Foreign-Policy Dissenters Deserve a Fair Hearing

As we approach the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there are a lot of lessons on which to reflect. One of the most vital is the importance of welcoming—or at least protecting space for—dissenting views, especially when it comes to the use of military force, one of the most profound and serious issues that any government considers.

In the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion, those sounding caution were cast as “unpatriotic,” “pro-Saddam,” and worse. Those who dared suggest that the problem of international terrorism could not be easily reduced to a simple equation of Good vs. Evil were accused of being “terrorist sympathizers,” a smear that is unfortunately still in use today.

This created a political environment that constrained, if not outright suffocated, alternative views that might have arrested the slide toward war and averted the strategic disaster. The political establishment—including U.S. President Joe Biden, who as past (and future)  chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should have been in a position to know better—willingly stampeded into a historic foreign-policy disaster, the consequences of which Americans are still grappling with.

Americans should’ve paid better attention. And they should pay attention today, where similar invective is deployed against critics of U.S. policy toward Russia and China.

Several weeks before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley called on the Biden administration to publicly withdraw support for Ukraine joining NATO, which he argued was a provocation to Russia (and a distraction from what he saw as the true threat: China). Then-White House spokesperson Jen Psaki responded by accusing him of “parroting Russian talking points.”

While I’m no fan of Hawley, who I think should’ve resigned from the Senate after helping  the Jan. 6 insurrection, his suggestion did not merit that response. Many senior U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary William Perry and current CIA Director William Burns, had in the past acknowledged Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had cited it numerous times. While Putin’s own words and deeds in the horrible months that followed have shown that NATO is only one piece in his grandiose set of historical grievances and goals, raising it in February was not unreasonable.

While the White House has fortunately avoided such invective since then, Washington’s hawkish pundits have not. Commentary’s Joshua Muravchik condemned members of the “Squad,” the loose grouping of progressive Democrats, along with pretty much anyone who voiced any concern about the possibility of escalation toward a U.S.-Russia war (a group that would also include Biden) as “Putin’s American Apologists” who share a “contempt for America.” Writing in the Atlantic, James Kirchick simply reused an Iraq war-vintage argument, quoting George Orwell (with a line that Orwell himself later disavowed) to say that “today’s anti-war caucus is objectively pro-fascist.”

Similar accusations are leveled against those cautioning against the fast-forming anti-China consensus. A 2021 letter from a coalition of progressive groups urging Biden to seek cooperation rather than conflict with China on climate policy was met with a wave of condemnation for ignoring human rights abuses. Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson deployed his confused face against Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s suggestion that anti-China rhetoric was feeding a documented rise in anti-Asian harassment and hate crimes, accusing Nadler of “flacking for China.” Recently, when Jake Werner, a research scholar at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, responded to the Chinese spy balloon frenzy by noting that countries regularly gather intelligence on each other, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton accused Quincy of “reflexively tak[ing] the Chinese Communist Party’s side.”

What makes these attacks particularly ironic is how quickly the conventional wisdom on both Russia and China has shifted. Two decades ago, it was a given that China’s integration into the neoliberal order would both enrich it and then politically liberalize it. “American trade with China is a good thing, for America and for the expansion of freedom in China,” wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein in April 2000. “That seems, or should seem, obvious.” In the following years, Putin successfully presented Russia as a willing and able partner in the war on terror. In 2002, authors Ian Bremmer and Alexander Zaslavsky called the U.S.-Russia post-9/11 partnership “the most significant geopolitical realignment since the Second World War.”

The fact that the consensus view of both countries has now shifted so radically in a relatively short time should be enough to engender more humility  in our debates. Some may be trying to make up for their previous soft line by taking a harder one now. But accusing others of working on behalf of the enemy simply for raising legitimate questions about American national interests and concerns about the risks of war is a cheap way to constrain, if not avoid, that debate.

To be sure, there is an enormous amount of disinformation, misinformation, and just plain stupidity being pumped into debates on a regular basis. Some of this is being done by foreign actors, but most is homegrown. Misinformation should be rebutted vigorously. Both right and left need to call out bad actors on their own sides, not just because fostering a reality-based debate is necessary for determining good policy but because the presence of bad-faith conspiracy-mongers are often used to attack and marginalize good-faith dissenters.

Restoring a sense of common U.S. political purpose is one of the core challenges of our time. The polarization and nativism that infect U.S. politics have been a long time coming, but they were seriously deepened by the debates around the Iraq War, which shattered the U.S. government’s credibility along with any reputation for competence. But we will not repair our democracy, let alone defend democracy abroad, by stifling democratic debate at home. One of the lessons of the Iraq experience is that we should err on the side of being more open to alternative policy arguments, rather than less. As we have painfully learned, sometimes the dissenters turn out to be quite right.