Invasion Ukraine Reveals Fault Lines in Conservative Foreign Policy

In a recent issue I wrote about common good conservatism — more precisely, about the postliberal approach to religion and society.  I did that because I agree wholeheartedly with their thoughts on that topic.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought home forcefully that I disagree just as wholeheartedly with their views on foreign policy.  This cognitive dissonance reveals a major fault line in present-day conservatism that the irredentism of Russia’s aspiring Tsar, not to mention similar Communist Chinese threats to our friends, makes worth some thought.

In an essay on postliberalism, Patrick Deneen described its positioning on the two dimensions of social/identity and economic issues.  He described one group of voters as being consistently liberal on both the social/identity dimension and the economic dimension, and another group being consistently conservative in both dimensions.  A smaller group of libertarians were liberal on the social/identity dimension and conservative on the economic.  Postliberals occupy the remaining position of favoring both government activism in the economy and social conservatism, similar to many Trump voters.  More on that in another article.

There is at least one more dimension that matters, foreign policy, that is harder to characterize in such a linear fashion.  We have just among Republicans some remaining neo-cons, Trumpian nationalists like Tucker Carlson, Never-Trumper internationalists (right liberals, in postliberal vernacular) and now some postliberals, all attacking each other.  If I oversimplify to isolation versus intervention, the postliberals tend toward isolationism combined with Just War philosophy for some, pacifism for others.  They identify willingness to intervene abroad with liberalism.

Right now I am not going to try to describe or defend any of the other conservative variations on foreign policy, just that of the postliberals, and I will stay away from Just War argumentation.  More on all this is a later article.

Ever since Putin’s saber-rattling started, the postliberal consensus has been that what happens in Ukraine is none of our business, and that the US should not provide any kind of military support to that fledgling democratic, or in another characterization “democratish,” nation.

Tweets by the postliberals on Ukraine have been unusually vicious.  Patrick Deneen set the tone, when he reacted to an article on the strategic importance of Ukraine to US national interests with a tweet that “Anyone who writes these kinds of articles should promise that they and their kids will be the first to enlist” — an uncharacteristically ad hominem argument even for the pugnacious Deneen. I thought it was an excellent and balanced article. Sohrab Ahmari, whom I much admire, commented on the same article “Dr. Strangelove, please call your office.”  Gladden Pappin has chimed in, retweeting a comment by J D Vance on Hilary Clinton’s [good?] suggestion that we launch cyber-attacks against Russia : “This is an absolutely awful idea. Serves no national interest. Risks drawing us further into the conflict. For the love of God, why can’t our leaders focus on our own problems? We’ve got plenty of them.”

Ahmari wrote a more lengthy defense of his opposition to military intervention in a comment on Biden’s incoherent January speech on Ukraine: “We can’t create flash points wherever revanchist powers such as Russia, China and Iran seek to reassert claims within their historic civilizational spheres.”  His position appears to be that these three autocratic and unfriendly aggressors should be allowed to define their own spheres of influence as they please, while we define ours narrowly.  That did not work out well in the competition between Britain, France, Italy and Germany leading up to WWI.

Deneen, Ahmari and Gladden Pappin laid out more of the basis for their postliberal position in an article on Republican hawkishness:

A painful contradiction lies at the heart of the American right. Even as conservatives are breaking with some Cold War orthodoxies on domestic policy, Republican politicians remain wedded to that era’s violently expansionist [sic] foreign policy.  They oppose liberal imperialism in the United States —the aggressive push to impose progressive values, often joined to corporate power — while still contriving to spread the same order to the ends of the earth….The persistence of donor-backed Republican hawkishness remains an obstacle to national development — of industrial capacity and widely shared solidarity — that would strengthen America’s defenses and ennoble its culture.

It would be hard to disagree if their claim were just that efforts to spread liberal democracy have neither succeeded in keeping authoritarians at bay nor stimulated economic progress.  But the pivot from condemning “expansionist” foreign policy spreading the liberal international order to condemning “hawkish attitudes” toward Russia and China is a non sequitur.  They go even further, arguing that the “new vision of conservative American politics” must not be “co-opted by hawkish ideologues more interested in posturing abroad than in reform here at home. Conservatives must make a clear break with neo-neoconservative foreign policy and instead emphasize widely shared material development at home and cultural nonaggression abroad as the keys to U.S. security.”  (On cultural nonaggression, they do have a point about LGBTQ flags at the U.S. embassies in the UAE and Vatican, that is close but not exactly a military intervention).  Relations with China should be based on “cooperation, exchange and shared interests.”   Ignoring genocide and allowing China to censor U.S. athletes and foreign journalists at the winter Olympics, I might ask?  On Ukraine, they assert that “Thoughtless NATO expansion bred resentment in a wounded-but-still-strong Russia, setting the stage for recurring crises.”  

The three writers predict that defending “democratic allies dotting the peripheries of revanchist powers like Russia and China” would only lead to “protracted and destabilizing conflicts that would distract us from domestic reform — not to mention imperil the lives of overwhelmingly working-class young Americans in uniform.”  This quotation is worth parsing.  They admit we have democratic allies — most importantly Taiwan — facing “revanchist powers,” but they are still so concerned about domestic policies that they see defending them as a distraction.  Their point about the unshared sacrifice of military service is a valid one, as JDQB wrote last issue, but it serves here only as a declaration of the class-oriented viewpoint of postliberalism.  Surrender will ultimately hurt all Americans, and there are better ways to correct the problem of the volunteer army and biased draft than pacifism.

The authors go on to condemn Republican hawkishness and NATO expansion on the grounds that these actions will lead to “the integration of evermore geographic space into the same socioeconomic order” that postliberals object to at home.   Integration of Eastern Europe into the EU and the liberal international order may be happening and may be deplorable, but it is not the result of either hawkishness or NATO expansion.  Even one who dislikes globalization and the policies of the EU can be a hawk, if the threat justifies it, and NATO includes Hungary, a country whose social and economic policies the same writers have lauded.  Opposition to globalization and efforts to spread democracy in infertile soil does not entail the position that all intervention abroad is bad.

The postliberal point of view on foreign policy and military support to allies thus appears to be based more on their opposition to globalization and their class-oriented economic thinking — more of that later as well — than on morality or realism about national interest.  

What drew my ire most immediately, and inspires this article, is an editorial on Friday in Crisis Magazine.  It condemns Putin for invading Ukraine but then turns rapidly to sharing the blame: “the West, led by the United States, did not reach out to them to build them up as an ally [after the fall of the Soviet Union], but instead treated them as a defeated foe that could be trampled upon [sic]. We promised no expansion of NATO east of Germany, but soon broke that promise, eventually extending NATO’s borders all the way to the Russian border. The West felt it could just dictate—and later change—terms as it saw fit.”  

This is a selective history that Putin would be proud of, leaving out Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea, efforts to keep a puppet government in power in Ukraine,  support for the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, intervention in Syria to protect Bashir Assad, and the incursion into Georgia, among other things.   It ignores fact that upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was already a nuclear power with both warheads and the requisite means of delivery.  They gave them up in exchange for a promise that their territorial integrity and independence would be respected by Russia and others, an agreement we brokered and Russia, who was a party to the agreement, has violated.

The editorial attacks those who point out how similar Putin’s irredentism and blitzkrieg are to Hitler’s:  “Already some are claiming that if we let Putin have Ukraine, he’ll move on Poland next. First, such a view falls into the ‘Putin is Hitler’ trap, and it also misunderstands the significance of Ukraine in the Russian mind.”

But do not worry, they assure the reader: “Poland is already a NATO nation, which means we have an existing treaty to defend them if such an invasion occurs (and Putin knows we have that treaty).”  Left unexamined is the question of whether giving Ukraine to Putin might lead him to make a mistake — or get it right — that we will not defend Poland either.  Or what China will infer about strategic ambiguity and confused Biden comments on Taiwan.  No retreat from the pre-invasion positions of the postliberal commentators.

Matt Taibbi was more honest, with a refreshing admission of his “faceplant”: “My mistake was more like reverse chauvinism, being so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough. To readers who trust me not to make those misjudgments, I’m sorry. Obviously, Putin’s invasion will have horrific consequences for years to come and massively destabilize the world.”

None of that in the Crisis editorial.  It turns from unjustified sharing of blame to absurdity: “No matter the reasons behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one thing is clear: America cannot commit any military forces to this conflict. If the past thirty years have taught us anything, it’s that when America engages in military interventions overseas, we make things worse rather than better.”

This passage perpetuates the falsehood that we would inevitably lose in Afghanistan. We had achieved a stable stalemate creating a territory in which Christians, women and others who supported us had unprecedented security and freedom before Biden threw it away. See JDQB’s piece on that subject from last September.  And what he did was no more than what all those who lamented the “endless war” being conducted by 2000 US service personnel in Afghanistan wanted.  But the more important point is that blaming neo-cons for trying to export democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan has nothing to do with Ukraine: this is a sovereign nation that is being invaded by an aggressor, with predictable harm to our own national interests.

Crisis continues: “And now we are talking about engaging a nuclear power. Making things worse could make the world very worse indeed. Do we really think a President Biden can be a successful Commander-in-Chief in a time of war? The question alone should keep us up at night.” 

The last two sentences are indeed true and proven beyond doubt.  Yet, it it remains true that cowering to a nuclear threat will just encourage more use of that tool— by far too many nuclear-capable countries.  As Noah Rothman pointed out today, 

Is it any wonder then that the Ukrainians lament their failure to develop a nuclear deterrent? A nuclear umbrella is quite clearly the chief guarantor of security. You can bet that Ukraine isn’t the only nation living in the shadow of an aggressive neighbor that is coming to that same conclusion. What imperiled nation would allow itself to be negotiated out of its commitment to its own survival?  

Backing off from confrontation with Putin does not make the world safer from nuclear threats, it just encourages more of them.

The Libertarians also double down on how all this is due to the U.S. pretending to be the world’s policeman: “it’s too late to undo decades of entanglements which the United States is unlikely to be able to credibly fulfill, and which may have deterred countries such as Ukraine from taking full responsibility for their own defense. But promoting freedom overseas as well as at home requires that, in the future, the U.S. government make fewer hollow promises to act as the world’s policeman.”  Even use of sanctions is characterized as “… less dangerous than troops on the ground, but it means yet more interference in private economic activity with resulting loss of liberty and prosperity.”

The libertarian commentator is likely correct that the American people have little interest in sustained use of our military power to defend anything but our own shores.  I offer the caveat that we have not had a leader since Reagan (or maybe Truman) who forthrightly stated reasons why we should do that.  There was a time when it appeared we had left the ineffectual military posture created by Vietnam behind, but observing the arc from 1974 to 2021 it appears that we are back where we started. That has to change.  It does not so much bother me that the Talibs and AOCs of the Democrat party or a few libertarians do not want us to project military power, nor that the woke are more concerned about pronouns than marksmanship in the military.  Much more disturbing is that there is a significant split within the conservative movement on the role of the Unites States in the world.

I think that all conservatives are in full agreement, and Noah Rothman states it well, that reliance on international institutions to preserve peace and deter aggressors has, since the end of the Korean War, been a repeatedly shattered illusion.  He wrote: 

We have not been thrust into a new world today because of Russia’s act of unprovoked violence. We’ve merely been reintroduced to the world as it always was. For decades, global peace was preserved by an international security architecture we all take for granted. That enterprise was underwritten by the preponderance of American military might, not some illusory matrix of diplomatic niceties, international agreements, and bureaucratic red tape.  

I would add to that the spectacle of the UN Security Council’s debate on Russian aggression being presided over by Russia (Rothman’s point, not original with me). 

Where there seems to be a significant disagreement among conservatives is with Rothman’s second conclusion:

If there’s any silver lining to be found in this horror show, it is that perhaps the West will wake up and recognize the delusions it has labored under for generations. A Western world resolved to check the threat posed by revisionist actors with overwhelming force—one that doesn’t put its faith in modern contrivances to do the work of compelling aggressors to abandon their perfectly rational ambitions—might emerge from this crisis with a more durable conception of how to preserve the peace. Maybe, but I doubt it.

In light of the unquestionable failure of a new international order of diplomacy and supranational institutions to deter aggressors, there are two alternatives for America.  One is Rothman’s, “to check the threat… with overwhelming force” and the other is to withdraw and double-down on isolationism.  That isolationism, coupled with an apparent religious pacifism, is the alternative that the writers I quoted at the beginning appear to advocate. I agree with Rothman.

Deneen and others are correct that there has been a strong strand of isolationism in American politics since the founding.  That isolationism was possible in the past does not mean that with modern warfare we are still protected by distance — a point made by Henry Olson (who is probably in the postliberals category of a “right liberal”) —  in the Washington Post. Even a foreign policy based solely on national interest can no longer ignore geographically distant threats, any more than it prevented us from intervening closer to home under the Monroe Doctrine.

In the moral dimension, American isolationism began and grew along with the individualism that postliberals condemn as the source of current economic and social ills.  Perhaps they should ask if their diagnosis of the failures of individualism does not also imply that lack of solidarity with weaker countries in the West is an error rather than a desirable feature of our history to be repeated. 

I have been convinced since my teens by C S Lewis on pacifism: “War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken.”  I, and I assume all postliberals, accept the unvarying Catholic declaration of an individual right to defend oneself and another innocent person with deadly force if necessary.  A nation is equally obliged to defend itself or another when it has vital interests at stake.  And once the latter conclusion is accepted, the determination in any particular case comes down to a matter of experience, prudence and fortitude in its leaders.  Something, I do agree, that we have regrettably lacked for several decades.

As we think about a postliberal world, I am firmly convinced that another way our national character must change is to become willing to endure the sacrifices entailed by commitments to others.  The postliberals, grounded in Catholic social thought and teaching, should above all look beyond national interest.  Yet much of their argument is couched in those terms.  If we are facing the decline of the West, the restoration of faith, family and community advocated by the post-liberals are indispensable.  But those internal changes are not enough when we face enemies like Russia and China abroad.  We also need to accept the responsibility of containing them far from our shores, as we did successfully with the Soviet Union, and execute a foreign and military policy in accordance with that aim, however imperfectly it turns out in practice.  And we may just have an obligation to help those trying to escape or evade those aggressors for moral as well as a national interest.

As a matter of principle and pragmatism, we do need to keep our commitments in line with our capabilities.  The expansion of those commitments by NATO was done perhaps not done “mindlessly,” but it was questioned at the time by George Kennan and others including Matt Daley (our MPD).  We also made the mistake of not weaning Europe off our teats and nudging them to maintain their own capabilities.  Trump tried to do this, although ham-handedly.  

We need not mount this defense on our own.  The NATO countries, in aggregate measures of power and capability (industrial base, population, GDP) far outclass Russia.  They, with our support, have to be the bulwark for Europe.  The Biden Administration’s start with Great Britain on the AUKUS alliance with Australia could be expanded to a mutual defense agreement for Asia including Japan, India, Taiwan and Korea to oppose Chinese ambitions.  In both theaters, the United States must promise and be prepared (in spirit and military power) to go to war to defend its allies.  That should be the position of all who hope to arrest the decline of the West.