The moral and intellectual vacuity of left isolationism

At some point, you have to align your worldview with the facts as they exist on the ground...right?

One of the things I’ve been meaning to do with this publication is offer comprehensive rebuttals to what I call “left isolationism.” In this worldview, the United States is the prime global destabilizer and NATO, which is perceived as America’s empire, ought to be abolished. In this worldview, if the United States sharply reduced its defense spending (we should, but for different reasons), withdrew from its global footprint, and simply left the world alone, we could usher in a new global era of peace and prosperity as the United States used its savings for domestic priorities and the rest of the world could live peaceful lives without being threatened by American imperialism.

In the West, you most often see this viewpoint among older socialists with sympathies to the Soviet Union, as well as their global fanbases. Jeremy Corbyn, erstwhile leader of the Labour Party in Great Britain, is perhaps the best example. Corbyn was an overt sympathizer with the Soviet Union, is on record as saying NATO should have been disbanded after the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, at one point thought that the genocide in Kosovo that was halted by NATO was a manufactured excuse for imperialism, and blamed NATO for “provoking” Russia leading up to the 2014 crisis in Crimea and the Donbas. Other politicians—including those whom I did and would eagerly support against conservative opposition, such as Lula da Silva in Brazil or Bernie Sanders in the United States, hold some of these positions to varying degrees regarding sympathy with the Soviet Union and skepticism of the value or virtue of NATO as an institution.

The main reason I personally have never shared these views is because I have never sympathized with the Soviet Union. As a democratic socialist/social democrat, I have always viewed the “democrat” part as an equal partner to the “social” part—meaning that I prioritize economically left policies, but I also value democracy, political freedoms, and high standards of living, none of which were provided in any measure by the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. Let’s look honestly at the history of Germany in 1948 and 1949: the United States, France, and Great Britain were trying to rebuild a democratic, independent, peaceful Germany while the Soviet Union attempted to starve West Berlin in order to pressure the Western allies into abandoning that idea and then proceeded to form a brutal police state under the full political control of Moscow. I’m not sure how you take a look at that process or the outcome that resulted from it and conclude that the Soviet Union was on the right side of that or any other equation because “capitalism” but these guys manage to do that. The United States, by contrast, was on the wrong side of the Cold War to the degree to which we abandoned the Truman Doctrine of support for democracy and self-determination and prioritized free rein for American corporations over actual democracy or self-determination if we felt that those democratic processes might take a country too close to the orbit of the Soviet Union (see: the overthrow of Mossadegh and installation of the Shah, the overthrow of Allende and support for Pinochet, the Jakarta Method under Suharto, and many, many other examples, especially in Central America.)

The collapse of the Soviet Union should have made these sorts of moral calculations easier because it opened up the opportunity for rapid expansion of global democracy and political self-determination, especially in Eastern Europe—an expansion for which NATO was a key guarantor. There is a reason that since 1999, 14 independent nations that had been under Russian imperial domination from anywhere between 50 years and 300 years (poor Estonia!) have chosen to join the NATO alliance and get a mutual defense pact in case someone (not hard to guess who) tried to re-establish their empire, and that reason is the same as the difference between West Germany under NATO and East Germany under the Warsaw Pact. Equally, there’s a reason why Sweden and Finland are going to join in 2023 once Turkey finally stops delaying it to put pressure on the Nordic states to stop helping the Kurds. It really wasn’t hard for most nations in Eastern Europe to decide which side of that divide they really wanted to be on—which is part of why the Soviet Union had to work so hard to build walls to keep people in.

The February 2022 invasion by Putin’s oligarchic, kleptocratic, crony capitalist hyperconservative Russia of a democratic Ukraine should have been the easiest moral choice in the world, but that would be significantly underestimating the rigidity to which left isolationists adhere to viewing America as the bad actor under all circumstances. Take, for instance, this piece in The Intercept by Jeremy Scahill, which tries to center itself on American policy regarding providing unmanned aerial vehicles to Ukraine but can’t help but share Scahill’s bias regarding the war more broadly. Scahill seems to welcome the perspective of the odds-on next Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, promising to end support for Ukraine, in apparent contrast with Democratic lawmakers who, in Scahill’s view, aren’t even allowed, judging from the reaction to the retracted letter by the Progressive Caucus, to suggest diplomacy as opposed to continuing to support Ukraine militarily. Scahill also seems to challenge Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor Matt Duss on how he, and Sanders, can continue to support providing military wherewithal to Ukraine even though it “enriches defense contractors.”

It’s hard to know where to even start deconstructing all of this. First, a drone—unmanned aerial vehicle—is a hardware platform. that’s all it is. The reason they’re so despised on the left is because they’ve been used during the so-called “war on terror” to conduct assassination attempts of dubious legality, often with horrifying collateral damage and civilian casualties. Yeah, those strikes are morally outrageous and counterproductive, but it wouldn’t matter if you did that strike with a manned plane, a special forces strike team, or any other kind of platform. It’s not about the platform, it’s what you do with it that counts. In modern warfare, drones of all sizes and complexities have become essential tools for kinetic strikes, surveillance, reconnaissance, guidance, and target acquisition—and, in Russia’s case, terrorism against civilian targets. Trying to tie in both Ukrainian and Russian use of drones to American extrajudicial assassinations is ridiculous, because there is no comparison between the two, no matter which weapons platform they use.

I also have explained at length on Twitter why the now-retracted Progressive Caucus letter to Biden regarding “diplomacy” in Ukraine wasn’t, despite whatever best intentions it had, a polite suggestion about using diplomacy, but was a large and consequential mistake: first, by complaining about the negative domestic effects of Russia’s invasion, it undermined President Biden’s negotiating position in any future talks; second, it suggested that Biden had diplomatic options that he was not already using; and third, it implied that we either could or had the right to dictate to Ukraine the terms of any peace negotiations with Russia. But even ignoring all of that, Scahill seems to be using an incomprehensible moral calculus to determine his positioning regarding keeping Ukraine sustained on the battlefield.

Simply put, denying funds for American defense contractors should not be your highest political and economic priority when compared to the economic, political, and military independence of the second-largest country in Europe and its effort not be conquered by autocratic maniac with dreams of restoring the Russian empire. I’m flummoxed as to how anyone thinks that any political or economic priority of the left is served by letting Ukraine be conquered because the alternative hypothesis results in Raytheon and General Atomics getting a larger windfall from providing Ukraine the hardware it desperately wants in order to preserve its territorial integrity against a much larger, aggressive neighbor with a genocidal history towards it.

The Soviet Union was a moral, environmental, and humanitarian abomination, but at least during the cold war, a leftist could be forgiven for having the perspective that on balance, seeing the influence of the United States and NATO weaken could theoretically hasten the decline of capitalism and the rise of a more equitable model of economic distribution. Those days are long gone, and it’s not hard to assess what has replaced them.

Since the Cold War, the Democratic Party in the United States has gone well to the left of where it was when thirty years ago. On the issues of regulation, economic redistribution, environmentalism, anti-racism, and equality for gender and sexual minorities, there is simply no comparison between the position of the mainstream left party today and its position then. The right in the United States, meanwhile, has responded with far-right conspiratorial autocratic revanchism in order to reverse the human rights and economic policy gains of the last 30 years, and in some ways they have been successful—but the United States is in the fight of its life to both stay a functioning, prosperous, representative social democracy that guarantees civil rights for its population at home and supports self-determination abroad. Now let’s take a look at the world’s two (one and a half?) other pre-eminent global powers, because there, that battle was lost a long time ago.

It can’t really be contested, except by the most fanatical of extremists, that Russia and China are crony capitalist totalitarian autocratic states with ambitions that are most generously described as imperialist, and likely genocidal as well. China is a mass surveillance state that is trying to ethnically and culturally destroy its Muslim Uyghur population in the Western province of Xinjiang, has sharply cracked down on political and communications freedoms in Hong Kong since taking possession of it, and would like nothing more than to subsume Taiwan the same way. Russia is even more aggressively imperialist, and had waged a long series of foreign wars even before the invasion of Ukraine in order to restore some shred of its prior imperialist glory. State media in Russia’s autocracy is now openly calling for genocide in Ukraine, apparently with no shame. The regime frequently attempts to assassinate defectors or dissidents on foreign soil, and has turned “falling out of windows” into a source of dark humor. They are also both fossil fuel states: Russia has aggressively tried to use its supply of oil and gas to force Western compliance with its genocidal aspirations, while China has only recently stopped financing the large-scale construction of coal plants abroad.

Even as the US is renegotiating its posture abroad in both the Middle East and Africa—withdrawing from Afghanistan and debating our posture more broadly across the Sahelian region—China and especially Russia are expanding their economic and military interests there. At its most positive, China’s Belt and Road Initiative can be seen as a series of ill-advised boondoggles that have left countries across the world, but especially in Africa, with incomplete infrastructure projects, unsustainable debt service, and PRC possession of both natural resources and infrastructure facilities seized as collateral. At its worst, it can be seen as a broad strategic initiative of dubious success to “shock doctrine” countries in Africa. China has also established a permanent military base on the continent and is looking at more.

Russia is even worse in this regard too: Russia’s state-approved private military company, the Wagner Group (yes, the same one that is throwing tens of thousands of prisoners into the meat grinder at Bakhmut) is also operating in several countries in Africa, and is racking up a long series of humanitarian disasters and civilian massacres in pursuit of Russian state economic objectives in the continent. I want you to imagine the reaction from the U.S. left if Erik Prince’s Blackwater, or Xe, or whatever they call themselves these days were routinely massacring civilians in West Africa in order to secure concessions for American oil and mining companies across maybe a dozen countries, because that’s what Russia is doing.

If you’re actually committed to any social democratic principle whatsoever—whether from the perspective of environmentalism, equitable economic redistribution, or political freedoms—Russia and China are by far bigger enemies of any of your goals than the United States is. And even if that case were a challenge to make in some way, what China and Russia are doing in terms of actual militant imperialism should convince you of the futility of simply demanding American withdrawal and expecting the rest to take care of itself.

The actions of China and Russia on the world stage have strongly indicated, if there was any doubt before, that U.S. disengagement will not lead to more peaceful outcomes. Instead, it will lead to increased regional conflicts, proxy wars, and and the type of shock doctrine backed by mercenary companies that would make Naomi Klein blush. The United States is by far the most moral, most accountable, and most politically and economically progressive of any of the three major global powers, and the challenge facing the left both domestically and globally now has to involve a reorientation around what the U.S.—and NATO—can do to be a global force for political and economic self-determination.

It’s worth noting that this does NOT mean neoconservatism or regime change wars. Even if they could be morally justified—they can’t be—they’re completely counterproductive and accomplish the exact opposite of what they are intended to do. Instead, what I’m talking about here is a commitment to a multilateral, values-based, alliance-based foreign policy that views democracy and respect for human rights as the key metrics by which alliances are determined and global respect is earned.

That presents some thorny challenges. For instance, Hungary is a viciously racist far-right autocracy, but they’re a member of NATO. Should they be? Turkey is an autocracy that is committing egregious human rights violations against the Kurds. Should they be as well? Israel is a pluralistic multi-party democracy with regular elections that is also engaging in a hardline military occupation and gradual annexation of territory that does not belong to them. How should a foreign policy aligned around the values of democracy and self-determination handle these challenges?

These are the issues regarding global leadership in the 21st century. What needs to be long-since dead and gone is the reflexive anti-Americanism that was such a hallmark of the left in the 20th century. Even if at one point those sentiments had justification, they are now morally nihilistic and intellectually vapid. The intellectual and moral basis for what should replace it is not that hard to find—it’s sitting right there, surrounded by all the evidence 2022 has seen fit to give us. All we need to do is open our eyes, accept it, and move forward with what it teaches us.