Leon Wieseltier, writing in Liberties:
What the Ukrainians can expect from the progressives is an airlift of thoughts and prayers. I suspect that what really outrages them about Putin's invasion, even more than its war crimes, is that it might beget an increase in the American defense budget. ... In recent decades progressives have been more fascinated by Islam's martyrs than by liberalism's martyrs. They certainly do not look favorably upon the new activism of American foreign policy that has been engendered by the Ukrainian war. In their view, American foreign policy should be nothing more than a commemoration of the Iraq war unto the end of time. Our disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan was celebrated as precisely such a tribute to our post-Iraq wisdom. And now Putin comes along and spoils things. Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in! (In fact, the conjunction of events was not a coincidence: our flight from Afghanistan made the moment auspicious for the Russian aggression.) In the curious logic of left-wing isolationism, the danger of Putin's imperialism is that it may beget American imperialism, since all American interventions are by definition imperialistic....
Realists almost always advocate the same positions as isolationists, except that their op-ed pieces are longer.
The ethical phoniness of realism found its perfect avatar in Barack Obama...The war in Ukraine is substantially the consequence of the moral and strategic timidity of Obama, who opened a strategic vacuum in the Middle East that Putin quickly proceeded to fill and thereby to inaugurate the contemporary (and until then, unlikely) resurgence of Russia. ...the strategic vacuum was made possible by a moral vacuum: if it had been the policy of the United States that, one way or another, with force or without, with allies or without, we would not stand idly by the genocide in Syria, we would have retained a regional position that might have kept Russia at bay. ...
"the forever war" was swiftly replaced by a new platitude, which is that we must beware of getting into "a new cold war." It is past time to put some intellectual pressure on this slogan. For a start, a cold war is preferable to a hot war. More importantly, our destiny is not entirely up to us: if Russia or China behave towards us (or our allies) in a hostile manner, then we are in a cold war with Russia or China. And so we already find ourselves in two cold wars. ...The term "cold war" has become a term of imprecation, a dystopian word, because the Cold War, I mean the one that took place between 1946 and 1991, is erroneously remembered as an unprincipled contest between two deranged nuclear powers who went around the world committing crimes and abuses. It was nothing like that, though we did commit our share of crimes and abuses. It was an honorable struggle against totalitarianism that over many decades was conducted more or less firmly and more or less rationally and in stirring consonance with our principles; and every decent man and woman should tremble at the thought of what life everywhere would have been like if we had lost.
Humanitarian interventionists or liberal internationalists have been in retreat politically since the Iraq War, so it is newsworthy to see this case made. It resonates strongly with me—increasingly I feel that Seth Lipsky's self-deprecating description of himself as a "broken-down old cold warrior" applies to me, too. Who will be the politicians, if any, to take up this message? Where are the foreign policy hawks of the 2024 political cycle? The new cold warriors won't be Senator Warren or Senator Sanders, that is for sure.
