Should We Stop Arming Ukraine?

with Daniel Bessner

Watching the ongoing war in Ukraine has been a strange experience. It’s easy to understand American sentiments of support for the besieged nation. Ukraine has been invaded, its people killed and imprisoned, its sovereignty threatened. My sympathies rest with Ukraine and its citizens and the soldiers defending their homeland and way of life.

But sympathy is one thing and intervention another. If I can easily see the conflict from Ukraine’s perspective—they cannot be expected simply to roll over and accept Putin as their new overlord—it’s less easy for me to see the case for US involvement. I have some nagging questions: Is it our responsibility to provide Ukraine with billions of dollars and shipments of advanced weapons? Once committed to supporting Ukraine, is there any length to which we won’t then go to protect the investment we’ve already made? Why are we the arbiters of a conflict that, the case could be made, has little to do with us? Even putting aside questions of national interest, we’ve seen that, far too often, involving ourselves in foreign conflicts can result in protracted boondoggles that only exacerbate the toll in blood and treasure from all sides.

In the following excerpt from this week’s conversation, historian Daniel Bessner argues that these issues are far too seldom seriously considered by the (often unelected) people at the top who make the decisions. He argues that liberal interventionism, the house ideology of the foreign policy establishment, is no longer viable in a world where the US is no longer the global hegemon, and that our ongoing commitment to involvement in foreign conflicts may well be leading us down the road to disaster. We cannot police the entire world. And even if we could, we likely shouldn’t.

Daniel is a left-wing intellectual. We have sharp disagreements about all manner of issues, so I was fully prepared to disagree with him on this one. But I have to say, I harbor a great deal of sympathy for his analysis of the situation. In publishing Haim Shweky’s dispatches from Ukraine, I’ve provided a platform for a principled interventionist perspective. But there is more than one side to this debate, and Daniel provides a very convincing dissenting position.

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GLENN LOURY: I want to talk about the Harper's piece. This was “The End of the American Century.” Henry Luce. You start out with Henry Luce's vision for an America-led domination of global affairs. And you say the jig is up, and like it or not, we better get used. Talk about that.

DANIEL BESSNER: Right. So what's happening—to put on my other cap as a foreign policy guy—is that the United States has been ruling the world since at least the early 1990s. One could even say that, since World War II, you could tell the whole history of the Cold War as being about nothing more than the US rise to primacy. Obviously, it is about something more, but you could put that narrative frame on it. So basically every American that you know has only lived in the world in which the United States was effectively, not undisputed, but hegemonic. I would say in retrospect, we could see that the Soviet Union—barring its nuclear weapons, which is a different question—it was never really an economic threat to the United States or US global hegemony.

The US probably won that battle by like 1965, which is what a lot of historians have [found]. So we've only lived in a world of US dominance. But the problem is that that world is rapidly going away, just in terms of things like share of GDP and US power vis-a-vis China. So [in] the United States, I think one of the reasons that people are so confused right now is that the fundamental thing about what it means to be an American is changing. Is the United States going to be able to dominate East Asia forever? Should the United States fund European defense until the cows come home? Should the United States spend $800 billion on its military instead of on social welfare programs and things of that nature? 

To which the answers are “no, no, and no,” right?

Depends who you ask. The thing is, most Americans say “no, no and no.” But most of the foreign policy establishment says “yes, yes, and don't care.” This is one of the interesting things. This is why I think that when people say things like, “The United States isn't a democracy,” they're not usually referring to voting. They're referring to how the state is literally made up. And I think the post-World War II American state basically insulated foreign policy and macroeconomic decision making from public opinion and from Congress in a lot of instances. So what you have is a moment of transition, but an entire leadership class that effectively wants to act like nothing has changed.

We should fight World War III over Taiwan, for instance, that this is something that is in the American interest, that the United States should send arms to Ukraine because you want to defend international norms against trans-border aggression. But I think that we actually don't talk about these much larger structural shifts, these generally epochal structural shifts about what the United States did actually do in the world.

And so I count myself as a so-called restrainer, a left-wing restrainer. I would say, basically in DC, basically in both political parties, there's a form of liberal internationalism that governs the United States's approach to the world. So I think we're cruising for a bruising, because I think in ten years, five years, two years, when China tries to attack Taiwan, is the US just going to automatically defend Taiwan? Is that in the United States's interest? This is something that should be subject to democratic discussion at the very least and is absolutely not by any stretch of the imagination.

Wow. I'm trying to think. So the conventional response: Of course we have to defend Taiwan. The United States's reputation for maintaining its commitments to its allies would require that. And a failure to respond to Chinese aggression against Taiwan would be a kind of capitulation and a de facto acknowledgement of the diminution of American influence in the world.

Should we care about that? I'm not an international affairs expert, but I imagine the argument would be that, down the road, there would be the need to assure people that the US would do this or do that, and without the ability to credibly commit itself in that way, deleterious consequences would ensue. I mean, I don't know why, as an American, I should care about the influence of the United States of America in world affairs. But I somehow sense that there's gotta be another side to that. And Taiwan is a really extreme case, is it not? 

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Well, it's the most likely one. Extreme in its consequences, but most likely in its possibility. Mainland China has made repeatedly clear that it wants Taiwan. So I would say that, even if I disagree with that position, that position might have made sense in 1993 or 1985. But I'm saying, that doesn't even acknowledge the world that we [live in]. The US can't do it, just like China couldn't conquer Cuba. The US isn't really going to be able to defend Taiwan.

So the problem is that we're having this fantasy discussion about US reliability, about a world that doesn't exist. In the article there's the exact numbers, but US GDP and GDP held by the G7 has been down, down, down, down. And it's just going to continue to go down. It's not gonna be World War II 1945, when the US is responsible for half of world exports. It's not gonna be 1991, where it's the sole, unipolar power. 

But the problem is someone like Joe Biden, who's 80 years old, only understands that world and thus only hires people who understand that world. So you have an entire approach to foreign policy that is literally atavistic. It's like talking about the aristocracy in 1965 as a major problem. It's just not the world that exists anymore. So we have this totally disconnected from any objective reality discussion about US foreign policy, which I really do think is going to lead to disaster, which could literally lead to massive wars and massive deaths around the world. Could.

Well, you're in a good position, in the event—the awful, horrible event—that war should break out between the US and China to be able to say, “I told you so.”

But I won't be in a good position in Seattle, though. That's on the West Coast. 

That point is well taken. 

Another problem is Americans are so far from a nuclear explosion that they don't take it seriously, and they don't quite realize what that really means. I think, particularly when it comes to things like arming Ukraine, it is a low-probability event, but it's so catastrophic that people really do need to take it more seriously than they ever have, in my opinion. 

I have to ask you, what is your position—I'm sure you must have one—on the US and the support for the Ukrainians and the conflict with Russia?

Oh, I have an opinion. I think that there's no major US interest in Ukraine. I think much more relevant to American concerns is the continuing existence of the military-industrial complex. And I think that sending weapons to Ukraine and giving them a blank check has—I'm sure you've seen the numbers—has been great for Lockheed and Boeing and everyone like that, and it's just been another steroidal shot in the arm of this complex, which I think distorts American society in manifold ways. By diverting resources, but even more than that, we live in a militaristic society, which again, I just don't think is good for the human soul. Especially because we're very safe. Why are we surrounded with militaristic imagery, militaristic language, fly-overs at football games, things like that?

That's more of a metaphysical point, but I think we should try to live in a peacetime society as opposed to the permanently mobilized one we've been living in, with an $800 billion military, budget since 1945. 

Okay, everybody. He was prepared with a response to my question.

And with NATO … Europe's rich. They should pay for their own damn defense. As a philosophical problem, I think that people within regions are ultimately better able to determine their interests than people who don't live in regions. That's a philosophical point. That's a point almost about sovereignty. If Europe wants to send weapons permanently to Ukraine, maybe if I don't agree with it for whatever reason, that's Europe's decision. It shouldn't be the United States's decision.

You don't have any concern about Putin run amok and about having to send him the right message and to enforce the norms of international border? 

The US loves enforcing those norms against everyone but itself. But forget the hypocrisy. I think if anything, the war has demonstrated that Putin can't go into Poland, which is what people were saying at the beginning of the war. I don't think that that's literally possible. 

Okay. [Laugh.] I laugh because I want to disagree with you, but I don't think I do. 

Thank you. 

I know that I'm supposed to. How do you explain the near unanimity of manufactured consensus opinion around this issue, particularly with the nuclear war risk? John Mearsheimer I know has been saying some stuff that I thought was pretty sensible, but not many people at all are sounding a concern. 

I actually have a real answer for this. I'm co-editing a volume on Cold War Liberalism. And I think Liberalism as a governing ideology. Like capital-L Liberalism, nineteenth-century liberalism. In the US, small-L liberals and conservatives are both species of nineteenth-century Liberalism. But I think for the first time in 70 years, Liberalism is itself in crisis. The promises of the utopian 1990s just haven't come true. Things are more unequal, people are more atomized, people generally are unhappy. Eastern Europe, home of democracy's efflorescence, has now gone authoritarian in regard. Trump won. Most importantly, Trump won. And his loutishness demonstrated to liberals that people aren't abiding by their norms of exchange.

So Liberalism is in crisis. I think what people are doing is they're searching for ways, unconsciously, to reinvigorate an ideology that has basically governed uncontested since 1945. You see it with fascism talk. I have a piece coming out in the New Republic. Everyone's a “fascist.” I go into the specific reasons why, but I think that's a symptom of liberals not feeling confident in themselves. Think about 1995 and the Oklahoma City bombing. No one called Timothy McVeigh fascist. If that happened today, he would be a fascist, because I think liberals need an other in order to justify themselves.

With the Ukraine War, they're having this great, old other, the Russian. They were taught for 50 years to hate the Russian. So it's just like putting on an old shoe. It's comfortable and it fits well and it feels like you're righteous and it feels like you're fighting on the good side, when liberals really don't have that much to brag about with things like climate change and inequality and continued racism and all these things. I think that really explains it in a psychic way. And also none of their kids are going to die. It might be different if they were sending their kids to die in Kyiv or wherever on the Ukrainian front. You're able to strike a posture of moral superiority and power without sacrificing anything, which is basically the definition of Liberalism since 1945, and I think that's a hard moment. 

Why I think Frank Fukuyama was right is that there's no ideology to challenge this. It's not like there's been another efflorescence—sorry to use that word again—of a great ideology to challenge liberalism. We're all just sort of shuffling along and feeling weird. So you have an ideology that has pretty much been shown, and on some level I think everyone recognizes, that it isn't quite working, even if you believe in it, even if you think of the Panglossian “the best of all possible worlds,” this is the one we got. But they're not really convinced by that. And so that's what I think explains the fervor around Ukraine, the anger at someone like Mearsheimer, and again, this fascism talk.

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