Are we the goodies?

[thefuturemesozoic]

People on the left tend to point out that the U.S. has a long history of meddling in other countries' affairs and exerting power on the global stage. As they see it, war mainly benefits rich people and weapons manufacturers, and it is inextricably linked to capitalism. They deplore the money spent on weapons, believing that it would be better spent on infrastructure and services for people at home. They strongly believe that countries should settle disputes through diplomacy rather than war. They oppose U.S. imperialism with every fiber of their being, believing that other countries have the right to make their own decisions without interference from the U.S. Last year, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the U.S. and the EU have sanctioned Russia and provided weapons to Ukraine. So some people on the U.S. left see U.S. imperialism. They feel that the war primarily benefits rich people and weapons manufacturers and that the U.S. is sending weapons to Ukraine with money that would be better spent at home. They would like for Russia and Ukraine to settle their dispute with diplomacy, rather than war. They are doing the thing that I wrote about here, that I would call lens drift, where they see a new situation as an extension of their existing world view, though it may not be the best way to look at the situation, even as it may have been appropriate in other situations that they have experienced in their lives.

The argument that these people make usually goes something like this. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, several eastern European countries joined NATO. Many people believed that this was unwise and would lead to Russia perceiving a threat to its national security. Then, in 2014, the U.S. backed a coup that overthrew the President of Ukraine and installed a government with a lot of Nazis in it. These things led directly to the present situation, where Putin's choices were to submit or to invade, and he chose to invade. NATO is fighting a proxy war with the goal of weakening Russia. The U.S. is trying to remain the only global super-power. In this telling, Putin has done little more than react to western aggression and make the choice that was available to him. But this argument has a few problems.

The trouble with attributing the war in Ukraine to the NATO expansion is that Ukraine had not joined or applied to join NATO, and there was no imminent plan for Ukraine to do so. Furthermore, Putin himself has argued that Ukraine is not a real country and should be a part of Russia, or at least it should be governed in collaboration with Russia. In a counterfactual world where NATO had not have expanded, Putin would still have been left with an independent Ukraine with a government that was not oriented towards Russia. He has made various justifications for the war over time: that he was trying to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, that Ukraine shouldn't exist as an independent country, that parts of Ukraine should be incorporated into Russia. If the invasion was a response to the 2014 revolution, then why is it happening now, where Poroshenko is no longer in power? U.S. leftists sometimes see the U.S. and NATO as the primary aggressors in Russia's war against Ukraine, but this narrative does not fit the situation well. What it does do is fit the existing lens through which these leftists see the U.S. and its foreign policy.

There are times when concepts push against other concepts, in which case it is important to be clear in terms of what one would like to accomplish. If we oppose U.S. imperialism because we believe that other countries have the right to choose their own path, then we need to acknowledge that Ukraine has the right to choose its own path. If we are concerned about global peace and security, then we need to acknowledge that, though the cost of war is high, there is also a high cost to allowing one country to use force or the threat of force to annex another country's land with little or no consequence.

Segments of both the U.S. right and the U.S. left oppose sending weapons to Ukraine, and both see the war in Ukraine and their opposition to U.S. involvement as an extension of their existing world view. As the far left sees things, the U.S. is trying to weaken Russia in order to strengthen its own position, and, as in many other matters, the U.S. ought to mind our own business. To the far right, U.S. elites are magnanimously giving our money away to solve problems around the world and putting America last. They see opposing aid to Ukraine as an extension of their idea that we should put America first. Still others see the U.S. working with the European democracies to uphold a rules-based order and contain the autocratic threat. This suggests that people tend to see what we expect to see, and, in any given situation, this may or may not be an accurate representation of the way things are, as there are many potential ways to look at any given thing.

The lesson to take from this isn't that people need not concern themselves with U.S. imperialism. Rather, we should keep in mind that all situations are not the same, and our world view can lead us towards looking at a new situation in a way that isn't particularly helpful. When considering how to handle the war in Ukraine, it is important to understand the role that Putin himself is playing, even if, in matters of foreign policy, our first impulse is to question the role that the U.S. is playing. And, regardless of our understanding of Putin and his war, there might be an area in life where we are looking at a situation through an existing filter that we have adopted, and, even as this filter may have served us well in the past, it may not be helping us in the present, as any given situation can arise from its own set of factors.