“No american president who ignores the ingrained aspect of the American moral enterprise can count on the sustained support of the American people” - Henry Kissinger
I grew up in the age of Bush and became an adult in the era of Obama. The events of 9/11 are my earliest powerful memories and the fervor of the War on Terror defined much of the national attitude when I was young. My parents, who were both fervently opposed to war, tried to counsel me to swim against the growing current. I grew up in a household that wouldn’t allow guns, surrounded by a town where my fellow students aspired to become military officers. After the Iraq War began my father started a column in our local newspaper where he would list the names of the US soldiers who had died every week. He lived to see Obama elected, and felt powerfully that he was seeing the emergence of a new era in American history. Probably his politics did the most to define my own. I was enamoured by Obama and when I was old enough to vote I supported him in his second election.
In a thousand ways Obama was an outsider, literally and symbolically, to the American legacy of white supremacy and imperialism. A mixed race, pro gay-rights candidate from a former colony, he rose upward on the swell of a growing wave of progressive cultural values, and his leadership drove this wave forward as well. He represented a new kind of mainstream progressive thought that people like me wanted to see reflected in an America they could be proud of. Finally, I and everybody I knew felt like we had a leader who shared our fundamental values and conception of a just, tolerant society. And all in all I do still think Obama was a pretty good president in the domestic sphere.
But let’s talk about war.
Many young voters, including myself, saw in Obama a chance to get a do-over from Bush, a real change from the brutal regime change wars. Instead, Obama slipped easily into the role of leader of the liberal world order, a conception of the world dating back since Woodrow Wilson which obligates America to intervene internationally in the name of spreading liberal values.
In Libya one such liberal intervention led to the complete collapse of the nation, leaving in its wake radical religious warlords and open air slave markets. In Syria, another such intervention led to a devastating conflict between the state and our chosen rebel allies, creating a vacuum filled by ISIS, which grew in power to reign over some ten million people. Over the course of the conflict around half a million people are estimated to have lost their lives and over half the population fled the country. In the backdrop of all of this was the Yemen war, bombing campaigns in Nigeria and Somalia and State Department support for Arab Spring revolutions across the Middle East.
Given this record of bloody interventionism, you might well imagine that the liberals who hated the Iraq war would turn on Obama as well.
But no such thing happened. Obama maintained impressive popularity throughout his election and his party went on to vote overwhelmingly for Hilary Clinton, his Secretary of State and the architect of many of these interventions.
Bush was responsible for Afghanistan and Iraq.
Obama was responsible for Syria, Yemen and Libya.
I know why we hated Bush. I am confused why we love Obama.
I’m starting from the assumption that American liberals, particularly American progressives, are opposed to war and needless death. So how do we get a voting block fundamentally opposed to war voting enthusiastically for a candidate who waded knee deep through military interventions?
I hear some say that Assad was so evil that he had to be deposed, and that the fallout was far beyond what we could have realistically expected when we entered the conflict. But how is this qualitatively different from the narrative that justified the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and rationalized the ensuing ethnic cleansing as a side effect outside of our control? I believe the strongest clear difference between Iraq and Syria is not the circumstances of the invasion, but the fact that Bush did one and Obama did the other.
My theory, simply put, is that we support Obama’s wars because we identify with his values.
I want to talk about a new phenomenon, the rise of the pro-war progressive liberals. This movement is related to neoliberalism but is not exactly the same thing because I believe it focuses primarily on moral character. I think on some level Americans are so distanced from our wars that we rarely engage with them directly; we engage with our leaders as proxies for real conflicts, and our perception of those conflicts is reflected through the prism of the values our leaders express.
I would posit that among modern liberal voters it is possible to believe that as long as our leaders have the correct progressive values (think Obama), then the conflicts they wage are virtuous in nature. When our leaders are non-progressive (think Trump, Bush), then their conflicts are clearly wrongheaded and destructive. This allows us to justify the attempts to depose Qaddafi and Assad as the actions of a virtuous leader against evil despots, regardless of the devastating end results of these conflicts. To my surprise my liberal friends don’t seem to feel an internal contradiction in supporting a president who promotes social justice virtues at home but also wages an aggressive, expansionist military campaign abroad. Instead of these two facets of Obama’s administration conflicting with each other, the former seems to reinforce that the latter must be justified.
I am fascinated by the original neoconservative movement, which, surprisingly, did not spring fully formed from the GOP. Rather, the ideology originally came from anti-USSR leftists, mostly Trotskyists, who defected from the war weary Democratic party. This transition involved a movement from the left to the right in the sixties because the right was more willing to go to war. Over the course of the Obama and Trump administrations, I worry that we are beginning to see what may be a reverse in this trend; not that hawkish Republicans may find a new home with the Democrats, necessarily, but that progressives may find themselves increasingly comfortable with war.
The second stage in the evolution of this mindset is the rise of Donald Trump, the first supposedly anti-war candidate from either the left or the right in decades. Trump promised an end to the regime change wars and a return to focusing on national concerns. For as long as I can remember liberals have been asking for these things, saying the US should stop being the world police, stop fighting forever wars and instead focus on the good of the citizenry. You might imagine that many of the left would take the stance that yes, Donald Trump is an awful, incompetent leader with unacceptable positions on every issue except war on which he is clear eyed and actually this is what we’ve been saying all along.
Instead, almost every liberal politician and liberal media outlet castigated Trump for his attempts to end the Syrian War and withdraw forces from Afghanistan. Presidential candidates in the Democratic primaries argued down the line (with the sole exception of Tulsi Gabbard) that the proper approach to Syria is to stick around to protect our allies, aka, to keep a military force indefinitely and create a pro-American pseudo state. Does that sound familiar? Doesn’t it sound kind of like the neoconservative strategy for the past several decades?
Let me offer another example.
Let’s say I’m the president. Here’s my proposal: let’s take a country that shares a border with an hostile enemy, like Russia. The next step is to find an anti-establishment fringe militia, fund them and arm them to the teeth. This is a pretty conventional American foreign policy strategy that justifiably comes under a lot of criticism from the left. What if these fringe rebels have a pretty scary ideology of their own? We’ve armed radical Wahhabi groups several times and it always turns out pretty badly. But this group counts actual neo-nazis among their ranks, men who openly fly the flag of Hitler into battle. They’re pretty unsavory, but Russia is a big threat to this country, a recent ally which we want to stay in our orbit. The geopolitics would benefit America immensely if we were able to fight Russia back in this situation. Are we justified in arming the neo-nazis to the point where they can hold their own against a modern military?
I think the default progressive answer would be no, obviously don’t give money and guns to Nazis. But this is exactly what we’re doing with the far right militias in Ukraine. When Trump got caught withholding military aid in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden, there was widespread outrage across liberal media; every Democratic politician denounced his actions as unpatriotic, every friend of mine shook their head at how could the Oval Office have sunk so low. Film reels went up across CNN and MNSBC valorizing the struggle with Russia and an American diplomat described the Ukrainian fascist militias as “modern day minutemen” in a testimony to Congress.
In all of our excitement over Trump’s latest horrible action, there was absolutely no discussion of whether we should be funding and arming far right militias in the first place, over whether this was the morally correct action to take. His abuse of power was so magnified that the actual details of our relationship with the conflict seemed incidental. The strongest stance our country has taken was to eventually cut off direct aid to the openly white supremacist Azov Battalion, but our security funds continue to be funneled into far right groups with principles antithetical to the progressive, human values we hold dear. A closer look might bring this dynamic into sharper relief, but we have become accustomed to analyzing foreign policy not by the on-the-ground facts and details, but rather through the character of the president directing the conflict.
Likewise, I’ve heard many people my age voicing strong concerns about the way Trump is handling Yemen. But these concerns seemed only to suddenly manifest when Obama left the office and Trump arrived, though our role in the conflict began under the former and not the latter. The humanitarian crisis raged for years under Obama and his only action was to stop directly selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and instead give them massive State Department subsidies to arm themselves without us. Why did this seemingly inexcusable conflict only show up on our radar when someone we hated took the wheel?
Trump stands for nationalism and retreating from international coalitions and our role as global policeman. If we hate nationalism, and we love international coalitions, does this mean we necessarily must support our role as global policeman when Trump opposes it?
When did everyone decide this was our new paradigm? When did all my friends begin to unquestioningly brush off regime change and military conflict? When did we accept the things we found so abhorrent under Bush, that we clearly still find abhorrent under Trump?
We are now poised to vote for Joe Biden, one of the earliest strident advocates for shipping weapons to Ukraine. Biden is no Obama, either in charisma or his perceived level of liberal values. He doesn’t fit neatly into the slot of a strident progressive, and many are still smarting at the betrayal of Bernie Sanders in the primary. That said, Biden won overwhelmingly in most demographics and the Democratic party doesn’t seem to have had too much trouble rallying behind him.
If Biden starts another conflict, how will liberal voters react? Will we protest, will we consider Biden part of the old guard, not capable of the necessary progressive character to lead a just war? Or will we rationalize the conflict, will we find ways in which it was justified because we are the side of good and they are the side of evil?
Perhaps on some level this is all me grasping at straws, maybe I’m only even thinking from this angle because I’m projecting my youthful naivete and personal values onto The Real World, a world where most people other than me understand that hard choices will always be made and that war is a fact of life. But I think I’m pointing at a larger phenomenon among American liberals, because most people I know also shared this sense of naivete about Obama, the man who ran on posters emblazoned with “Hope” and “Change.”
For me maybe this is just a story about growing up and learning that reality doesn’t necessarily reflect campaign posters, but what about everyone who doesn’t seem to have realized this? What about everyone who remains convinced that Hope was well placed and that Change truly happened, what about the people who are certain that our leader was just and his crimes nonexistent? This is a mindset that has plagued humanity in every political regime on earth and we would be foolish to assume that we are immune to it. We must ask ourselves whether we are willing to tolerate mountains of bodies in the Middle East to be led by a man who shares our values, a man who we want so desperately to stand for the things we believe in that we may even change the things we believe in to match what he stands for.
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