Dissent on the Margins 2000 Could It Happen Again
Ross Douthat
Why We Need Wartime Dissent
On Sept. 14, 2001, the House of Representatives passed what was understood to be a declaration of war against the perpetrators of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, by a vote of 420 to 1. The one dissenter was Barbara Lee, Democrat of California. At the time, her protest vote seemed like embarrassing peacenik nonsense, an example of left-wing folly at a time of moral clarity and necessary war.
In recent days, since the invasion of Ukraine, the House has cast votes by similarly lopsided margins — 426 to 3 for a resolution urging various kinds of support for Kyiv, 424 to 8 to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus. The dissenters this time have been Republicans, a mixture of eccentric libertarians like Thomas Massie of Kentucky and crackpot populists like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
Just as I didn't agree with Barbara Lee's worldview, I don't agree with the views that seem to be motivating today's dissenting votes — and not just in their most paranoid, Greene-ian expressions. As I wrote last week, the Ukraine war has exposed certain limits to populist thinking generally: Organized as it is around the internal failures of Western and American elites, the populist response to a clear external threat has been a kind of anticipatory opposition, a critique of elite mistakes not yet in evidence.
The shared populist assumption — on the anti-establishment right, the heterodox left and the new spaces where they intersect — seems to be that the Biden administration is destined to repeat the Bush administration's War on Terror and Iraq-era mistakes. But so far this White House has taken a more cautious and controlled approach. Certain individual voices in the establishment have pushed for reckless escalation, but no equivalent of the hawkish "uniparty" of the early 2000s has yet reassembled.
Instead, President Biden's team seems to be following a Cold War playbook of cautious proxy war rather than embracing sweeping Bushian ambitions. And for every would-be Curtis LeMay on cable television or in the White House press room, there are noted anti-populists like David French and Tom Nichols warning their readers about the dangers of escalation, the threat of nuclear war.
So I'm not here to offer three cheers for Massie or Greene or any other dissenter from our effort to support Ukraine. But having lived through the last two decades of failed American military efforts, and having watched as Lee's lone vote in 2001 came to seem eventually like an admirable dissent rather than a far-left folly, I want to offer a single cheer, at least, for such dissent in present circumstances.
At the very least, it should be possible to disagree with the dissenters provisionally, and to reject the kind of anti-anti-Putinism to which they're often tempted, without pretending that all the reasons to doubt the wisdom of our foreign policy establishment have suddenly evaporated.
Three connected realities, in particular, should guarantee the dissenters a place in the discussion. The first is simply the recent track record of American involvement in military struggles overseas. Since the Cold War's end, whether we've put boots on the ground, dropped bombs or confined ourselves — as in Ukraine, so far — to arming combatants, our record of interventionism features numerous debacles, on the small scale of Somalia and Libya as well as the large scale of the Iraq war, and fewer unalloyed successes. If you made decisions retrospectively and reduced every case to a binary choice, "intervene or stay out," the side saying "stay out" would generally have the better of the argument.
There are excellent reasons — starting with the performance of the Ukrainians themselves — to think that this time is different, that a limited effort in support of the Kyiv government is in the American national interest in the way our bombing campaign in Libya or our endless quest for the "moderate rebels" in Syria wasn't.
But this leads to the second point, which is that dissent can still be important in cases where the interventionists are initially correct. Our decision to topple the Taliban in 2001, for instance, remains the right and necessary call in hindsight, notwithstanding the debacles that followed. But that didn't make Lee's dissenting vote any less important — because it anticipated the disaster of our nation-building effort, the over-expansive application of the authorization to use military force, the various abuses of presidential power in the War on Terror.
Likewise, in the current moment there's no way to know for sure whether Thomas Massie's libertarian warnings about the House's measures — that they're overly broad, escalatory and liable to presidential abuse — will be borne out by events. But it's entirely possible for arming Ukraine to be good policy and for Massie to be right that some elements of the American response to Russian aggression could go badly or disastrously astray.
Finally, dissent matters because the potential scale of a disastrous outcome in a conflict with Russia is so much greater than even the worst-case scenarios in other recent wars. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that because of the Biden administration's caution, there's only a 5 percent chance that our support for Ukraine leads to unexpected escalation, to the American military's direct involvement in the war. Whereas if you looked at the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq in late 2002, you would have said that the odds of a war for regime change in that case were well over 50 percent.
On that level, the Biden policy seems much safer for a cautious realist to support. But that hypothetical 5 percent risk carries with it some still-more-fractional risk of nuclear escalation, which is a much more existential danger than even the more disastrous scenarios for Iraq. That has to create its own distinctive set of calculations. Even if the Biden policy is the best course, you still need an unusual level of vigilance, a somewhat hyperactive caution, around the possibility of escalation. And here the anticipatory critique of elite failure that we're getting from the populists becomes valuable: Not because it will necessarily be vindicated, but because even a small risk of elite folly is worth worrying over when nuclear weapons are potentially involved.
For a practical example of that folly from Republican politics, consider the G.O.P. Senate primary in Ohio, where J.D. Vance has been running as a populist traitor to the intelligentsia that helped make his "Hillbilly Elegy" a best seller. (Full disclosure: I used to have long conversations with Vance about the future of the G.O.P., if you'd like to hold me responsible for the tone of his campaign.) That populist pitch has included a strong dose of anti-interventionism, which led him to declare his indifference to "what happens to Ukraine," relative to domestic concerns, just before Vladimir Putin gave the order to invade.
It's a comment that has been highlighted and condemned by populism's critics since the invasion, and in the recent Republican Senate debate Vance took predictable fire over the issue. But in the same debate the two candidates who are seemingly ahead of him in the polls, Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel, both endorsed an improbable halfway kind of escalation — a no-fly zone somehow imposed by Europeans rather than Americans, with the idea that this would thread the needle between thwarting Russia and accidentally starting World War III.
It was an idea that only Vance wholeheartedly condemned, and he was right. Under wartime conditions, the escalatory fantasies of his rivals — have our European allies close Ukraine's skies, and then when they get into a shooting war with Russia, we do … what? — carry a more immediate risk than the dangers of populist indifference, the flaws of isolationist dissent.
Dissent, the Bush-era left often proclaimed, is the highest form of patriotism. That may be overly dramatic and self-flattering. But at the very least we can say this much: In a context where elite mistakes and hawkish temptations could have atomic consequences, to read dissenters out of the debate makes the path to destruction much too wide and smooth for comfort.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/opinion/ukraine-war-russia-dissent.html
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