The evolution of foreign policy sentiment, NATO skepticism, and how Putin has caused it all

Have you ever gotten the feeling that the traditional understanding of the left/right spectrum is in light of more recent political events, breaking down? Particularly in the United States, that is? It would seem that since COVID-19 broke out, two years ago, we’re reaching this strange new step in the evolution of political science where tests on sites like PoliticalCompass.org may not fully explain where you stand on today’s ideological map. Things like the ideal COVID response (or whether one should engaged in COVID denial, a position too crazy for me to acknowledge on here), whether or not we should even regard climate change as real, let alone do something substantial about it (again, the crazy position being mostly unique to US conservatives), and what foreign policy actions the US and the West should take with regards to Ukraine are the new front and center issues.

Where one lies on the traditional linear spectrum may not be an accurate prediction of what stance they may take on these issues.

*breathe*… So where do we begin on this? Let’s start with foreign policy… we know, and have known for a while that there are a good number of people in the Western World, many of them younger people, who for various reasons are deeply skeptical of NATO’s continuing role on the world stage, skeptical of Atlanticism, and on the more extreme end of this, tacitly approve of or even outright praise Putin. I’ve explained in the past that a lot of this sentiment in the United States has its origins in the Trumpist right. But there’s also a presence of anti-NATO skepticism among some elements of the American left, on anti-war and anti-imperialist grounds. In fact, just last month, Dana Rubinstein and Katie Glueck in the New York Times, reported on the New York 16th Congressional District primary and the challenge ongoing towards Jamaal Bowman.

Now, I followed the Bowman/Engel race in 2020 very closely. I was pleasantly surprised by the results. Bowman represents another much needed new mind to US leadership and Elliot Engel was just another centrist dinosaur that didn’t stand for anything other than big politics & big money. And given Bowman is a democratic socialist, it’s also a pleasant surprise to me that some centrist PAC with deep pockets didn’t manage to stop his efforts with more red scare tactics.

But what makes this round different is that his challenger, Vedat Gashi, is a Kosovo refugee. Basic history recap: the Kosovo refugee crisis was a direct result of the unspeakable horrors inflicted upon civilians by the dictator Slobodan Milosevic, who was eventually overthrown and charged with war crimes, dying before the trial could be completed. Frustratingly, Putin sympathizers and apologists are often also Milosevic apologists.

Why this is relevant to Kosovo is that NATO intervened to stop these horrors in 1999 and Putin never forgave the West for it. Putin has even gone so far as to say that the tensions between NATO & Russia started in 1999, owing to this intervention. Naturally, Mr. Gashi constitutes the position that Putin’s aggression in Ukraine must be met with clear cut foreign policy opposition. In the words of the NYT, he is, “…making foreign policy central to his primary challenge.”.

This is where the Democratic Socialists of America further represent a fracture of their constituents’ opinions; the DSA cited imperialist provocation by NATO as the cause of Putin’s invasion, rather than Putin’s own decision to invade, and even gone so far as to call for the withdrawal of the US from NATO altogether:

The group condemned the invasion, but also urged the United States “to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.”

I identify as a social Democrat, or interchangeably, a Democratic Socialist, perhaps in a buffer zone in between. I firmly believe that Bush 43’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 is one of the most disastrous and crooked foreign policy undertakings the US ever waged. But I myself being ideologically left am left here asking,

“Withdraw from NATO in the midst of a war an invading power unilaterally started? How crazy can we get?

And it is crazy. It would be like taking Ukraine’s arms away and letting the chips fall where they may, which is what makes isolationism dangerous. Anti-war is not IMO a policy of unconditional isolationism. The US for all intents and purposes is NATO, or at least, its most defining member state. Remember, this was a talking point weaponized by then presidential candidate Trump in 2016, when he seized the US’ dominance in the alliance as a means to attack the Baltics’ social spending. It was a dirty tactic, it likely emboldened Putin, and it has since prompted countries like the Baltics to unnecessarily cut social spending.

Predictably, the DSA and others who made these statements have since walked back on these positions, lest they’re interpreted as being too pro-Putin. And on that regard I can understand the frustration. There’s too much of an either or mentality in the West today, as Cold War 2.0 commences, just as there was when the original Cold War was raging throughout the world, both in its form of endless proxy conflicts and the culture of fear that gripped nations not hit directly by them. I get that anyone who is anti-war is going to feel as though NATO has inappropriately expanded eastward, making a confrontation with a bully like Putin inevitable.

But the time to pull out of the existing foreign policy structure of multilateral action and multilateral alliance is not when a world leader who has expressed on numerous occasions that he does in fact want Ukraine; demanding Ukraine stay out of NATO, or else, is in effect, expressing a will to control it, no matter how fast saying this will cause the Trumpist right, and some tankies to lose their shit. Putin wants control of the Ukraine; he did the unthinkable when he sent those troops right into their land, and this reflects a reality thrown right at our doorstep.

So even though arguments by academics like John Mearsheimer, who maintains NATO’s expansion has been provocative have some merits, that people like George W. Bush should not be revered, or are otherwise in no position to give foreign policy lectures, given that he launched an invasion of Iraq on false information, that NATO’s intervention in Libya was iffy at best…. the alliance is still a firewall that might be, however imperfect, the one thing keeping the madman regime to the east from rolling right over Ukraine and into other countries Putin no doubt believes should once again be under the sphere of influence of Russia,…like the Baltics.

If the US were somehow able to just pull out of NATO it would be like signing the Ukrainian peoples’ death warrant, even if direct NATO confrontation should be regarded as a last resort.

It’s frustrating that there are people on the right, as well as, how we see here, some on the left, that are, however softly, shielding Putin from the criticism & condemnation he so thoroughly deserves for a war he unilaterally initiated.