In a time of war, unpopular dissent welcome
Ross Douthat says to read anti-war activism out of the current debate makes the path to atomic destruction much too wide and smooth.
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 420-1. The one dissenter was Barbara Lee, DCalif. 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 — 426-3 for a resolution urging various kinds of support for Kyiv, 424-8 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 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 Joe 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 U.S. military efforts, and having watched as Lee’s lone vote in 2001 came to seem eventually like an admirable dissent rather than a farleft 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 U.S. 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 U.S.' 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 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
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.