Remember the ’50s and the ’60s
In American politics, there are patterns that persist across the generations. That’s what we’re seeing in foreign policy right now. The Democrats are replaying their Vietnam-era divisions in the split between the Biden administration and the pro-Palestine left. Again you have an aging Democratic president struggling to modulate a conflict with no certain endgame.
Again his left-wing critics represent his party’s younger generation, their influence concentrated on college campuses, their power expressed primarily through disruptive protest tactics. And again you have a deep divide between progressives and the Democratic older guard — Cold War liberals then, liberal Zionists today.
The Republican split over Ukraine funding has revived debates from the 1930s through the early 1950s. We have noninterventionists pitted against hawks, populists against internationalists.
Of course history doesn’t repeat that neatly. Vladimir Putin’s Russia isn’t Adolf Hitler’s Germany or Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, Israel isn’t at all like South Vietnam, and U.S. troops are not committed to either conflict yet.
Moreover, seeing continuities across different eras doesn’t tell you who’s correct in this one or reveal how today’s crises will ultimately end. Especially when the crises are concurrent, and others loom ahead.
A new pattern with China
You could imagine right-wing noninterventionism undermining Republican support for Israel as well as for Ukraine, but so far right-wing critics of Israel like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens don’t have a big constituency in Congress.
Likewise, you could imagine antiwar activism on Israel-Palestine encouraging a left-wing case for making peace with Russia. (If Israel is expected to bargain with Hamas, why not Kyiv with Moscow?) But those arguments aren’t a big part of Democratic politics at the moment.
Perhaps there will be more crosspollination if the two conflicts drag on. Or maybe current debates will be transformed and superseded by events in Asia, especially if you believe that the current period of global conflict is only “hardening” the Chinese regime’s “intent to execute an act of aggression similar to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” (to quote a new analysis from Mike Studeman, a former commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence).
In that case China will go from occupying a second-order role in our debates to rewriting them entirely — maybe by discrediting both left-wing and right-wing skepticism about American overseas commitments, the way isolationism was abandoned when the simmering crises of the 1930s gave way to World War II.
Or maybe by heightening and shaking up today’s divisions, so they feel less like reruns and more like the new debates of an era when the American empire may be fighting for its life.