On Sept. 14, 2001, the U.S. House 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, D-Calif. 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 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 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.