Joe McCarthy's Favorite Ukraine Argument
Falsely accusing doves of being Russian agents or dupes has a long, sorry history. It needs to stop.
Now that we are debating what to do about Russia’s possibly imminent invasion of Ukraine, an old perennial has re-entered the discourse. During the Cold War, it was common for hawks (who were, at that time, usually conservative) to accuse the mostly liberal and leftist community of doves of either working for Russia or wittingly or unwittingly acting as Russian assets. This was one of Joe McCarthy’s favorite arguments, and it should have been repudiated along with McCarthy. But it got repeated by many hawkish politicians and commentators. It played on the fears of Americans that the Soviet Union had a network of spies and was trying to undermine our democracy from within. And it often ended up moving the Overton Window to the point where pacifist and conciliatory approaches to US-Soviet relations could not even be discussed.
It was also a smear. Yes, there were a few Communists who took orders from Moscow. There was obviously Soviet espionage. But the vast majority of the people who got caught up in the Red Scares were ordinary left-wingers whose main concern was that the United States not get into a heedless conflict with the Soviet Union, or that the various proxy wars of that conflict in developing countries were horrible for the peasants living in those places. And some of the folks tarred with the smear were just liberals who disliked the United States’ using military force and pushing other countries around. A few were pacifists. Etc.
This atmosphere also had a really bad impact on the political left in the United States; a lot of liberal politicians became performatively anti-Communist, lest they be tarred with the smear of working for Russia.
And meanwhile, the United States got itself in more than a few situations that threatened its own national security as a result of excessive hawkishness towards the Soviet Union. The Vietnam War is an obvious example of this- and it was mostly the work of Democrats (Kennedy and Johnson) trying to show how anti-Communist they were. The Cuba embargo harmed ordinary Cubans for six decades, through Democratic and Republican Presidents and Congresses alike, because nobody wanted to appear “soft on Castro” and get called a Communist.
So you have an argument that was associated with one of the worst political figures in American history, that was false and defamatory, and that had the effect of skewing American politics towards over-hawkish policies that killed tens of thousands of Americans and millions of others. You’d hope that such an argument would be dead and buried. But it hasn’t been.
At this point, I do want to make a digression, because there’s a sense in which I understand the argument’s resurrection. The 2016 election was a uniquely traumatic event for Democrats. Obviously they lost to Donald Trump, but beyond that, the Russians really did try to interfere in the election and defeat Hillary Clinton. That’s the sort of thing that can cause a lot of Democrats to really hate Vladimir Putin and to want a tough policy against him. And it’s also the type of thing that can cause Democrats to fear that people in the United States might be working for Putin. The ensuing few years, with its occasional prosecutions and scandals involving politicians’ and political actors’ dealings with Russia (and Ukraine) haven’t helped matters here.
(Hillary Clinton herself succumbed to this, when she made the statement (which I thought was libelous) that Tulsi Gabbard was a “Russian asset”, with absolutely no evidence based solely on the fact that Gabbard’s foreign policy towards Russia urged caution and conciliation while Clinton was an uber-hawk.)
But still, foreign policy doves aren’t working for Putin! They’re doves because they are pacificists, or because they are skeptics about American power, or because they have no issue with American power in general but think it’s crazy to play chicken with a nuclear armed state. Whatever. They aren’t working for Putin.
But the argument is just too damned attractive, so we are now seeing it deployed all the time at anyone who urges caution in the current situation with Ukraine. If you think Russia is doing similar things to what the US does in its neighborhood, you are working for the Russians. If you say that the norm against transborder aggression that Putin has violated in Ukraine has also been repeatedly violated by the United States, you are a Putin toady. If you think the US should make a deal with Russia to defuse the crisis and limit NATO’s reach, you are doing the bidding of the FSB. Etc.
This just needs to stop. People are proposing very serious steps that could increase the likelihood of war with a nuclear armed state. This is serious business, and it needs to be taken seriously. We can’t afford to make the same mistake we made in the Cold War, where we marginalized doves with the “Russian asset” epithet and then committed ourselves to incredibly destructive wars. And the left, which was the victim of these smears during the McCarthy era, ought to know better.