In 1943, the Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler wrote: “In this war we are fighting against a total lie in the name of a half-truth.” That’s a good motto for American progressives to adopt in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Saying the US stands with Ukraine because America is committed to democracy and the “rules-based international order” is at best a half-truth. The US helps dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates commit war crimes in Yemen, employs economic sanctions that deny people from Iran to Venezuela to Syria life-saving medicines, rips up international agreements like the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accords, and threatens the international criminal court if it investigates the US or Israel.
But this hypocrisy wouldn’t have fazed Koestler, because it’s nothing new. In 1943, the alliance that fought Hitler was led by a British prime minister who championed imperialism, an American president who presided over racial apartheid, and Joseph Stalin. Koestler’s point wasn’t that the US or Britain, let alone the USSR, were virtuous in general. It was that they were virtuous relative to Nazi Germany in the specific circumstances of the second world war, and that these sinful governments were the only ones with the geopolitical heft to stop a totalitarian takeover of Europe.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is neither as powerful nor as genocidal as Hitler’s Germany. But Putin’s claim that historical and cultural affinity gives Russia the right to bludgeon Ukraine into submission is a total lie. It is no less of a lie because the US – by pushing Nato ever-further eastward after 1989 – exploited Russian weakness and compounded Russian humiliation. The Treaty of Versailles was also a victor’s peace. It also strengthened toxic political forces in the defeated nation forced to accept its terms. Hitler’s murderous revanchism, like Putin’s today, was still a crime.
Koestler’s adage is subject to abuse. Hawks might interpret it as suggesting that because the US is a democracy and Russia is a dictatorship, America has the moral high ground in every clash between the two. That’s not true. Democracies can commit aggression and tyrannies can oppose it. When Putin opposed the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, Russia was defending a half-truth against America’s total lie. When his government backed UN resolutions condemning Israeli settlements that the US vetoed, Russia supported human rights and international law while the US defied them. When Joe Biden declares, as he did last Thursday in his remarks on Ukraine, that “America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are,” progressives should hold their applause. Claiming the US possesses an inherent inclination to support liberty implies that the United States can be trusted to act outside of the bounds of international law – a logic that leads to the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
But Koestler’s point was that progressives can puncture America’s pretensions to universal virtue while still recognizing that it is sometimes one of the few instruments available to combat evil. As important as it is to recognize that the US is capable of wars like Vietnam and Iraq, it’s equally important to recognize that not everything the US does is Vietnam or Iraq. In Ukraine, it was Putin, not Biden, who lied about weapons deployments. It was Putin, not Biden, who defied the UN and international law. It is Putin, not Biden, who is bombing another nation and creating vast numbers of refugees. In Ukraine, the US is sending weapons not to a prop up a dictator but to defend a free nation against one.
In a rare and admirable act of self-reflection, the left-leaning journalist Matt Taibbi last week noted that he had underestimated the chances that Putin would launch a full-scale invasion because of “reverse chauvinism”. He was “so fixated on western misbehavior” that he discounted the possibility of Putin’s. It’s not surprising that American progressives, having lived through the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, would grow skeptical when Washington’s military and foreign policy establishments gear up for conflict with a foreign adversary. But that skepticism must extend to America’s adversaries as well. As one socialist put it last week on Twitter, “believing America has a monopoly on being evil is just another kind of American exceptionalism”. And in the current conflict over Ukraine – where the US is a flawed but essential element in the fight against Vladimir Putin’s murderous lies – it’s a form of American exceptionalism progressives must avoid.
Peter Beinart is professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and writes the Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter
