Hard Left's Anti-U.S. Ideology Turns It Against Ukraine

As the war in Ukraine nears the one-year mark, it is not unreasonable to expect it to eventually end in some sort of negotiations. The crucial point is where one takes responsibility for the beginning and the end of the war. For a certain section of the progressive western left, “peace through diplomacy” means one thing, though they rarely say it openly: Ukraine’s surrender on Russia’s terms.

At some point in the future negotiations will take place. The window for Russia to achieve its goals on the battlefield is long gone – if it ever existed. But unless Ukraine receives more and additional types of offensive weapons from its Western partners, it will be very difficult for Ukrainian armed forces to launch large-scale counter-offensives to liberate the rest of their country, as they impressively did in Kharkiv and Kharkiv oblasts have done in Cherson. Eventually, therefore, one or both sides will run out of resources to go to war, and both countries will end up sitting around a table to discuss the terms of a ceasefire. But Russian President Vladimir Putin still does not recognize Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign state and separate people, and his obligation to negotiate in good faith and honor all agreements is disputed at best.

Support for Ukraine in most western countries is a mainstream consensus. These include Ukraine’s largest and most trusted partner, the United States, where protecting Ukrainian sovereignty has strong bipartisan support, such as a standing ovation across the aisle during Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s historic speech to a joint session of the US Congress on December 21st.

But Western support for Ukraine has prompted hostility on both ends of the political spectrum. For the Western hard left opposed to “US hegemony” or “US militarism,” their own anti-American and anti-Western worldview is so compelling that they will readily side with any aggressor in the anti-Western camp. Likewise, they will zealously oppose any country supported by the United States. Hence, in part of the left, there is enduring sympathy for repressive regimes like those in Russia and Iran – it’s not that they are authorize of repression per se, but the reflex to join the anti-American camp is stronger than any disapproval.

The hard left’s holy war against its own governments brooks no distractions – not to mention that Ukraine’s fall is a clear-cut struggle by a sovereign, previously colonized nation defending itself against an imperialist invader who is completely honest in its genocidal intentions confesses. These progressive extreme leftists – often self-styled as pro-peace activists – will ignore such evidence, even if it comes from their own ideological comrades such as Ukrainian socialists.

Instead, their arguments on Ukraine are often indistinguishable from those of the western far right, which makes similar arguments for withdrawing its support from Ukraine. Former leader of the British Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn, an icon of the progressive left, and Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson both liberally repeat favorite topics of conversation for the Kremlin, including the cynical claim that aid to Ukraine needlessly prolongs the suffering of Ukrainians.

In terms of the obvious consequences, when the hard left demand to “stop the war in Ukraine” they really mean “stop helping Ukraine to defend itself”. While they gloss over well-documented Russian atrocities, Putin’s stated goals in Ukraine, and the invasion’s apparent colonial nature, there is never a moral imperative in their self-proclaimed anti-war stance. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from this is that these leftists do not reject war, but rather the fact that there is a war in which one side enjoys US support.

This twisted worldview — in which Ukrainians have no agency and Russia is the victim of a proxy war — was on full display at an event at Manhattan’s Cultural Center last month. There, some of the most prominent personalities of this subculture discussed what the event was called a “real way to peace in Ukraine”. The line-up included several icons of the progressive left: linguist Noam Chomsky, former US Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and Medea Benjamin, a prominent self-proclaimed peace activist.

During the more than three-hour debate, broadcast to a modest online audience, not a single speaker proposed even a first step towards peace in Ukraine. Despite the subtitle of the event – “Negotiation – yes! Escalation – no!” – not a single speaker bothered to address who would negotiate, what their negotiating positions might be, and who would give up what in order to achieve a lasting peace. Ukrainians were not represented at the event, so one speaker tritely argued that “you don’t have to be Ukrainian or Russian to call for peace.”

Whenever these activists call for “peace” or a “diplomatic solution” in Ukraine, the details are invariably vague. For Stein, a truce is just “a mouse click” away – but she quickly moved on to other issues, as did other speakers. Of course, the content of future negotiations is purely theoretical at this point, but at least some other pro-negotiators come up with concrete proposals, thoughtful or not. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for example, has called for a return to the pre-February state. 24 Status quo ante.

But for the hard left, calls for a diplomatic solution always seem to boil down to “stop helping Ukraine and letting Russia do whatever it wants”. Consider, for example, the UK Stop the War Coalition’s November petition. While acknowledging the terrible human cost of the war in Ukraine, he urges the British government to “stop sending arms” – and only then “implores all sides to heed the growing calls for an immediate ceasefire and peace talks.” . The implication is clear: “Peace for Ukraine” means peace at Ukraine’s expense and on Russia’s terms.

Give “pro-peace” activists a microphone long enough and their pro-Russian leanings will surface. It is no coincidence that Max Blumenthal, co-founder of gray areaa blog that follows the dictum that the United States is bad and anti-US dictators are good is not interjection all Russian officials in Washington the day Zelenskyi arrived, urging them to do whatever they could to end the war. Instead, Blumenthal and his comrades focus their efforts on personally disparaging Zelenskyy while either denying or downplaying Russian atrocities.

Many other Western “anti-war” activists don’t even bother to hide their pro-Kremlin bias. Brian Becker, spokesman for the ANSWER Coalition, an umbrella organization for various far-left activist organizations, said he considers Putin’s revisionist treatise and justification for war document On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians as one of his sources of inspiration.

Even when a Western “anti-war” voice acknowledges Russian atrocities and expresses sympathy for Ukrainian civilians who have been bombed in their homes, this is inevitably thrown into yet another anti-US diatribe blaming the atrocities on anything but Russian aggression will. A prime example of this moral blindness is Chomsky, the patron saint of the “anti-militarist” left. Time and time again, he begins his interviews and public speaking by condemning Russia’s “criminal invasion”—only to quickly move on to blaming the war on the United States, whose military-industrial complex is said to be planting weapons on Ukraine. His world view denies not only Ukraine’s ability to act, but also Russia, which is presented as a kind of natural disaster that can only be avoided by not standing in its way. In this pragmatic defeatist school of anti-war thinking, Ukraine is definitely screwed. For Chomsky, agreeing to all of Russia’s demands seems the only choice, simply because of its ability to destroy the world. By refusing, the West is engaging in what he called “a ghastly gamble” at the New York event.

Fortunately for Ukraine and other countries that have been invaded or bullied by their larger neighbors, the West’s self-proclaimed anti-war left is no longer as influential as it was, say, in the 1970s and 1980s. Its niche events rarely attract more than a few hundred attendees. It doesn’t have an audience large enough to tarnish Western support for Ukraine, at least not in the United States. But it will manage to poison a few minds as it reaches for influence.