Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) walks through the Senate subway yesterday, at the Capitol in Washington.
Yesterday, Bernie Sanders delivered what I consider an exemplary progressive—and socialist—speech on the floor of the Senate, laying out his analysis and position on what we must hope is not the coming Ukrainian conflagration. He began by warning of the casualties that a Russian invasion would bring—to the lives and economies in both Ukraine and Russia, to the broader political climate, and to the international cooperation needed to save the actual climate. He warned of the prospects of the war expanding into a broader clash that no one actually seeks. He made clear that the threat of war is a threat not just to Ukraine but also to Ukrainian democracy, however imperfect it may be, from an autocrat who’s no friend of democracy.
“There should be no disagreement that this is unacceptable,” Sanders said. “In my view, we must unequivocally support the sovereignty of Ukraine and make clear that the international community will impose severe consequences on Putin and his fellow oligarchs if he does not change course.”
But America, he added, could do some things that might prod Putin to change course. He argued, as many across the political spectrum have, that the U.S.-backed push in the 1990s to expand NATO right up to Russia’s borders was a destabilizing strategic blunder of the first order. Just as America has invoked the Monroe Doctrine for more than 200 years (and as recently as 2018) to keep European and other nations from establishing potentially anti-U.S. alliances with Latin American countries, so Putin likely has analogous concerns. “Even if Russia was not ruled by a corrupt authoritarian leader like Vladimir Putin,” Sanders said, “Russia, like the United States, would still have an interest in the security policies of its neighbors. Does anyone really believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a U.S. adversary?”
“The fact is,” Sanders continued, “that the U.S. and Ukraine entering into a deeper security relationship is likely to have some very serious costs—for both countries.” He also pointed out that nonaligned European nations on the continent’s east-west frontiers—Finland, Sweden, and Austria—were exemplary democracies despite their non-membership in NATO. (As, I might add, NATO members Hungary and Poland are not.)
I cite Sanders’s words not only because I think they’re right on the money, but also because they’re so out of sync with those of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization to which I’ve belonged (including my membership in DSOC, its predecessor) for more than 45 years. DSA’s explosive growth since 2015 is largely a by-product of Sanders’s presidential campaigns, which, by a margin of several light-years, did more to resuscitate American socialism than any, and perhaps every, other proximate cause. That doesn’t mean, alas, that Sanders’s deep commitment to fighting for and expanding democracy is shared by some DSA leaders, even if that commitment is what attracted so many rank-and-file DSA members to the organization.
In its statement on Ukraine, DSA’s International Committee pointed, quite accurately, to the problem of NATO’s eastern expansion, but where it parted company from Sanders wasn’t so much in what it said as what it didn’t say. The word “Russia” appears just three times in its 608-word statement, twice in passing and only once in the section where the Committee lays out its policy recommendation. Here’s that passage: “DSA International Committee calls on the US to reverse its ongoing militarization in the region, avoid implementing sanctions against Russia, and uphold internationally agreed upon commitments to end NATO’s expansionist drive …” That Russia (and Putin, who is not mentioned in the statement at all) instigated the current crisis by its own rather hard-to-miss “ongoing militarization,” or that it even so much as played a role in the bewildering appearance of an army (the Russian one, it would seem) on Ukraine’s border, is somehow omitted from the statement, which attributes the current standoff solely to expansive U.S. militarism. That Putin’s Russia is an autocratic regime that actively seeks to undermine democracy wherever it can is also, apparently, not worthy of comment.
When the Communist Party of yore uncritically praised Stalin’s Soviet Union, not least when it hailed his 1939 pact with Hitler and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Poland, it at least could count on payments of Moscow gold for its efforts. To the best of our knowledge, the current group of DSA apparatchiks—innocents all—provide such encomiums for free.
