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An anti-war activist leads a rally outside the White House in Washington, January 27, 2022, amid rising tensions over Ukraine.
A new Data for Progress poll shared exclusively with the Prospect finds that the majority of Americans favor diplomacy with Russia over sanctions or going to war for Ukrainian sovereignty.
Most Americans are not particularly animated about the escalating conflict in Eastern Europe, the poll shows, despite round-the-clock media coverage. When asked, 71 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans said they support the U.S. striking a diplomatic deal with Russia. They agreed that in the effort to de-escalate tensions and avoid war, the U.S. should be prepared to make concessions.
It’s the latest poll showing that Americans are skeptical of the drumbeat of news casting Ukraine as a vital national interest. The findings are echoed in surveys by Morning Consult and YouGov.
Notwithstanding lukewarm public sentiment for escalation, the White House is signaling its intent to impose sweeping sanctions on the Russian banking and energy sectors, and has approved a rush of U.S.-made weapons to Ukraine. A bipartisan push for economic penalties is also moving rapidly through Congress.
One White House official told reporters that when dealing with nuclear-armed Russia, “the gradualism of the past is out, and this time we’ll start at the top of the escalation ladder and stay there.” And with 8,500 troops put on alert for potential deployment to Eastern European countries near Ukraine, President Biden on Tuesday said that the United States’ commitment to reinforce NATO allies is a “sacred obligation.”
That drive to war has seen muted opposition from anti-interventionists in Congress. Rather than urging restraint, several progressives have echoed criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian whose advances must be checked.
“We can’t allow for one nation to violate sovereignty, unprovoked, with no justification,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) told the Prospect in an interview. Asked whether the United States should be willing, in diplomatic talks, to commit to not bringing Ukraine into NATO, Khanna said, “I would not be blackmailed by Putin in this situation.”
OTHER MAJOR CRITICS of American interventionism declined to call on Biden to pump the brakes.
The 41 co-sponsors of a sanctions package moving through the Senate include progressive heavyweights like Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. In a press release on the bill, Markey said the legislation was designed to “work in concert with the actions the Biden administration has already taken to demonstrate that we will continue to support Ukraine and its sovereignty.”
Democrats in the House are looking to bring a companion bill to the floor for a vote as soon as next week, The Intercept reported.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put out a statement on Wednesday with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA). “Russia’s strategy is to inflame tensions; the United States and NATO must not play into this strategy,” the representatives said.
The statement raises concerns over “sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions.” But pressed on what, exactly, the United States should be prepared to offer in diplomatic talks, a spokesperson for Lee did not respond.
One White House official told reporters that when dealing with nuclear-armed Russia, “the gradualism of the past is out.”
Reached by the Prospect, spokespeople for leading progressives, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), declined to comment on questions including whether the U.S. should commit not to bring Ukraine into NATO and whether it should provide direct military aid to Ukraine.
Sanders declined to weigh in. In a statement, Warren said, “The United States must use appropriate economic, diplomatic, and political tools to de-escalate this situation.”
Spokespeople for Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, who have previously criticized American interventionism in the Middle East, did not respond to questions from the Prospect, including ones on sanctions policy and NATO commitments.
There has also been discussion of introducing a war powers resolution, a source close to the deliberations told the Prospect. If passed, the resolution would require the president to inform Congress within 48 hours of any military action, and would limit it to 60 days, with 30 additional days for withdrawal, unless Congress affirmatively authorized the conflict. There’s a debate as to whether deployment of troops in the Baltics, or arming Ukrainians, would constitute military action. But the resolution would be a way for Congress to assert control over the process.
So far, a war powers resolution has not been introduced.
FAILED MILITARY ADVENTURISM in the Middle East has in recent years become a more socially acceptable target of criticism. Not only progressives but also right-wing critics of the foreign-policy establishment, including former President Trump and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have helped to mainstream once-taboo criticisms of American blunders in foreign wars.
Americans have also become increasingly disapproving of Israel, as progressives have destigmatized criticism of the conflict in Palestine.
That cultural shift occurred alongside a strategic realignment, most prominently signaled by troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Since at least 2015, military strategists have spoken of a shift from counterterrorism focused on rogue states to great-power competition with China and Russia.
The renewal of strategic competition with land powers—and their standing armies, ships, and missiles—could be a boon for U.S. defense spending. As the historian Adam Tooze pointed out, “The F-35 fighter jet—the most expensive product development programme in history—is not a weapon for fighting insurgents. Its job is to shoot down the best fighters the Chinese and Russians can put in the air.”
The moment is not lost on defense contractors.
“We are seeing, I would say, opportunities for international sales,” said Greg Hayes, chair and CEO of leading weapons firm Raytheon, on an earnings call this week. “The tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”
“You have an entire military-industrial complex outside of the U.S. military, but part of this complex of contractors that frankly just left Afghanistan and are starved for revenue,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan. She added, “The Biden administration is well within their right to seek a diplomatic resolution to this issue.”
Of course, it does not follow from the fact that great-power competition will be especially lucrative for the weapons industry—and Silicon Valley—that arms manufacturers are the prime impetus behind the strategic realignment. But windfall profits in submarines and missiles don’t hurt.
“WHATEVER WE DO SHOULD BE EFFECTIVE. That was Obama’s concern on escalation, that it would increase provocation and not be a sufficient deterrent,” Khanna told the Prospect. “But there are things we can do around the financial consequences of them selling energy, restrictions on using the financial system.”
The California Democrat, who has championed efforts to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, echoed the White House’s argument that the U.S. is prepared to freeze out Russian energy and banking sectors.
Would proposed sanctions work? Russia sources key electronics from producers in the U.S. and Europe, and export bans could damage the country’s production of high-tech goods. But anticipating the use of sanctions, “Fortress Russia” has prepared countermeasures to weather a long freeze-out, stockpiling foreign exchange reserves and pursuing more cooperation with China.
Even proponents of sanctions tend to agree they are a tool dulled by overuse. Once targeted more narrowly at outliers like North Korea, the use of sanctions has grown dramatically in recent decades, coming to a head with President Trump’s indiscriminate use of the tool.
The U.S. and Europe have had some sanctions in place since Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea region in Ukraine, with limited effect. Some advocates of screw-tightening say that only tougher action targeting banks and oil revenue will do the trick, with unavoidable drawbacks for the United States.
Even proponents of sanctions tend to agree they are a tool dulled by overuse.
The White House is currently scrambling to find alternative fuel supplies for Europe. The continent is already suffering from a natural gas crunch that has bled into almost every sector, from fertilizer—where shuttered plants could drive a global food crisis—to metal smelters. Wagering that it can avert this crisis, the Biden administration argues Putin will not weaponize energy exports when prices are so high. And even if he did, one official said, “he is creating a major incentive for Europe to accelerate the diversification of their energy supplies away from Russia.”
That’s a dicey bet. It’s also a profitable one: The United States just this month edged out competitors to become the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the shippable fuel that could be increasingly relied upon as Russian pipeline deliveries to Europe are called into question. The White House says in addition to selling more of its domestic gas, it is also aiming to help Europe buy from other producers, like Qatar and Australia.
One senior progressive congressional aide questioned the notion that sanctions will need to be far-reaching to have a deterrent effect.
“Targeting Putin’s crew of corrupt oligarchs is an obvious first step, freezing and seizing assets, limiting their ability to travel. We can work our way up from there, but it’s important to be careful about broad-based sanctions that simply immiserate the Russian people while missing the rulers—those have a near-zero record of success,” the aide told the Prospect.
At any level of intensity, sanctions should be perceived as conditional on ending bad behavior—something security analysts worry the U.S. has struggled to achieve in the past.
“We should also make clear that there is always a diplomatic off-ramp, in which sanctions can be removed. That’s something the U.S. is not very good at, since paying the domestic political costs of removing sanctions is something U.S. administrations like to avoid,” the aide said.
Others worry that extending America’s blanket of existing penalties, which target countries including China, Iran, and Venezuela, risks creating a coalition of the pariahs, encouraging shunned countries’ economic and political interdependence.
Asked on a press call whether sanctions could spur increasing Russian-Chinese interdependence, a White House official replied that the U.S. retains dominance in key sectors.
“If you look at where the inputs to the major foundational technologies of the world come from, they still come from the West. Yes—yes, China is competing in many of these areas,” the official conceded, but “if they have to resort only to China, in terms of purchasing oil and gas or to supplying technology, we believe that’s going to make the Russian economy far more brittle.”
SEN. JOSH HAWLEY (R-MO), a self-styled populist and frequent critic of China, has just this month argued that Americans should be wary of driving Moscow closer to Beijing. Hawley questioned NATO’s open-door policy—a key sticking point in January’s failed talks—at the hearing of Celeste Wallander, a nominee for assistant secretary of defense for international security.
“Given the challenges that we are facing globally, and most notably, China’s efforts to dominate Asia, do you think that this is the time when it is prudent or advisable for the U.S. to allow Ukraine to join NATO?” Hawley asked. Reached by the Prospect and asked about the potential of sanctions to drive Eurasian hegemons closer together, Hawley’s office declined to weigh in.
For now, the crisis in Ukraine is being communicated as a matter of self-evident moral right. It could leave a “volcano of violence festering in the middle of Europe,” Washington Post editor David Ignatius salivates in a recent column. “The path of eventual victory for the West will be unity, patience and a refusal to compromise on matters of principle.”
Absent calls for restraint, foreign-policy elites have the floor. It is understandably harder for Democrats to break with a sitting president than to criticize Trump’s foreign-policy blunders. But the lack of anti-interventionist opposition leaves a subset of right-wing media as lonely voices of criticism.
If a December report from the Congressional Research Service is to be believed, defense planners are investing in the revival of great-power competition for the long haul. The more immediate question is whether the anti-war wing of Congress has caught up.
David Dayen contributed reporting.
