How the Democrats Became the War Party

By David Talbot, Columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

They want to bleed the Russian Army, even if their much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive has bogged down. They want to “weaken” Vladimir Putin’s military machine, even if it means fighting to the last Ukrainian. They want to risk a nuclear war, even if Moscow has at least 1,000 more nuclear missiles than the U.S., as well as an anti-ballistic system that is probably superior to ours. They want to win, even if they can’t.

After 20 years, they didn’t win in Afghanistan, where the Taliban now rules with theistic cruelty. They didn’t win in Syria, a bloody proxy war that only left the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad more firmly in control. They didn’t win in Iraq, a war which has cost over one million lives and left that country a violent, sectarian failed state under the shadow of Iran.

And yet they control the Biden administration’s foreign policy—even though they should have been driven from public life in shame.  

They are the Blob, to use President Obama advisor Ben Rhodes’s term. Or neoconservative hawks. Or gung-ho interventionists. Like the forever wars they advocate, they won’t go away. When they temporarily fall out of favor at the White House, they gather at Washington think tanks and university departments, thanks to generous military-industrial support.

They are President Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and these men’s network of top aides, as well as Victoria Nuland, whom President Biden just named acting deputy secretary of the State Department. They are belligerent neocon Elliot Abrams, the President Reagan appointee convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, whom Biden recently resurrected, nominating him to serve on his diplomacy panel. (Yes, diplomacy.) And the equally hawkish John Bolton, the ex-Republican presidential advisor who admires Biden’s aggressive foreign policy.

They believe that Putin should be driven from power and put on trial. They believe that China must be confronted in Taiwan and around the world. They believe in U.S. military dominance and in dropping bombs rather than building hospitals and schools.

Now they want Congress to send another $24 billion in military aid to Ukraine. More weapons to defeat an undefeatable foe—in addition to the child-shredding cluster bombs Biden just sent, widely-banned weapons whose use was once denounced by his spokesperson as a “war crime.”

It’s not just the Biden presidency that’s been taken over by the war hawks, it’s the Democratic Party. Politics has become topsy-turvy in America. While House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has wavered, Congressional opposition to U.S. support for the war in Ukraine has come from far-right members of his party like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s vowed, “Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. Our country comes first.”

Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders, an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq, just as strongly advocates U.S. military aid to Ukraine. And last year, House Democrats’ Progressive Caucus embarrassingly walked back an open letter calling on President Biden to step up his diplomatic efforts to settle the Ukraine war.  Since then, Democratic opposition to the war on Capitol Hill has gone largely silent.

Even the antiwar movement in the U.S, such as it is, remains divided and ineffective when it comes to restoring peace in Ukraine. Normally, grassroots peace activists put political pressure on Democratic representatives in Washington. But as The New York Times concluded on Tuesday, “Only pockets of resistance to U.S. support for Ukraine exist on the American political left.”

If not for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, the dangerously expanding Ukraine war—which has cost the U.S. taxpayers over $100 billion so far, as well as “the flower of Ukrainian youth,” according to Kennedy—would be largely taboo in Democratic circles.

Before a large crowd at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday afternoon, Kennedy voiced his opposition to U.S. involvement in the war, telling reporters afterwards that he would negotiate with Putin to end the war.

"That is not about Ukrainian freedom," he said of the American role. "It is about using Ukraine in a proxy war in a geopolitical dispute between two big powers."

“I’m not making any excuses for Vladimir Putin,” added Kennedy, whose son Conor served as a machine gunner with a Ukrainian military unit resisting the Russian assault. “His invasion was illegal, it was brutal. And he has other options. But did we deliberately provoke the action? Yes, we did. Again and again and again we would not allow (Ukraine President) Zelensky to sign the peace accords in 2019.”

The grim Democratic determination to stay the course runs counter to public opinion, which has turned against U.S. support for the war, according to recent polls. A survey released by CNN earlier this month found that 55 precent of Americans now oppose further military aid to Ukraine. If not for liberal Democrats, who heavily favor continued military assistance, the antiwar sentiment found by CNN would have been even more lopsided.

Apparently, liberals have discovered their inner warrior. What the hell is going on here?

Of course, there’s a financial explanation. (There always is). Although the war industry favors Republicans, Democratic members of Congress also benefit from its campaign donations. Many weapons plants are located in blue states or districts, and their senators and representatives make sure they benefit from the Pentagon’s lucrative contracts. Spotlighting the deep penetration of the war industry in American life, Raytheon and Boeing, two major military contractors, even enjoy membership on the John F. Kennedy Library board of directors, although President Kennedy often clashed with the military-industrial complex.

But America’s constant cocked trigger is also ideological.

When I was young, the halls of Congress were filled with Democrats who passionately opposed the war in Vietnam, even though Lyndon Johnson made it a Democratic war during his presidency. Senators like J. William Fulbright, Wayne Morse, Frank Church, Eugene McCarthy and of course the Kennedy brothers, Robert and Ted. House members like Ron Dellums, Bella Abzug, Father Robert Drinan, Allard Lowenstein, Les Aspin and Phil Burton.

In those years and well afterwards, being a staunch Democrat like me was synonymous with favoring peace over war, questioning the Pentagon’s bloated budget, and ending U.S. imperial arrogance and overreach.

In 2016, Donald Trump channeled middle America’s growing weariness with war. As a Republican candidate and then president, he railed against the fiasco in Iraq and tilted toward America First nationalism. Neocons fled Trump’s party in horror, crying the Republicans had turned “isolationist.”

In the beginning, President Biden positioned himself similarly, emphasizing domestic programs. He even spoke out against the toxic burn pits operated by the U.S. military, which he believes took the life of his son Beau, spearheading legislation to compensate their many victims. When Biden finally completed U.S. withdrawal from the forever war in Afghanistan, the neocons shuddered. Was America no longer exceptional, they worried? Would we no longer impose our will on the rest of the world?

Then the Blob reasserted itself. With Ukraine, the forever war policymakers and pundits are back. Big time.

By sending other people’s sons and daughters to fight and be maimed or killed in never-ending foreign wars, the neoconservative lobby helped create the populist backlash that led to Trump’s stunning rise. But rather than taking blame for Trump— or, better yet, retiring altogether from political life—these hawks have found new political sponsorship. In Biden’s White House, they  have found an accommodating new home.

The neoconservative project in Ukraine is just as doomed as it was in the Middle East. But we don’t have to go along on the neocons’ political suicide mission. Democrats need to rid the party of their noxious influence before they take us down with them.