An Alt-Liberal Playbook for Ukraine

One of the interesting aspects of the Ukrainian War is the division it has created in the American left. On one side you have establishment/Boomer lefties – who support Ukraine because Trump doesn’t, will support whatever the Democrats in Washington tell them to, and/or have seen this movie before and recognize Russia on the warpath as something one wants to keep a good eye on. On the other side you have the new “populist left” or “alt-left”. Folks like Glen Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Jimmy Dore, and Aaron Matte et al who have horseshoed around so far that often they agree with the American right and are useful idiots for Tucker Carlson to bring on his show to kick the shit out of the liberal establishment (who, let’s face it, usually deserve it). Suffice it to say, nothing gets this group rock hard like any mention of Hunter Biden’s laptop. What is interesting about this group is: at first glance you would recognize them as typically liberal. They are anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-government, pro-Palestinian liberation, blah, blah, blah. One would be forgiven for assuming that their reaction to the Russian/Ukrainian War would be condemnation of Russian aggression, support for a UN-brokered peace requiring the ceding of captured territory, etc., etc. But not our boys! To a man (and woman) this crew had the same reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, and they’ve been staying strong through 2023. The playbook went/goes something like this:

Play #1: The Russians would never invade Ukraine.

Many in the alt-liberal ecosystem maintained that Russia would never invade Ukraine prior to the night things kicked off in February 2022. No one was hanging out there more than Matt Taibbi and going back to read his commentary from early February 2022 is informative and fun. Taibbi forcefully pushed back on the idea that Russia would invade, tweeting that reports of imminent invasion were “baseless and embarrassingly incorrect”. This was a typical Taibbi Twofer – he got to apologize for Russia AND dunk on the lames in the lamestream media. Aaron Matte called the run-up narrative to the invasion “US-generated war fever”.

Undergirding this play was the idea that the Russians were playing an awesome game of 4-D chess, to get something out of the West, and that the dumb-old Americans were playing right into Putin’s hand by acknowledging that there may be a problem with 200K Russian troops massing on the border of a neighbor. Taibbi called this successful Russian “information warfare” and a “big international PR win for Russia”. What Russia would have wanted with this show of force – that was definitely not going to be an invasion – is hard to nail down with this group. Something between an assurance that Ukraine would never join NATO, permanent status as a Russian vassal state for the Ukrainians or bringing back the McRib.

Play #2: The Russians HAD to invade. The invasion happens. Oops. Maybe time for some on the alt-left to pump the breaks. Reassess whether we want to be ride or die for Russia or Putin. A war of aggression that includes aerial bombardment of a sovereign capital, 100+ Russian Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) attacking on two axes of advance, and almost immediate credible claims of sexual violence used as a weapon of war by the Russians – this should be where liberals draw the line. These are the same dudes who go apeshit every time the Israelis role a single tank into Gaza. Surely the invasion itself would be the trigger to condemn Russia and generally accept the “lamestream-establishment-propaganda” position that in 2022 – a free European country should have a right to be free. Not our boys (and girls)! These cats are committed. They immediately went to play #2. In fairness, this play usually starts with the alt-leftie saying something like “While of course I condemn the Russian invasion, it’s important to understand…”. The second part of that statement is obviously what they want you to know. This play has two variations – an internal and an external.

Play #2A:. Russia HAD to Invade. Nazi edition.

The internal variation goes something like: “You know, Ukraine fought with the Nazis in WWII. The place is currently crawling with Nazis”. This one is a lay-up – because there is some truth to it. But there is also a metric shit ton of bullshit to it as well. It’s not the purpose of this article to get into complex Ukrainian history. But the bottom line is the Ukrainian people have been a beat-up dolly for empires for centuries. The Ukrainian alliance with the Germans in WWII stemmed from their 100% certainty that Russia was going to gobble them up before Russia was double-crossed by Germany in Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Why would they think this? Because Stalin stated it in the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 – which established the Soviet Union sphere of influence over all of Europe east of the Vistula River in Poland. While Hitler may have been the king, Stalin was no slouch in the genocide department. So, you could forgive the Ukrainians for the port they found themselves in the storm of WWII. We all seem to have forgiven Finland.

The second part of the internal variation is to point to the Azov Battalion (a Ukrainian National Guard regiment since November 2014) – a group of soccer hooligans turned paramilitaries when Russia invaded Ukraine in June 2014. To steelman the alt-left argument, one could say the story here is murky. However, an appropriate counter to the claim that one unit of the Ukrainian National Guard – made up of less the 2,500 people, most of whom died in Mariupol in 2022 – may be neo-Nazis goes something like: “who gives a fuck?” The Anti-Defamation League has a fun little app where you can compare rates of anti-Semitism across countries. It was disturbing to see that rates of anti-Semitism hover in the 30-50% range for most of Eastern Europe. That said, after spending hours of fun asking myself questions like: “who hates the Jews more - Latvians or Belarusians?” (Spoiler alert, it’s the Belarusians by a mile) I came to a conclusion. The Eastern European country with the demographically elected Jewish president – who has lower rates of anti-Semitism than Poland and comparable rates to Russia – is not where I would start de-nazifying the continent. After the Maiden revolution (which Russia claims was initiated by Nazis) Ukraine had free and fair elections. The Nazi party won 1% of the vote. Either they ran the worst revolution in history, or maybe there aren’t a ton of Nazis in Ukraine.

Play #2B: Russia HAD to invade. NATO edition.

The external variation of the Russia HAD to invade play is the big one. It goes something like this: Russia had to invade Ukraine because since 1990/1991 NATO and the West has been encroaching on Moscow’s historical sphere of influence. Underlying this theory are two ideas: Idea #1 – Russia was promised that NATO would not push East after 1990. Idea #2 – NATO is provoking Russia by going back on this promise. None of these ideas are well supported – neither by fact nor logic.

With regards to assurances made to Russia, the classic story is that in February 1990 then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch East”. This happened. And a whole bunch of leaders from Western governments gave similar assurances. George Washington University has posted the National security Archives on this subject online. It’s fascinating reading. If you read those documents, you get some context for why the assurances where being made, to whom, and about what. At the time Baker laid the famous line on Gorbachev the world was seeing cracks in the Warsaw Pact, and there was whispering that Germany could reunify. The USSR was trying to figure out what the future would look like, and the West was trying to get the USSR to avoid doing something rash like, say, nuking a rebellious Warsaw Pact member. Virtually everyone in those conversations believed two things – that they had more time than they did, and that the USSR would continue to exist at the conclusion of the crisis. Neither of those things were true. When the end came, it came fast. And the nation that was provided those assurances rapidly fell apart between the failed coup of August 1991 and when the hammer and sickle was lowered over the Kremlin on December 25th, 1991. On that date, the USSR ceased to exist, and the Russian federation was born. The following year Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine recognized each other’s independence and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the Belovezha Accords. Fun fact: for assurances of its territorial integrity Ukraine gave Russia all its nukes in a deal that the West 100% backed (our logic at the time being it was easier to keep track of the nukes if they were all in one country – oops). Not to get weaselly about this, but who would the promises made in 1990/91 make the West beholden to? And what would we be getting in return? Is our answer to an Eastern European nation seeking to gain entry into NATO “Sorry. But we made this promise 30 years ago. And if we go back on it the ghost of Mikhail Gorbachev might nuke Dresden to stop German de-unification”?

The idea that NATO is provoking Russia is similarly goofy. It gets the balance of threat wrong. In the history of the alliance, NATO gone to war three times – Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and Kosovo. NATO has never fought a war of aggression, nor has it ever permanently held territory. The same cannot be said for my boys the Russians! Hard to know where to begin. These guys have been laying it down since 1917. In fairness, we’ll exclude all the invasions wherein the USSR crushed rebellions in Eastern Europe and the Caucuses between 1939 and 1991 (and there were a LOT). If we look at the current Russian state, it has gone to war nine times since 1991 - Georgia (3x), Chechnya (2x), Ukraine (2x), Moldova (1x), Dagestan (1x). In each instance, Russia has gone into their neighbor under the guise of protecting ethnic Russians living there, and with the intent of conquest or the establishment of a vassal state. And don’t worry. If the ethnic Russians in the region aren’t under threat or not motivated to go to war against their own country Russia will send in Spetsnaz “little green” men to cook up their own version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This injection of ethnic Russians into vassal states was a feature and not a bug of the USSR internal policy that resulted in a diaspora of Russians throughout the former Warsaw Pact. Why does the alt-left think Eastern European countries want to join NATO anyway? NATO doesn’t recruit, but membership in NATO was priority #1 for every Eastern European and Baltic country. Do the leaders in Riga, Warsaw, and Prague have designs to take Moscow? Or do they think that in the past 80 years the threat has come from the East and not the West? Perhaps they have noticed that Moscow has shown itself to be adept at hybrid warfare and destabilizing democracies by weaponizing the features of a free society and using ethic Russia populations as an excuse for aggression.

What the “NATO is provoking” argument really gets wrong is the idea of agency. In this view only NATO has agency. It is exerting pressure on Russia for some dubious, but never defined reasons, and is the only player with free will. Everyone else is either a non-player character (NPC) – whose role is prescribed or is reacting to NATO’s provocations. Ukraine, who’s overtures to join NATO since 2014 received a tepid response from the alliance and the EU, is an NPC. It is the vassal state of the dead USSR and has been willed to Putin’s Russia as a slave may be passed down to one’s descendants. Referring to the “not one inch East” routine – the Eastern European countries who joined NATO since 1991 are also NPCs. They too should be vassal states of the new Russia. They simply had the good fortune to join NATO while Russia did not have its shit together enough to fuck with them while it was committing its genocides in Chechnya. They got off easy and should be thankful. Certainly, they should not be interested in arming the Ukrainians (Poland and the Baltics have punched about their weight class in military aid to Kyiv). Interesting that the countries that Russia has traditionally sought to own as buffer states are motivated to support Ukraine.

The kicker is – according to the alt-left view – Russia has no agency either. It MUST react to NATO provocation by launching a war of aggression against its neighbor. Russia is the semi-drunk elderly white guy who blows away a black kid selling magazine subscriptions on its front porch and then claims it felt threatened. Russia is the George Zimmerman of Eastern Europe. Russia is the nervous cop who shoots a brown-skinned motorist for reaching for his wallet. Reacting to threats and standing its ground. It never had a choice. The irony being, of course, that the alt left sees the insanity of the over-reaction when it results in violence and tragedy on a small scale. But when it results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands they are asking “Why didn’t Ukraine just show the cop its hands?!? None of this would happen if it hadn’t resisted.”

Play #3: The Russians are going to nuke us all.

In the early days of the war most the alt-left POV was “The war will be over in a couple of weeks. Russia will humiliate both Ukraine, the US, and NATO. Get used to it.” Listen to Useful Idiots, Breaking Points, Jimmy Dore, etc. from February through June of 2022 and you will hear confident assertions that Kyiv is a good as gone and Western support to Ukraine amounts to “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian”. As evidence, check out any podcast that platformed Scott Ritter in the past 18 months. For those not in the know, Scott is a former marine and UN-weapons inspector in Iraq who really, really likes Russia and has been predicting a Ukrainian rout, to anyone who will listen, every day since February 24th, 2022. His claim to fame is that he got the Iraq war right. There were no WMDs, and Saddam did not want the smoke. His other claim to fame is that he’s a convicted pedophile.

But the war didn’t end. Ukraine demonstrated itself to be an actual country whose people were willing to die to defend its sovereignty. They had also developed a capable military since 2014 while no one – except maybe their NATO trainers – was noticing. The Ukrainians smashed the Russian airborne bridgehead/airhead at Hostomel airport in April of 2022, then they answered the question of whether small anti-armor teams could fix and destroy a numerically superior armored convoy north of Kyiv. Later that spring they evicted the Russians from Kharkiv and Kherson. Suddenly the alt-left conversation went from assured Russian victory to a panic at how the Ukrainians may not have the courtesy to lay down and surrender like good little vassals. And if that happened, then the Russians would be more than justified in ending the world in a nuclear Armageddon. After all, Putin has always maintained that nukes are on the table if he feels the Rodina is threatened.

To summarize: either the Ukrainians were destined to lose if the West didn’t help, or the West would help them, prolonging the general suffering and create an unacceptable risk of Russia lashing out and nuking us. This idea has a couple of underlying assumptions which are useful to unpack. First, Russia is fucked up enough that it will eventually nuke someone other than Ukraine in response to battlefield loses in Ukraine. This would be the worst war crime in the history of the world, but it checks out considering how the Russians have conducted themselves to date. The second assumption acknowledge that NATO is not that fucked up. Because no one is worried that the alliance will airburst a tactical nuke over a Russia column or give a nuke to Ukraine (what kind of proxy war is this?!?). The generally accepted NATO response to Russian use of a nuke is the sinking of the Russian Black Sea fleet using conventional forces.

The implication of this argument and its assumptions is that on a long enough escalation timeline, anyone with a nuke is unstoppable. The country with the nuke just needs to escalate until the only remaining option is a nuclear strike and the West will back down. If this is the case, then NATO is meaningless. And Russia is destined to take whichever countries it wants. China can too (sorry Taiwan). And North Korea. And eventually Iran. In the weak-kneed real politick of the alt-left nothing is worth the risk of nuclear conflict. We have ceded the world to the worst actors and the biggest megalomaniacs. The days of the 93% of countries that don’t have nuclear weapons are eventually numbered. There is no cause or alliance or treaty that would make it worth it for the U.S. (or any of the 13 other nuclear states) to come to the aid of a non-nuclear power against one that possesses nukes. This POV is best embodied by Saagar Enjeti on a recent episode of Breaking Points on which he said the quiet part out loud when admonishing Ukraine for a drone strike on the Kremlin: “One side has nukes, and you don’t. Deal with it. I’m not saying it’s fair, life is not fair”. I don’t know if any of the “We can’t stand up to Russia because it has nukes” crowd has played out the rope on their perspective. But I doubt they really want to live by tooth and claw in the world they would be creating.

The alt-liberal playbook is not novel. It’s probably been around since one monkey told another monkey what they should do with all the bananas. What is unique about its current incarnation is that it is being pointed at the obvious victim of aggression. By a group of people who typically support the victim of aggression versus the perpetrator. My hypothesis about why is rooted in the psychological theory of reactance. A super-simplified explanation of the theory is that people will over-resist people or things they don’t like. The way teenagers will hate EVERYTHING about their parents and rebel at things that don’t require rebellion. I suspect that the alt left see the lames in the current Democratic administration and the establishment liberal media supporting the Ukrainians, and their compatriots in Trumpistan supporting the Russians (always principled Tucker Carlson famously only walked back his statements about “rooting” for Russia when they started shelling Ukrainian nuclear plants). They really, really hate establishment Democrats, almost as much as the liberal/mainstream media. Like a LOT. As such, the position a good alt-leftist must take is clear: corrupt Ukraine, led astray by evil NATO must be brought back into the loving arms of Mother Russia.