Ukraine, the progressive-approved proxy war

By voting to enrich the US arms industry and escalate a proxy war against Russia, Bernie Sanders and the Squad enable a militarist agenda that threatens their political cause, and the planet.

President Biden signs the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

In the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders' opposition to the US invasion of Iraq helped set him apart from frontrunners Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the party establishment that they represent.

In 2022, with the US engaged in another costly and catastrophic conflict abroad, Sanders has chosen to abandon the anti-war mantle and join the ranks of his former rivals. Along with every elected Democrat -- including the Squad – Sanders voted last week to approve a $40 billion measure that will escalate the Ukraine proxy war and enrich its prime beneficiary, the US arms industry.

More than half of the allocated spending, $24 billion, is for military aid, including $9.1 billion for weapons makers to replenish the US arsenal. The mammoth bill follows the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act – also unanimously approved by Democrats -- which invokes World War II-era policies to speed the transfer of US military equipment to Ukraine. Coupled with NATO's likely expansion to Sweden and Finland, "the real winners are American defense companies," Forbes columnist Jon Markman writes.

In passing the new $40 billion bill, "the leaders of both parties raised few questions about how much money was being spent or what it would be used for," the New York Times observes. This swift bipartisan approval "was striking, given the gridlock that has prevented domestic initiatives large and small from winning approval in recent years." This includes the progressive-backed Build Back Better agenda for social spending, once a headline issue and now seldom discussed.

The unwavering US effort to flood Ukraine with weaponry instead of diplomacy is additionally striking given its predictable consequences for the conflict and the planet. These include more bloodshed; more refugees; more arms trafficking; more weapons falling into the hands of neo-Nazis and other extremists; more war profiteering; more inflation; more global hunger; and more of a possibility of direct military confrontation between the US and Russia.

The dangers have prompted the New York Times' editorial board, normally a reliable supporter of US militarism, to get cold feet about the Ukraine proxy war that it has heretofore cheered. To avoid "a costly, drawn-out war," the Times editors argue, the Biden administration should make clear to Kiev that "there is a limit to how far the United States and NATO will go to confront Russia, and limits to the arms, money and political support they can muster."

The Times' stance will resonate with anyone worried about an escalated proxy war between the world's top nuclear powers. But in Washington, it is difficult to see how Biden will receive that message if even the progressive, anti-war flank of his own party is voting in lockstep to fuel the danger. This group includes lawmakers like Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee, who have previously voiced concerns about the very military escalation in Ukraine that they just authorized. Remarkably, as Glenn Greenwald notes, not only have these politicians betrayed their own public statements, but have refused to provide any explanation for their tectonic about-face.

The lone exception was Cori Bush, who simultaneously defended her support for the $40 billion measure while acknowledging that it will "primarily" benefit "private defense contractors" and fuel "the increased risks of direct war and the potential for direct military confrontation" between the US and Russia.

That so many single self-identified Congressional progressives can turn against their anti-war record and public positions might seem perplexing. In light of the prevailing US political and media climate of recent years, it makes perfect sense.

The enlistment of progressive support for a neoconservative proxy war in Ukraine is the outgrowth of the Russiagate disinformation campaign that has engulfed the US since 2016. When it comes to the US posture toward the Russian government, Russiagate has normalized militarism and evidence-free allegations; blamed it for US dysfunctions; stigmatized diplomacy; and, to ensure domestic obedience, portrayed anyone who dissents from these imperatives as a Kremlin pawn, asset, or conspirator.  

The fact that a mammoth gift to the US arms industry – and attendant escalation of dangers unseen since the Cuban Missile Crisis – could win the unanimous support of politicians nominally committed to progressive causes is one of the Russiagate campaign's strongest successes to date. Its consequences are worth considering for anyone concerned with the future of the US progressive movement, and the planet.

Escalating a Trumpian proxy war

In public statements about Russia, Bernie Sanders has made clear that he sees a hawkish posture toward the Kremlin as a challenge to Donald Trump's agenda. Just like they deceptively sold the Mueller investigation to the Democratic base as the miracle cure that would bring down Trump, Democratic leaders and their media acolytes have marketed the Ukraine proxy war along similar lines. The minority of Republicans who voted against the $40 billion spending measure, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer declared, are adopting "the same soft-on-Putin playbook that we saw used by former President Trump."

In reality, Democrats are continuing a bipartisan war-mongering playbook that Trump's administration escalated. It is true that Trump made friendly statements about Vladimir Putin and critical ones of NATO. But looking beyond his off-the-cuff remarks, Trump's policies played a major role in provoking the current crisis.

In Ukraine, Trump authorized weapons shipments that Barack Obama, worried about further inflaming the Donbas war and arming neo-Nazis, had refused to send. As senior Obama official Charles Kupchan cautioned in August 2017, arming Ukraine would be "a recipe for military escalation and transatlantic discord," – a prescient warning that Democrats have long forgotten.

Trump, along with Congressional Democrats, opted to follow the dictates of leading Republican neoconservatives John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who had personally vowed to Ukrainian forces that "2017 will be the year of offense," in order to make Russia "pay a heavier price" and ensure that "we will win together."

Trump's escalation of the Ukraine proxy war coincided with his nixing of vital arms control pacts that had eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons and encouraged US-Russia cooperation. The John Bolton-led abandonment of the INF treaty in 2019, and the Open Skies Treaty the following year, played an overlooked role in triggering Russia's military build-up on Ukraine's borders last year.

In a bid to resolve the impasse, the Kremlin's draft pacts with the NATO and the US, transmitted in December 2021, contained extensive proposals to revive the arms control regime that Trump had killed. But continuing the Trump posture, Biden rejected a sweeping agreement, sending the "basic message to Moscow" that the US and NATO will "not to bow to Russian demands," the New York Times reported one month later.

Bernie Sanders: Russiagate target, and ally

In supporting militarism against Russia, progressive Democrats are not only enabling a dangerous playbook for the planet, but one that has been wielded to undermine their own political fortunes.

The 2016 election put the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party in a historically vulnerable position. Hillary Clinton, the presumed shoo-in, not only lost to the reality TV host Donald Trump, but did so after being caught conspiring against Sanders, her progressive rival. Just as Trump had taken over the GOP, Clinton's humiliating loss offered the Sanders wing a rare opportunity to displace the failed, corrupt leadership that had tried to sabotage them.

Sanders initially appeared poised to take the reins. "What Trump did very effectively is tap the angst and the anger and the hurt and pain that millions of working class people are feeling," Sanders told CBS News one week after Clinton's defeat. To defeat Trump, Sanders said, "there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business… I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from."

But Clinton and her establishment allies had no interest in change, as that would threaten their status and power within the failed neoliberal system that voters had just revolted against. Instead, as documented in Shattered, the 2017 insider book on the Clinton campaign, "Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss." Within 24 hours of Clinton’s concession speech, top aides devised a plan to "engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up and up." The then-evidence-free claim of "Russian hacking" was chosen as "the centerpiece of the argument." As the ongoing trial of Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann is newly underscoring, "the argument" entailed concocting – and feeding to the FBI – false tales of a sweeping Trump-Russia plot.

The Clinton camp's plan succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Rather than allow Sanders to take control of the party and address the working class discontent that Trump had tapped into, the Democratic Party elite and their media allies kept the base fixated on conspiracy theories that Trump was the creation – and asset of – Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

Adding to the Clinton wing's good fortune, Bernie Sanders played along. Rather than renounce the Russia fixation concocted by the same DNC elites who had plotted against him, Sanders instead paid lip service to their Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. And rather than focus on the corruption – including directly targeting him -- that the stolen DNC emails revealed, Sanders instead helped channel outrage at the Russian government for (allegedly) making them public.

Sanders' servitude to the Russiagate narrative was so devout that he even introduced a John McCain-quoting Senate measure in July 2018, the height of Mueller-mania, to "Protect American Democracy from Russian Meddling." The resolution, Sanders explained, sought to "force members of the Senate to go on the record in accepting the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and the looming threat of Russian interference in this year’s midterm elections."

In short, Sanders was not only willing to promote evidence-free claims – long since called into serious question – that "Russian interference" was behind the DNC email theft and posed "a threat to the democratic system of the United States," but motivated enough to "force" his Congressional colleagues to declare their fidelity to these allegations and the "intelligence community" that generated them.

When the 2020 election season arrived, Sanders learned how the US intelligence community and allied Democratic elites would reward his Russiagate narrative discipline: using it against him. On the eve of the Democratic caucus in Nevada, when Sanders was still a frontrunner, intelligence officials dusted off the Russiagate playbook with anonymous leaks claiming that Vladimir Putin was seeking to help Sanders' candidacy.

No details or evidence was provided, for good reason: despite so many humiliating retractions, US officials knew that reliable media stenographers would dutifully report any malicious act ascribed to "Putin" – all the more so if it could benefit Sanders' neoliberal rivals.

To illustrate, the New York Times breathlessly parroted the new "Russian interference" claims even while acknowledging that this supposed pro-Sanders meddling consisted of "as-yet-undetectable methods." Easily detectable was the real agenda at play. “Current and former officials” fed the Times a view that happened to comport with the talking points of Democratic Party centrists: “Moscow could potentially consider Mr. Sanders a weaker general election opponent for the president than a more moderate Democratic nominee, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

The team of anonymous officials and “moderates” who targeted Sanders could also once again rely on him to comply. Rather than challenge a transparent scam aimed at undermining him, Sanders ultimately catered to it. Asked by The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal why the campaign had not demanded evidence of the alleged Putin plot on its behalf, Sanders foreign policy advisor Matt Duss explained that the progressive frontrunner accepted the anonymously disseminated, evidence-free "intelligence." When Sanders was briefed by U.S. officials on the supposed Russian plot to elect him, "he was briefed convincingly," Duss declared.

Aaron Maté @aaronjmate

When Bernie Sanders got Russiagated in Feb. 2020, @MaxBlumenthal asked @mattduss why the campaign had not pushed back and demanded evidence for the alleged "Russian interference" in its favor. Duss said the campaign accepted US intel claims, having been "briefed convincingly":

Democratic Party media pundits, conditioned to parrot any anonymous claim involving Russia, were convinced as well. Obama alum Dan Pfeiffer declared on Meet the Press that the Kremlin is "trying to give Trump the opponent that Trump wants. They helped Bernie Sanders in 2016 to divide the Democratic Party." Clinton strategist James Carville concurred. After Sanders won Nevada, Carville told MSNBC, "the happiest person right now is Vladimir Putin."

Democratic primary voters, having been targeted by years of fear-mongering about mystical "Russian interference,” were seemingly convinced as well, and Bernie's candidacy immediately cratered.

"The responsible progressive position on Ukraine"

Having established their willingness to enable the Russiagate narrative even when used to sabotage them, it is no surprise that Bernie Sanders and Congressional progressives have signed on to its current phase in Ukraine.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Matt Duss, the Sanders foreign policy adviser, declared that "the White House should be applauded for its judicious reaction to the Ukraine crisis", including a "diplomatic surge ahead of the invasion" that "was expertly done." Duss' only comment approaching criticism of Biden pertains to the "broad-based sanctions that only further immiserate ordinary working people in Russia by cratering the economy." But instead of outright opposing sanctions that "immiserate ordinary working people," Duss can only bring himself to suggest that these sanctions "face more scrutiny."

Given that his article fails to mention it, Duss apparently does not wish to apply any scrutiny to the critical US role in the Ukraine crisis, including: the eastward expansion of NATO (invoked by Sanders in a February editorial, but since forgotten); the 2014 US-backed Maidan coup that ousted Ukraine's democratically elected president and set off the Donbas war between Kiev and Russian-allied rebels; the refusal to push for implementation of the Minsk II accords aimed at ending the Donbas war, opting instead to use it for a proxy war to "fight Russia over there" (Adam Schiff); the refusal to promote any diplomatic solutions that could bring the war to an end, instead ceding the outcome to bipartisan hawks who vow that there will be "no off ramps" for Russia (Sen. Lindsey Graham) and no resolution involving "some type of a treaty," with Russia, only one that entails "getting rid of Putin." (Sen. Joe Manchin). In the process, Congressional progressives are also ceding the anti-war mantle to MAGA Republicans, the only contingent in Congress willing to challenge the US role in the proxy war, or even seek a debate over it.

Rep. Chip Roy Press Office @RepChipRoy

"I'm wondering when we voted to go to war?” “If we're gonna have a proxy war, and we're gonna give $40 billion to Ukraine, because we want to look all fancy with our blue and yellow ribbons and feel good about ourselves, maybe we should actually have a debate in this chamber.”

Instead, according to Duss, Biden's policy is the "responsible progressive position on Ukraine."

That will indeed remain the case until Congressional progressives are held responsible for adopting the neoconservative position on Ukraine.

To this end, neocon attitudes toward their progressive proxy war allies offer a helpful path. When the Russiagate playbook came for Bernie Sanders during the 2020 primaries, members of Trump's administration were all too happy to join Democratic Party elites in using it against him.  

"Russia would like Bernie Sanders to win the Democrat nomination," Trump's then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien told CBS News in February 2020, "because he wants to spend money on social programs and probably would have to take it out of the military."

Two years ago, Sanders opted to accept the premise of a Russiagate hit job that helped sink his candidacy. Today, that deference has led to another ominous outcome: voting to enrich the military industrial complex and escalate a dangerous proxy war with Russia, Sanders and his progressive colleagues can no longer claim to champion spending on social programs instead of war. Unless reversed, it is a shift that puts the US progressive movement, and the planet, in peril.