Will the Democrats Renew Their Membership in the War Party?

Why does the Democratic Party want the Cold War back? Senator Mark Warner and Representative Adam Schiff tell us that Russia is the destroyer of democracy at home and abroad. Vladimir Putin, in their view, is seeking more than reasonable elbow room in Eastern Europe. He aims to subvert and conquer America. In a podcast conversation with Nancy Pelosi after the January 6 Capitol riot, Hillary Clinton said she would “love to see” Trump’s phone records from that day to find out if he was consulting with Putin. This fantastical supposition was greeted by Pelosi with instant credulity: “All roads lead to Putin.”

Where would they be without an enemy? These Democrats have already formed an implicit alliance with Republicans Liz Cheney, Tom Cotton, and Nikki Haley, as well as assorted media friends of the war party dating back to Iraq, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin. There are reasons to hope that Joe Biden’s foreign policy team will have a sounder balance, but the dramatis personae thus far leave an uneasy impression. Susan Rice, a careerist of the foreign policy elite who stopped just short of the highest rung under Barack Obama—having been denied promotion to secretary of state, owing to her association with the Benghazi disaster—has been put in charge of domestic policy. Yet she is hardly likely to stay away from the discussions that interest her more. Antony Blinken at the State Department, Jake Sullivan at the National Security Council, and Samantha Power as head of the US Agency for International Development will administer democracy-promotion initiatives that in the past have been known to include shipments of “armed doctrine.”

None of these people ever recognized that the eastward expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet empire—whose existence alone justified NATO—was a provocation felt by many Russians besides Putin. Further signs of a lesson not learned may be found in the first volume of Obama’s presidential memoir, which deplores (in passing) the weak Russia policy of his predecessors, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney: “Beyond suspending diplomatic contacts, the Bush administration had done next to nothing to punish Russia for its aggression.” By “aggression,” he means the Russian retaliation against Georgia after Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia. Throughout Obama’s two terms in office, his attitude toward Putin was all in the same vein: lofty, cool, and swanking.

Of their first meeting, in 2009, Obama now says that Putin “did remind me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall—tough, street-smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences.” Obama canceled a second meeting in 2013 over Russia’s granting of asylum to Edward Snowden. But that is an episode that plays more than one way. Obama indicted Snowden under the Espionage Act of 1917, which potentially carries the death penalty. Snowden had followed too faithfully the hint of Obama’s antisurveillance stance in the 2008 primaries and disclosed abuses of civil liberties by the National Security Agency. It was Russia, of all places, and Putin, of all people, who offered Snowden asylum. Who is the small man in this picture?