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FEBRUARY 11, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

On Ukraine: Bernie vs. DSA

One socialist gets it right. Some other socialists don't.

Yesterday, Bernie Sanders delivered what I consider an exemplary
progressive-and socialist-speech on the floor of the Senate, laying
out his analysis and position on what we must hope is not the coming
Ukrainian conflagration. He began by warning of the casualties that a
Russian invasion would bring-to the lives and economies in both
Ukraine and Russia, to the broader political climate, and to the
international cooperation needed to save the actual climate. He warned
of the prospects of the war expanding into a broader clash that no one
actually seeks. He made clear that the threat of war is a threat not
just to Ukraine but also to Ukrainian democracy, however imperfect it
may be, from an autocrat who's no friend of democracy.

"There should be no disagreement that this is unacceptable," Sanders
said. "In my view, we must unequivocally support the sovereignty of
Ukraine and make clear that the international community will impose
severe consequences on Putin and his fellow oligarchs if he does not
change course."

But America, he added, could do some things that might prod Putin to
change course. He argued, as many across the political spectrum have,
that the U.S.-backed push in the 1990s to expand NATO right up to
Russia's borders was a destabilizing strategic blunder of the first
order. Just as America has invoked the Monroe Doctrine for more than 200
years (and as recently as 2018) to keep European and other nations from
establishing potentially anti-U.S. alliances with Latin American
countries, so Putin likely has analogous concerns. "Even if Russia was
not ruled by a corrupt authoritarian leader like Vladimir Putin,"
Sanders said, "Russia, like the United States, would still have an
interest in the security policies of its neighbors. Does anyone really
believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for
example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a U.S. adversary?"

"The fact is," Sanders continued, "that the U.S. and Ukraine entering
into a deeper security relationship is likely to have some very serious
costs-for both countries." He also pointed out that nonaligned
European nations on the continent's east-west frontiers-Finland,
Sweden, and Austria-were exemplary democracies despite their
non-membership in NATO. (As, I might add, NATO members Hungary and
Poland are not.)

I cite Sanders's words not only because I think they're right on the
money, but also because they're so out of sync with those of the
Democratic Socialists of America, an organization to which I've
belonged (including my membership in DSOC, its predecessor) for more
than 45 years. DSA's explosive growth since 2015 is largely a
by-product of Sanders's presidential campaigns, which, by a margin of
several light-years, did more to resuscitate American socialism than
any, and perhaps every, other proximate cause. That doesn't mean,
alas, that Sanders's deep commitment to fighting for and expanding
democracy is shared by some DSA leaders, even if that commitment is what
attracted so many rank-and-file DSA members to the organization.

In its statement
on
Ukraine, DSA's International Committee pointed, quite accurately, to
the problem of NATO's eastern expansion, but where it parted company
from Sanders wasn't so much in what it said as what it didn't say.
The word "Russia" appears just three times in its 608-word statement,
twice in passing and only once in the section where the Committee lays
out its policy recommendation. Here's that passage: "DSA International
Committee calls on the US to reverse its ongoing militarization in the
region, avoid implementing sanctions against Russia, and uphold
internationally agreed upon commitments to end NATO's expansionist
drive ..." That Russia (and Putin, who is not mentioned in the statement
at all) instigated the current crisis by its own rather hard-to-miss
"ongoing militarization," or that it even so much as played a role in
the bewildering appearance of an army (the Russian one, it would seem)
on Ukraine's border, is somehow omitted from the statement, which
attributes the current standoff solely to expansive U.S. militarism.
That Putin's Russia is an autocratic regime that actively seeks to
undermine democracy wherever it can is also, apparently, not worthy of
comment.

When the Communist Party of yore uncritically praised Stalin's Soviet
Union, not least when it hailed his 1939 pact with Hitler and Russia's
subsequent invasion of Poland, it at least could count on payments of
Moscow gold for its efforts. To the best of our knowledge, the current
group of DSA apparatchiks-innocents all-provide such encomiums for
free.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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