One of the battle tanks is Donald Trump
Hugo Gurdon
Washington and Berlin arguing for weeks over whether to supply tanks to Ukraine highlighted their diverging preoccupations and how the sympathies and reflexes of America’s Left and Right have flipped.
Early in the conflict, President Joe Biden balked at supplying weapons with which Ukraine might beat Russia, not simply avoid defeat and annexation. Six weeks after the tyrant Vladimir Putin invaded, I urged Biden to escalate the conflict so Ukraine could break out of a deadly stalemate that had set in.
His move now, nine months later, sending 31 Abrams tanks is little and late. Like his every step in this conflict, it’s more than a day late and a dollar short of what circumstances demand. But it’s in the right direction. It doesn’t do enough but shows more confidence that Ukraine can and should prevail without toppling Europe into nuclear confrontation.
Germany, ever-traumatized by the guilt of its 20th century aggression (and spurred by its cynical 21st century commerce) resisted supplying Leopard 2 tanks because they are assault weapons — the kind used in a blitzkrieg. That one word evokes the problem; Germany shrivels up at the thought of seeming warlike, as well it might.
But now, the United States and Europe have agreed. Ukraine will get just over 100 of NATO’s most advanced battle tanks. Who in America supports this and who opposes it?
The most obvious opposition comes from an amalgam of the conspiracy-inclined Right, those who think Ukraine is nothing but a corrupt nest of Nazis, conservatives who don’t recognize a Russian war of choice in central Europe as America’s concern, and those who believe $30 billion of U.S. aid could more usefully be spent at home.
On the other side are many Republicans, centrist and conservative, and most Democrats. But much support, or at least acquiescent silence, also comes from those who would once have been staunchly within the anti-war Left. There are still some, such as philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky, who are where you’d expect them to be — against their own country, against its foreign policy, and in favor of Moscow.
But Biden is buttressed most in his Ukraine policy by people whose other domestic and foreign policy inclinations would once have identified them as certs to oppose American militarism and overseas involvement.
Why the volte-face? I suspect that, as with so many areas of political dispute today, the issue comes down to Donald Trump, who opposes Biden’s help for Ukraine in the “crazy war.”
Even though Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia was a hoax trumped up by his opponents to destroy him, the 45th president is indelibly associated with Moscow and its dictator both by the falsehoods alleged against him and by ugly facts that were evidently true. In the latter category, I’d place, for example, his disgraceful and groveling 2018 press conference with Putin in Helsinki.
The Ukraine war pits the West against Russia, and the Left, much as it hates the West in general and America in particular, hates Trump more. Because Russia is indissolubly linked to Trump, the Left zips its lip as it does on no other subject when the issue at hand is the dispatch of U.S. weapons into a hot war.