The militarism: Hawley isn’t really being dovish when he argues against Ukraine’s entry into NATO. He just doesn’t want America to divert its attention away from a possible confrontation with China. That’s where the real action is. “The United States can no longer carry the heavy burden it once did in other regions of the world — including Europe,” he recently wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “To the contrary, we must do less in those secondary theaters in order to prioritize denying China’s hegemonic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.”
None of this is the humanist pacifism of, say, Martin Luther King Jr. or Daniel Berrigan. It’s something darker, uglier, and angrier. That’s unsurprising; the “America First” anti-war activism of Charles Lindbergh, for example, was inextricable from his anti-Semitism. Something similar was at play when Patrick Buchanan launched The American Conservative on the eve of the Iraq War. “For all its newfound pacifism,” the writer Sam Tanenhaus noted at the time, “the ‘Buchananite’ worldview remains a bully’s, more authoritarian than libertarian, its favorite targets minorities, the poor, and the weak.” That’s still true.
That doesn’t mean that the anti-war left shouldn’t work with whatever allies they can find. The goal of those who advocate American restraint should be to avoid a war with Russia, not to signal their own virtue. But they should tread carefully. The world that Tucker, Hawley, and the rest hope to create is very different from the one progressives want.
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