The left's bad takes on Ukraine

The left’s arguments against America’s sanctions policy have been more worthwhile. The risks of waging a near total economic war on a nuclear superpower are vast and unprecedented. And the immediate impact of U.S. sanctions is to immiserate many Russians who are powerless to influence their autocratic government, while also exacerbating hunger crises in the Global South. Given the routine failure of sanctions to deter aggression, it is hard to say with confidence that the benefits of economic warfare will outweigh its costs. Yet the socialist left is one of the only factions in U.S. politics that’s interested in subjecting our sanctions policy to cost-benefit analysis.

Nevertheless, it is doubtlessly the case that sanctions make it harder for Putin to finance his war machine. And the DSA IC has not made much of an effort to explain why this is an unworthy goal. Nor has it tried to reconcile its moralistic objections to sanctions against Russia with its support for BDS. In theory, there are plenty of ways of rationalizing these stances: One could believe that broad-based sanctions are more likely to work in Israel, since Israel’s government is democratically accountable to much of its population; or that economic warfare against Russia carries a nuclear risk that economic warfare against Israel would not; or that “BDS” describes a demand for narrowly targeted sanctions, rather than the broad-based kind being inflicted on Russia. That last argument strikes me as dubious; it is hard for me to believe that, if the United States decided to kick Israel out of the dollar-based financial system until it withdrew all settlers from the West Bank, the American left would mobilize in opposition, on the grounds that sanctions “severely impact working-class people.” Regardless, failure to acknowledge and explain the apparent contradiction invites the suspicion that the DSA’s foreign policy stances derive less from considered principles than ideological reflex.