Imagine for a moment that, in 2003, when the US was preparing for the invasion of Iraq, Russia had behaved like the US has in recent weeks: with threats of escalation. Not that it is necessary to exert less pressure on Russia over Ukraine now. The argument of the Left should be, that in 2003, other governments did not put enough pressure on the United States over Iraq. Of course, these states need to be brought into the discussion – but how, exactly? Time and again, the Western Left responded to the critique of Russia by mentioning US aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq and other states. How many times did the Western Left bring up the US’s informal promises to the former Russian president, Mikhail Gorbachev, about NATO ( “not one inch eastward”), and how many times did it mention the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that guarantees Ukraine’s sovereignty? How often did the Western Left support the “legitimate security concerns” of Russia, a state that owns the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal? And how often did it recall the security concerns of Ukraine, a state that had to trade its nuclear weapons, under the pressure of the US and Russia, for a piece of paper (the Budapest Memorandum) that Putin trampled conclusively in 2014? Did it ever occur to Leftist critics of NATO that Ukraine is the main victim of the changes brought about by the NATO expansion? But we cannot bring back the past, and we have to orient ourselves on the current circumstances when seeking a way out of this situation. NATO tried to marginalise the role of the UN and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and to discredit them as ‘inefficient organisations’. I know that NATO’s eastward expansion undermined efforts directed at nuclear disarmament and forming a system of joint security. I know that after the end of the Cold War, the bloc lost its defensive function and led aggressive policies.

When it came to Putin’s intentions, he went only as far as remarking that the Russian leader had “signal less-than-benign ambitions”. Even after Russia recognised the independence of the ‘People’s Republics’ earlier this week, Branko Marcetic, a writer for American Left magazine Jacobin, penned an article almost fully devoted to criticising the US. Unfortunately, we have seen the same ideological cliché repeated over Ukraine.

“This excuses them from undertaking any serious power analysis to determine who the main actors driving the war actually are.” “A number of anti-war organisations have justified their silence on Russian and Iranian interventions by arguing that ‘the main enemy is at home,’” Al-Shami wrote. It only opposed Western interference, while ignoring, or even supporting, the engagement of Russia and Iran, to say nothing of their attitude to the ‘legitimately elected’ Assad regime in Syria. I will repeat only the main thesis here: the activity of a large part of the Western ‘anti-war’ Left over the war in Syria had nothing to do with stopping the war. Read her wonderful 2018 essay if you haven’t done so yet. British-Syrian author and activist Leila Al-Shami gave it a stronger name: the “anti-imperialism of idiots”. This is part of the wider phenomenon in the Western ‘anti-war’ movement, usually called ‘campism’ by critics on the Left. Or those who exaggerated the influence of the far-Right in Ukraine, but did not notice the far-Right in the ‘People’s Republics’ and avoided criticising Putin’s conservative, nationalist and authoritarian policy. Or those who criticised Ukraine for not implementing the Minsk Agreements and kept silent about their violations by Russia and the so-called ‘People’s Republics’. Or the DSA International Committee, which published a shameful statement failing to say a single critical word against Russia (I am very thankful to US professor and activist Dan la Botz and the others for their critique of this statement). Those who imagined ‘NATO aggression in Ukraine’, and who could not see Russian aggression – like the New Orleans chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

This article is about the other part of the Western Left.

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