Note: this post has been tweaked to reflect the letter being withdrawn.
Donald Trump’s pathological hatred for Ukraine, likely a result of his allegiance to Vladimir Putin, has turned much of American foreign policy upside down. While the center-right still largely supports the Ukrainian people’s gutsy defense of their country, it is the center-left that joins in that cause.
Meanwhile, the Republican “right” is going increasingly all-in with Putin [1] from Kevin McCarthy [2] to our own KGBob [3].
The Democratic Socialists of America, however, have retained their willful blindness [4] from the Cold War. That has led to some discomfort with some on the left of the party. For thirty self-styled “progressives” in the House of Representatives, this presented a choice between democracy in Ukraine and the DSA tankies just to their left.
Seeing that fork in the road, they took it, resulting in a word salad of contradictions in a letter to President Biden (WaPo [5]).
If you want to know how well it went, consider this. Within hours, the lead signatory of the letter was trying to walk it back [6]. She was not alone [7] either. Within the party, it was branded (and not without cause) as an “olive branch to a war criminal” (Politico [8]).
In the end, they simply withdrew the letter and blamed it on “staff.”
I’ll leave it to others to discuss the political effects of all this.