Opinion | The Backlash to Progressives’ Ukraine Letter Shows the New Cancel Culture in Washington
However, instead of telling voters that working with China saves American lives and promotes progressive values, many Democrats seem afraid to appear softer than their Republican opponents. theirs to Beijing. When asked during a Pennsylvania Senate debate to name “the greatest foreign threat to the United States,” John Fetterman did not answer climate change, which threatens to cripple the country’s swathes of land. uninhabitable. He answer that he would “stand firm against China” and accused his rival, Mehmet Oz, of manufacturing goods there.
For nearly half a century, America’s “one China” policy – which calls for informal relations between the US and Taiwan – has helped maintain peace in one of the most dangerous regions on Earth. But when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi destroy that compactness this summer by becoming the highest-ranking American official to visit the island in a quarter of a century, thereby spurring a strong military response from Beijing, some Democrats in Congress expressed opposition.
There aren’t many congressional Democrats either Mr. Biden’s challenge repeated statements that the United States would use force to defend Taiwan. Four times now, the president casually ignored a decades-old policy of strategic ambiguity in America and committed the United States to war, even though the Constitution vested that authority in Congress. Washington’s progressives, however, remained largely silent.
They have also accepted a higher military budget. When asked why most Democrats in Congress voted to allocate more money to the military than requested by the Biden administration, Representative Ro Khanna admit that the political climate frightened his colleagues: “I think it’s an irrational fear that our party is painted in a television commercial as weak.”
That fear is nothing new. In June 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told Senator Richard Russell that Americans will “forgive you for anything but being weak.” Two months later, that fear led even liberals in Congress to fully support the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed Johnson to catastrophically escalate the Vietnam War.
Like the war on terror, the cold war created their own cancel culture. They encourage politicians to swallow their doubts as conflicts escalate. They make compromise and cooperation with America’s adversaries seem abhorrent. The backlash to last week’s Ukraine letter will now be a cautionary tale. When a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine finally becomes possible — one that could require the United States to relax some sanctions on Russia — members of Congress will be wary of agreeing. into it, even if it had the tacit support of Kyiv. As hawks push for a complete abandonment of the “one China” policy, many progressives in Congress will fear protest, lest they be accused of sympathizing with Xi Jinping.
The greatest threat today to shrewd American foreign policy is not polarization. That is group thinking. That groupthink has more holdings today than it did a week ago.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also the editor of Jewish Order and write Beinart’s Handbooka weekly newsletter.
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