Ok, so, that’s officially clickbait, but I mean something quite sincere by that assertion.
We on the Left are being fed tons of stuff about how Tucker Carlson 🇺🇸 is just a tool of Putin. (Here’s an example from the Lincoln Project.) No doubt, there are clips where he expresses his affection for Putin and says he’s “rooting for Russia”—much of that, to be fair, before Putin started bombing children’s hospitals in Ukraine.
But Tucker has also long articulated a critically important view about American foreign policy — that we are too often led into disastrous foreign conflicts by, as the Republican President (and former General) Eisenhower put it, the “military-industrial-congressional” complex. Those adventures have been almost uniformly disastrous. So it is fair and consistent for Tucker to ask —is that what’s happening here?
Of course, if that’s what he’s doing, he’s doing it in an incredibly reckless way. If you’re going to try to occupy the space between pro and anti-Putin, you need to assert, religiously, “I believe—with Bill O’Reilly—that Putin is a killer and an authoritarian, but …” Not to assert this with any statement just leads to confusion—because we don’t do well, in America or may anywhere, with anything more than simple binaries (pro-Putin/anti-Putin, pro-war/anti-war). It also leads to being used on Russian state TV as a credible American source defending a wholly illegal war.
All of us should recognize the truth in the skepticism about American foreign/military policy. We are Charlie Brown; the military is Lucy. Hundreds of thousands of lives and as well as trillions of dollars have been wasted on futile and useless wars — all because the “military-industrial-congressional” complex has been so good in winding us Americans up to go to war.
But Putin’s war in Ukraine makes this skepticism very difficult to speak —at least in a way that most will hear. Bret Stephen's piece here is right and terrifying. (The punch line: “How does the next world war begin? The same way the last one did.”) What we need are different ways to wage not war but ‘war.’ I’ve tried to describe one — “crowdsourced ‘war’.” To be clear, most doubt such efforts will work. But I think we’re just seeing the beginning of a creative crowdsourced ‘war.’ (This video by Arnold Schwarzenneger is brilliant. Maybe in this case, Hollywood actors can have influence.) I think it is too soon to tell.
If it doesn’t work, what then? Especially for those of us committed to staunching our (as in the US’s) military addictions. We should admit — us non-binaries—that that is an extremely difficult question. Honestly and openly, and without Fox News scorn.
