And the ones we don’t.
Jay Nordlinger writes that he’s never met an isolationist:
I would like to make a point about isolationism, or rather isolationists, which I have made before. I have met many, many people in my life — including those who are called “isolationist.” I don’t think I’ve ever met a true isolationist. Instead, I have met admirers or excusers of dictatorships — including aggressive, expansionist ones.
As I read Jay’s column, however, I couldn’t help thinking of the hawk I’ve never met. I’ve met many people who have supported whatever war had been available for support at the time — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and so on. These hawks detailed the horrors of the dictators they opposed and touted the need to fight for human rights. They especially liked to frame things in terms of moral clarity.
But I’ve never met one willing to talk at length about the proxies the U.S. ends up enabling or outright supporting in these wars. After the U.S., through the CIA, funded ultraradical Sunni Islamists such as the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement in Syria — which went on to abduct and torture journalists and once posted clips of its men holding up the severed head of a child they had just murdered — I don’t remember running into a hawk who had anything to say about it. For all of the moral fervor they had for the cause of liberty in Syria, they exhibited little knowledge of who was fighting Assad, or receiving our largesse. They remind me of George Orwell’s characterization of the nationalist who “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
Isolationists don’t advocate for the United States’ funding Putin’s crimes, but hawks try to draw some kind of moral connection between them anyway. Do they similarly scrutinize their own positions? After all, hawks do — inadvertently or not — advocate for funding enormities in our name. I should think such upstanding moralists should be anxious to answer for their sponsorship, admiration, and occasionally false publicity of child-beheaders.
If hawks think the Ukrainian government’s draconian efforts at Ukrainization — its commemoration of ethnic-cleansers such as Stepan Bandera, or its suppression of a 1,200-parish communion of churches — are good policies and ones that the U.S. should continue to subsidize, let them say so openly. If they think the U.S. should condition its aid on Ukraine’s not doing these things, let them say so. Unfortunately, when critics point out these realities, hawks lash out by accusing them of being enablers of dictators such as Bashar al-Assad or Vladimir Putin, as if Ron Paul is sharing intel or sending arms or money to the Wagner Group.
If hawks are so convinced that the causes they support are just, they should be willing to acknowledge that their expansive vision for U.S. foreign policy often involves moral compromises. But, again, I’ve never met a hawk who has done so. I’ve only met the kind who blames Putin’s actions on too-dovish fellow Americans first, before excusing, ignoring, downplaying, or just studiously avoiding any knowledge of what the Saudis, the Turks, the ethnic-cleansers in Iraq, or the ultranationalist paramilitaries in Ukraine get up to with all this U.S.-supplied moral clarity.