“It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia,” Sen. Lindsay Graham told President Joe Biden earlier this year. Or that’s the story, at least, from Bob Woodward’s newest book War.
I’m sure there will be plenty of discourse over whether Graham really said this — and whether Biden responded “Let’s do it,” as Woodward reports.
But whether the exchange happened or not, it points to a very real dynamic in contemporary American politics. Democrats, despite their historical positioning as doves, have in Joe Biden a president who has intervened in two of the most dangerous and deadly wars our world has seen in decades. In Ukraine, President Zelensky has built his entire victory plan on the premise that the US will continue to ramp up its military aid to the region and ultimately fold the country into NATO — or at least provide it with nuclear weapons. In Israel, meanwhile, the Biden Administration continues to put on Ceasefire Theater, as Adam Johnson calls it: publicly calling for de-escalation while privately continuing to aid and abet Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine. Which has now spilled over into Lebanon.
And it’s working. Rank-and-file Democrats have overwhelmingly backed arming Ukraine since Russia invaded the country two-and-a-half years ago. And in Israel they’ve overwhelmingly accepted Ceasefire Theater: though 71% of Democrats support a ceasefire, only 40% say that Biden has been “too supportive of Israel.”
Donald Trump, of course, would presumably have no interest in ending either war were he to win another term in office. And Republicans, as they always have in the past, would dutifully fall in line whatever foreign policy agenda their president advances.
But Graham isn’t thinking about how the president’s party responds to war. He’s thinking about how the opposition party responds. Under Biden, we have seen Republicans froth with bloodlust for even more war in Palestine. And while a majority of Republicans voice impatience with the war in Ukraine, they’ve also shown no real interest in organizing against it. Despite the fantasies of our heterodox independent pundits, the legendary Republican antiwar movement remains the stuff of myth.
So how would Democrats likely respond to war under a President Trump? If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were any precedent, we might very well see the opportunistic opposition of partisans using the peace movement to score political points.
That, after all, was plainly what happened in Iraq. Recall that by 2002, Barack Obama himself was already showing up at anti-war rallies in Chicago and speaking out against Bush’s “dumb war.” By 2005 one could go to marches on the National Mall in DC and see normie Dem activists with “Protest Is Patriotic” t-shirts standing a stone’s throw away from black bloc anarchists. Where did all of the massive anti-war crowds go when Obama took office and the war continued? Home to watch The Daily Show, because they’d come to protest Republicans — not the war.
Given their endless apologetics for Biden and skepticism of left antiwar activists that “go too far,” it’s hard to imagine contemporary Democrats reversing their position on the wars in Israel and Ukraine. But as 2009 proved, Democrats are perfectly fine with reversing their political commitments if partisan advantage is at stake. And once it’s Donald Trump giving Oval Office speeches about how they’ve shipped even more missiles to Israel, it’s not hard to imagine pundits on MSNBC declaring: “We support Israel, but we don’t support how Donald Trump is fighting this war.”
This is the terrible situation that Democrats have put the antiwar movement in: their utter fecklessness under Biden is making a plausible case to cast a peace vote for Trump. Not because Trump supports peace, but rather because a Republican in the White House may be the only wartime president that the Democratic rank-and-file is willing to fight. Graham argues that if you want war you need to put a Democrat in office; perversely, this leaves only one option for anyone who wants peace.
Personally, I don’t think this kind of counterintuitive ten-dimensional chessmaster strategy is a sound way to do politics. If you want peace, you should vote for candidates who themselves support peace rather than voting for a warhawk president. That’s why I won’t vote for a Republican, though to be fair, it’s why I won’t vote for a Democrat either.
But if Democrats want to make Graham’s argument less persuasive, there’s a simple way forward: prove that you’re willing to take on your own leaders.