Reprinted from The Realist Review:
With the war in Ukraine back at the top of the fold (for now), I was thinking about how it all began and why so few of the good and right thinking liberals here in Washington–with their yellow and blue flags plastered on their cars and hanging from their windows and porches – bother to do so.
I think the following may help explain why they keep the origins of the war in Ukraine far removed from their thoughts.
Let’s take a step back in time, to January 2020, and into a parallel reality. The scene is the US Capitol where tens of thousands of heavily armed men and women from the Red State Heartland have violently stormed the House and Senate Chambers and installed new electors that have, contrary to the results, certified Donald J. Trump the winner of the 2020 election over former Vice President Joe Biden.
The militias and their supporters have for years been the beneficiaries of planning and funding from Russian and Chinese-NGOs, which operated freely in the US. Results of the pro-Trump coup were then immediately recognized by the governments in Moscow and Beijing as “legitimate” and “reflecting the hopes and aspirations of the American people.”
Blue State America begged to differ. Their candidate had won a free and fair election (EU observers sent over to monitor the election confirm this). Now the question was, what to do?
No word, parley, or approach had in the weeks following the coup been made by the junta Red government under Trump. In the aftermath of the coup, Blue State governors were calling for a measure of autonomy for their states, Among their demands were the right to teach classes in English and Spanish; the right to fly BLM and Trans Lives Matter flags from their state houses and schools; the right to provide non-citizens health care, legal aid, education, and a path to citizenship. And finally, and perhaps most importantly: The right to watch Colbert and/or Kimmel in the language of their choice. Blue States would like to remain in America, just with the proviso that their people would be protected from the rabid Red Staters who were seeking to install stone replicas of the Ten Commandments (in Hebrew and English, but definitely not Spanish) in each school, home, and public square.
Within weeks, with tensions rising, Blue California and Blue New York (now targeted by the post-coup Trump government as rebels, terrorists and traitors) declared their independence and renamed themselves the People’s Republics of New York and Greater California (now including, naturally, Oregon and Washington). Canada, sharing a border with the two new states and sympathetic to their plight but not recognizing the new junta in Washington, began aiding the Blue Rebels—militarily some, but mainly with humanitarian aid and rhetorical support.
Back in Red Washington, Trump called the SCO—the Russia and China military alliance which he had long wanted to join— for assistance with the rebellion which in his view was foreign-backed invasion. The SCO responds immediately (they had already been on the ground in a number of different capacities anyway) and with their help, he launches an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” aimed at subduing the Blue Rebel States.
The war had begun.
Dear pro-war liberal,
For whom do your sympathies lie in the above tale?
Now: Switch out the Blue Rebels for the ethnic Russians in the Donbas (that’s eastern Ukraine), and the Red Trump junta for Kyiv; the SCO for NATO, and you have almost exactly what happened between February-April 2014.
Where do your sympathies now lie?
James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review. He is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
