Thread by @samratner

Some thoughts on the @AthertonKD / @Noahpinion contretemps, and progressive US foreign policy in general:

First, cards on the table, @AthertonKD is a dear friend whose work I value, and even before today I thought Twitter would be better if @Noahpinion just logged off. Also, I just finished Day 2 in my job as a professional advocate for progressive US foreign policy.

So I didn't appreciate Noah's bad-faith insinuation that Kelsey is some kind of unwitting simp for Putin. I'm more interested, though, in Noah's much more insidious main argument.

Noah's argument, drawing on a misguided thread by @IbrahimAlAssil, is that US progressives have an "inward focus" because we see the US as an all-powerful actor, responsible for all the ills in the world. This, he claims, blinds us to the misdeeds of Putin etc.

Obviously this claim is wrong on the merits. US progressives have roundly condemned Putin's actions in Ukraine. Here's an excellent roundup of examples that @AlexMStark put together:

https://twitter.com/AlexMStark/status/1498726988948946954

But I think Noah's core point is not about condemnation, per se, but about US action. Why won't progressives, he wonders, join him in calling for the US to take up a policy of explicitly seeking regime change in Russia?

It must be, he argues, that US progressives see the US as all-powerful, the only actor with agency in the world, and therefore the only one worth criticizing.

This is exactly wrong. We do criticize the US, both because it is responsible for far more than its fair share of the world's ills and, crucially, because we're here! The US government is the one we're best able to influence!

But we aren't the ones who are blinded by a strange belief in US supremacy. That's the bizarre worldview of war hawks like Noah. In their world, if the US adopted a regime change policy for Russia, the regime would simply change.

Noah's real contention here is that US progressives aren't "outward looking" enough to believe in the limitless possibilities provided by US power. He wants you to believe that we're blind to how great the world could be with just a little more war.

That war fantasy has no relationship to the real world. In the real world, the people who would bear the brunt of a the US adopting a regime change policy would be Ukrainian civilians, then Russian civilians, then, if the conflict went nuclear, everyone. We oppose that suffering.

Anyway, a long thread to say a simple thing: when people falsely accuse US progressives of lacking an international approach, check out what kind of internationalism they're peddling. You might find that it really, really sucks.