They Paved the Way for Him

Liberal Hypocrisy Undermines Opposition to Trump

An entire neighbourhood in Shujayea was wiped out in the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza, killing many and displacing thousands. Photo credit: Karl Schembri

It’s quite remarkable how unaware most liberals and Democrats are about their own party’s facilitation of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaigns and the US empire’s bellicosity. Day after day, I read pronouncements condemning Trump and the GOP, rightly so. However, rarely provided is a follow-up critique of the Democratic Party’s complicity in facilitating the imperial presidency, an ongoing relationship with an openly fascist state (Israel), or the many coup wars, bombing campaigns, drone strikes, and special forces operations that have taken place over the past quarter of a century.

Of course, none of this comes as a surprise to those of us who’ve followed, critiqued, and protested the Democratic Party’s destructive foreign policy positions. But that’s not the majority of Americans. The last time a large, vibrant anti-war movement existed, George W. Bush, a Republican, was the US president. Once Obama was elected in 2008, the anti-war movement rapidly disintegrated. Today, only remnants exist. Fortunately, however, public opinion is in our favour, with the overwhelming majority of Americans opposed to further wars, especially the current war in Iran.

Trump is, without question, more dangerous and unhinged than his Democratic predecessors: Biden, Obama, Clinton, etc. His recent statement threatening to destroy Persian civilisation and mocking Islam is only the latest, most egregious example of his depravity. Yet, such depravity isn’t limited to the right. Let us never forget Hillary Clinton busting into her infamous cackle on CBS News back in 2011, following the public sodomy and execution of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died!” According to Clinton, helping to facilitate a failed state and killing tens of thousands of people is a laughing matter, something to gloat about.

Nor should we forget Barack Obama’s grotesque statement, ‘Turned out I’m really good at killing people.’ Didn’t know that was going to be a strong suit of mine—an utterance made on the same day Obama’s drone programme, which killed 3,797 people, assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, with no due process and no congressional oversight. Obama’s promise to bring “hope and change” to the United States quickly evaporated following the 2008 financial crisis, when his administration did virtually nothing to rein in the banks. Couple that with his decision to send an additional 30,000 troops to fight an unwinnable, never-ending counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan that continued for another 12 years, and Americans became disillusioned.

The Al-Attar family stands amidst the wreckage of their home in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, in early 2015, following the 2014 military offensive that left thousands of families displaced. Photo credit: Wissam Nassar

Of the nations Obama bombed during his eight years in the White House, Pakistan is the most stable, yet it remains largely controlled by military leaders. Libya is a failed state. Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan are the same. Iraq teeters on the brink of becoming a failed state and could very well if the war in Iran escalates. During Obama’s term, Israel launched several major military operations: Operation Pillar of Defence (2012) and Operation Protective Edge (2014), a 50-day bloodbath in Gaza. Here’s how the UN described the latter operation:

The scale of human loss, destruction, devastation, and displacement caused by the 2014 conflict in Gaza—the third within seven years—was catastrophic, unprecedented, and unparalleled in Gaza since at least the start of the Israeli occupation in 1967 and further eroded whatever resilience the people in Gaza still had left. During the 50 days of hostilities lasting from 8 July until 26 August 2014, 2,251 Palestinians were killed; 1,462 of them are believed to be civilians, including 551 children and 299 women. . . . Overall, 11,231 Palestinians were injured during the conflict, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children. Roughly one-third of these children will have to cope with disabilities lasting throughout life as a result of their injuries.

During the conflict, 118 UNRWA installations were damaged, including 83 schools and 10 health centres. In total, over 12,600 housing units were totally destroyed, and almost 6,500 sustained severe damage. Almost 150,000 additional housing units sustained various degrees of damage and remained uninhabitable. The conflict led to a massive displacement crisis in Gaza, with almost 500,000 persons internally displaced at its peak.

As many activists, including maligned groups such as Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), have said for years, the destruction of Gaza has been an ongoing and ever-present feature of Israeli policy—always with US support and backing. However, liberal hypocrisy doesn’t start or end with the State of Israel. From 2009 to 2017, Obama offered over $115 billion in weapons to the Saudi government, an absolute monarchy long known to engage in various human rights abuses. Hardly a bastion for American liberalism, Saudi Arabia enjoys the perceived protection of the US Empire, though that has been brought into question following Trump’s and Netanyahu’s war in Iran.

Moreover, let us not forget the Democratic Party’s blatant hypocrisy—condemning Russia’s inconsequential election interference in 2016—meanwhile, Obama and Co. previously undermined the democratic election of Ukrainian president, Victor Yanukovych. In short, as Professor John Mearsheimer wrote in 2014, the war in Ukraine is the West’s fault:

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004—were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbour turns into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labelled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilise Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

That war continues with over 1.8 million casualties. And speaking of liberal hypocrisy, the Biden administration and its allies in the West had a genuine opportunity to end the war in Ukraine in Istanbul in April 2022, but instead, they encouraged Kyiv to reject negotiations, a decision that has haunted the world ever since. However, that war, still raging, has taken a backseat to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, its bombing campaign and occupation of Lebanon, and the US and Israel’s ongoing attacks against Iran (all illegal under international law). Adding insult to injury, the US is likely to hold back weapons and various other military hardware from Ukraine in favour of sending such weapons to Israel. The Ukrainians are learning, as Henry Kissinger once said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Leaving aside the Democrats’ and Obama’s embrace of Wall Street and unwillingness to provide any significant reforms for poor and working-class Americans domestically, their continuation of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) paved the way not only for Trump’s victory in 2016 against Obama’s former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton—who, in part, lost the election due to her hawkish foreign policy record. Indeed, Obama’s reluctance to hold the Bush administration accountable for war crimes (itself a violation of international law) allowed subsequent administrations, including the current administration, to engage in countless war crimes and created a dangerous precedent that the global community endures to this day.

The Democrats, barring serious election interference/disinfranchisement (a very real possibility), will likely win the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in the 2026 midterm elections. But what they do afterwards is what matters most. Right now, there’s no evidence that the Democrats running for office in 2026 plan to fundamentally reject the US Empire. Hence, the preponderance of former C.I.A. and military members among their ranks. The party’s leadership, most of its rank-and-file members, and the majority of Democratic voters (also leftists) have failed to provide a systemic critique of the US Empire, offer an alternative vision of US foreign policy, or fundamentally change Uncle Sam’s relationship to the State of Israel. Remember, Kamala Harris’ refusal to denounce Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide cost her the 2024 election.

So, why does any of this matter? Namely, because the Democrats will be expected to enact major changes in the months and years following the midterms. Without doubt, US foreign policy will become a fundamental issue during the 2028 presidential election, much like it was in 2008. Israel, if left unleashed, will continue its genocidal campaigns. Currently, Israel is undermining the tentative ceasefire between the US and Iran. And God knows what depraved actions Trump will undertake over the next three years. We need a principled response to Trump’s insane policies. The Democratic Party’s inability or unwillingness to come to terms with its own hypocrisies and failures has been a persistent and growing problem. Democratic voters would be wise to hold their own party accountable for laying the groundwork for Trump’s authoritarian posture and disastrous foreign policy.

In the end, I don’t think anyone expects party elites or the corporate press to fundamentally change their stance with regard to US foreign policy without tremendous pressure from below. In the absence of vibrant and growing social movements and more deeply rooted organising efforts, Democratic Party elites will continue to do the bidding of Wall Street, the Zionist lobby, and the military-industrial complex. That much is understood. But that doesn’t mean liberal, progressive, and left activists shouldn’t bother challenging the concept of the US empire. If Americans are given a clear choice between maintaining the US empire or funding social programmes at home, poll after poll shows that they will choose the latter. But polls don’t equal political power. Only organising has the ability to create real power for poor and working-class people.

In the end, it’s not a coincidence that the Democratic Party has moved further to the left (not nearly far enough) on social, economic, and domestic issues; their shifting attitudes reflect the pressure they feel from organising efforts on the ground. Since the anti-war movement no longer exists, it’s not a surprise that Democratic politicians haven’t expressed a fundamentally different view of US foreign policy. There’s no pressure to do so. Even when the anti-war movement was powerful enough to force the GOP out of the House and Senate back in 2006 during the height of the Iraq War, the resulting policy differences were indistinguishable. Democrats failed to cut funding for the war. The anti-war movement never articulated a clear set of demands. When it did, insisting on the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, anti-war activists never quite figured out a coherent strategy to accomplish that goal.

All of this history is worth reflecting on and learning from. The problem, for many leftists, is that they forget that the vast majority of Americans do not keep up with the day-to-day of US foreign policy. People work. They have kids, families, friends, and hobbies. Surely, there are enough writers and commentators out there who spend the majority of their time denouncing Trump’s madness. With only seven months to go before the midterms, it’s a perfect time to start asking the question: what, exactly, do we expect from the elected Democrats who will (likely) take office in January 2027? What mistakes have we made in the past? How can we improve upon existing efforts? How can we create movements and organisations powerful enough to force the Democrats to do things they won’t do on their own?

It seems clear to me that providing a principled and serious vision for dismantling the US Empire should be at the top of everyone’s list, especially in light of recent events. Uncle Sam’s relationship with Israel will be in question. And voters will want answers. It’s bad enough that liberals and the left have ceded ground to the likes of Tucker Carlson on both issues. All too often, the left lags behind pop culture. Broader trends are clear: Americans have had enough of never-ending wars. They’ve become sickened by Israel’s genocidal behaviour. Timid responses and proposals should be condemned and rejected. It’s not an exaggeration to claim that the policy decisions of the next US Congress and White House administration will determine the very future of the republic. Activists, elected Democrats, and non-MAGA Republicans can usher in a period of peace and stability, radically cutting the defence budget and dismantling the empire, or they can hypocritically and cynically maintain the status quo and pave the way for the next Trump.