Why the new American left should take up the quest for peace if the Democratic Party wins control of Congress this November, and of the presidency in 2028.
People walk among debris in a residential area hit by Russian strikes on August 20, 2026, in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Ihor Kuznietsov / Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
The Trump administration’s attempt to bring stable peace to Ukraine has failed. The war is thus set to continue, without a radical change, but with a slowly deteriorating situation for Ukraine. The United States is no longer capable of supplying Ukraine with adequate numbers of the air defense systems necessary to prevent Russia from steadily destroying Ukrainian infrastructure. The coming bitter winter is likely to drive millions more Ukrainians to seek refuge in the West. Russia does not necessarily need to win on the battlefield if it can turn Ukraine into a permanently ruined state and a burden on Europe that European electorates will not sustain indefinitely.
While this conflict lasts, it will also present a permanent risk that the US will be dragged into direct conflict with Russia, and a certainty that the US will be distracted from other urgent and essential goals at home and abroad. The danger of the war spreading to engulf Europe and the US has been highlighted by the Russian threat to seize European ships in retaliation for their seizure of ships of Russia’s “shadow fleet.” Whatever Trump may think, should this happen it would be impossible for the US to remain aloof—and once a cycle of escalation begins, will anyone be able to stop it?
For the sake of the American people and the international community, most of which ardently desires and needs an end to this war, it is for the new American left to take up the search for peace, and to press for this if the Democratic Party wins control of Congress this November, and of the presidency in 2028.
For US progressives to pursue peace strongly and consistently will, however, take a radical break with the attitudes and policies of the Democratic Party establishment stretching back for more than a century. It will also require a willingness to overrule existing centrist governments in Europe.
Trump’s effort failed for multiple reasons: On a few key issues, Ukraine and Russia’s positions remain irreconcilable; the deep dysfunction of his administration made it impossible to craft a strategy that would have brought sufficient incentives and pressure to bear to overcome this gap; Trump met constant resistance from the Europeans, which also strengthened Ukrainian obduracy; and his administration has been increasingly infiltrated by neoconservatives who are rigidly opposed to compromise with Russia or anyone else.
Lastly, of course, the disastrous war with Iran has hopelessly distracted the administration from the Ukraine peace process—not least because, absurdly, the same amateur team is responsible for both sets of talks. In a rational world, US failure against Iran, and the exhaustion of key US weapons stocks, would have given a new and urgent impulse to the search for peace in Ukraine, which the US is no longer capable of supplying with desperately needed air defense systems.
But there is an additional factor that has barely been noticed in the United States, partly thanks to the refusal of most US journalists and “experts” to talk to the Russians and listen to what they are saying. This is that due to a combination of domestic political polarization and self-justifying moral arrogance, the US has repeatedly demonstrated that it can no longer be trusted to keep its word.
One reason for the rigidity of Russian positions is that the Russian establishment fears with good reason that any concessions it makes in a peace settlement will be permanent and irreversible, while any made by Trump will be reversed by a Democratic administration after 2028; just as Trump, disastrously, abolished Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
The West of course also has good reason to distrust Russia—which is why it is necessary that any peace settlement be as solid, formal, and comprehensive as possible, and not a fragile and unstable ceasefire like that in the Donbas between 2015 and 2022, that eventually led to full-scale war.
To be stable and lasting, a peace settlement will require Russia to recognize Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity on the land that it still holds, Ukraine’s right to defenses adequate to deter Russia, and Ukraine’s right to join the European Union. The Ukrainians will have to recognize Russia’s legitimate security interests (which are essentially identical to the bipartisan US determination to exclude hostile alliances from Central America), permanently forgo NATO membership and the stationing of Western troops on its soil, and guarantee the linguistic and cultural rights of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine.
If they are to commit themselves to the search for an end to the Ukraine war, the first thing that US progressives need to recognize is that this peace cannot be wholly “just,” and that this is because not just of the inescapable realities of this war, but of every war. Think of the peace agreements that the US has entered into since its foundation. At best, they have led to a lesser evil than the other possibilities, but not one of them could be called truly “just.” The one that came closest perhaps was the Versailles settlement after World War I—and its disastrous actual consequences contributed to the rise of the Nazis and a new and even more horrendous world war.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
Perhaps the most important lesson of all for American (and European) progressives is the one taught by Robert Burns:
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie usTo see oursels as ithers see us!It wad frae mony a blunder free us,An’ foolish notion.
The US establishment that launched the illegal war against Iran, thereby undermined the global trading system it was pledged to defend, endangered the entire world economy, and abetted the Israeli campaign of terror in Gaza has lost the respect of the world and no longer has any right to adopt a position of moral superiority on the world stage. Most of the Europeans, with their weaselly attempt to combine abstention from the war with the use of their bases by the United States, are in no better case.
Madeleine Albright (a Democratic secretary of state, let us remember), famously said that “we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and see further than other nations into the future.” This now sounds like a fantastically bad joke. The Cyclops was certainly tall, but only had one eye. The US is even worse: wandering the world like Oedipus, self-blinded in both eyes.
But if the image of the indispensable nation is dead, the United States, in concert with others, can still be a useful nation. This will, however, require an end to self-aggrandizing self-righteousness. Instead, Americans should remember the words of the Declaration of Independence, and pay “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” as being part of sinful mankind, rather than standing above it.
Anatol LievenAnatol Lieven is a coauthor, with George Beebe and Mark Episkopos, of the policy brief Peace Through Strength in Ukraine, published by the Quincy Institute for International Peace.