The Ukraine Lobby’s Latest Targets
A powerful pressure campaign is operating behind the scenes and distorting American policy.
In his 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington warned against the danger that would ensue if Americans identified too closely with the interests of any foreign country. He stated that “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”
Wiser words were never spoken, but the United States has strayed far from the principles that its first president expressed. The greater inclination of Americans to identify with the agendas of other nations, in turn, has enabled foreign powers and their advocates in the United States to exercise an undue, unhealthy influence over U.S. policy.
There have been several examples of that danger—especially since the early twentieth century. London’s propaganda campaign (assisted by key members of America’s northeastern elite) was dramatically successful in getting Woodrow Wilson’s administration to abandon neutrality and enter World War I on the side of Britain and its allies. A similar campaign was equally successful in inducing Franklin D. Roosevelt to support the Allied cause in World War II months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. More recently, the Israeli, Saudi, and Turkish lobbies have had a disproportionate impact on U.S. policy in the Middle East. Large contributions from such sources to American universities, think tanks, and other ostensibly independent organizations assure that the foreign government’s message will have a prominent presence in any pertinent foreign policy debates. In too many cases, that bought-and-paid-for message even dominates the narrative.
The Ukraine lobby is the latest example of a foreign government and its American supporters having a dangerously outsize impact on U.S. policy and the overall public perspective. Activists have attempted to harass and silence opponents of the fawning U.S. support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. At times, Ukraine and its Western backers have fostered a campaign of outright neo-McCarthyism against critics, utterly chilling debate regarding policy toward Kyiv.
The determination of Zelensky’s regime and its ideological allies in the West to silence critics has become increasingly flagrant. That objective was abundantly clear in the summer of 2022, when the Ukraine government’s Center for Countering Disinformation published a “blacklist” of such opponents. Numerous prominent Americans were on that list, including then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow, once an aide to President Ronald Reagan. A subsequent CCD document labeled Kyiv’s critics as “disinformation terrorists” and “war criminals.” Several blacklisted individuals have been assassinated: fortunately, no Americans yet.
Even earlier, a Ukraine front group, consisting primarily of Central and East European advocates of “free markets”, targeted both Bandow and myself in a February 2, 2022, “open letter” to Cato Institute’s leadership, urging that we be fired. The letter, signed by more than 90 individuals, identified the group as “leaders and alumni of international and Ukrainian think tanks, public policy experts and committed supporters of independent Ukraine.”
It did not take the signatories long to echo the usual smears coming out of Kyiv. “In his book, ‘Gullible Superpower’ (published in February 2019), Cato Institute's Ted Galen Carpenter presented some of the propagandist arguments generated by the Kremlin in its information warfare against the USA and the West.” In case anyone missed the thrust of that argument, the letter soon added: “We also seek to stress that the spillover effects of these fake news-based articles are disastrous. Russia uses these articles as a confirmation of the rightness of its actions. Ted Carpenter is regularly featured in the Russian state news. The headlines associate his writings with the Cato Institute’s view and the United States overall.”
The letter’s concluding passage made the group’s highest priorities extremely clear: “We appeal to the Cato Institute to consider the spillover effects of the articles by Doug Bandow and Ted Carpenter....We invite the Cato Institute to become intellectually diverse on foreign policy issues and offer more balanced positions on the matters which influence countries’ stability.”
Such tactics were not terribly subtle, and neither was the broader pressure campaign. It was not a trivial matter that the list of signers contained the names of several major donors to and prominent ideological allies of the Cato Institute. Two of the signatories even had been earlier recipients of Cato’s prestigious biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.
Their agenda with respect to Ukraine was antithetical to the promotion of liberty, however. Not only were they willing to whitewash the Zelensky government’s worsening autocratic conduct, the substantive points they made were little more than a brief for the West’s blind support of Ukraine, no matter the risks involved in pursuing a military confrontation with Russia. Worse, their arguments were a flagrant endorsement of Washington’s ongoing imperial, hegemonic role in Europe, combined with an effort to silence dissent.
The “invitation” for Cato to become more “intellectually diverse” and “balanced” on foreign policy issues was both insidious and menacing: Those terms were euphemisms for adopting a pro-Ukraine stance. Unfortunately, some foreign policy personnel at the institute already seemed distressingly receptive to Ukraine’s propaganda and pressure. Within days of Russia’s invasion, the institute posted a statement on its website that “Russia’s invasion is in contravention of international law and shows a flagrant disregard for the truth.” Therefore, “Sanctions focused on the Russian state are justified...”
The original version was even worse, endorsing sanctions without any reference to them being “focused on the Russian state.” If I had not expressed strong disagreement with such open-ended support, Cato’s foreign policy management was prepared to jettison more than four decades of scholarship showing that sanctions are cruel to populations in the targeted country, while being notoriously ineffective in compelling the offending regime to change policy. The harsher original language was taken directly from a February 24, 2022, op-ed by Cato’s director of defense and foreign policy studies, Justin Logan, in Inkstick Media.
Cato scholars who were squishy on Ukraine policy or even outright Ukraine partisans gained greater exposure and influence. The congenitally hawkish Cathy Young, who had long been an enthusiastic proponent of U.S. political and military support for Ukraine as well as Washington’s leadership of NATO, was promoted from adjunct scholar to cultural studies fellow. A senior fellow, Tom Palmer, routinely demonized Russia and praised Ukraine as a noble democracy. Even the usually sensible Doug Bandow wavered, endorsing sanctions and supporting at least limited military aid to Kyiv after Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
Although Cato’s management officially resisted the pressure from the signatories of the lobbying letter, growing pushback from key institute personnel regarding my criticism of Washington’s policy toward the Russia-Ukraine war—and especially my criticism of Kyiv’s increasingly repressive domestic policies—soon became apparent. Several of my articles that had appeared in outside publications were pulled from the Cato Institute website—in three cases without notice. Ultimately, the campaign of harassment brought my 37-year career with the organization to an end. The Ukraine lobby had scored another victory against an ever broader list of targeted critics.
An especially prominent example of the lobby’s potent campaign of intimidation was the decision of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in October 2022 to retract an open letter it had sent to President Biden just days earlier urging him to give higher priority to diplomacy as a way of ending the bloodshed in Ukraine.
The letter actually was a rather tepid document. Indeed, the signatories went out of their way to emphasize their support for Ukraine and the Biden administration’s policy of financial and military aid for Kyiv. The opening paragraph conveyed the overall tone:
We write with appreciation for your commitment to Ukraine’s legitimate struggle against Russia’s war of aggression. Your support for the self-defense of an independent, sovereign, and democratic state has been supported by Congress, including through various appropriations of military, economic and humanitarian aid in furtherance of this cause. Your administration’s policy was critical to enable the Ukrainian people, through their courageous fighting and heroic sacrifices, to deal a historic military defeat to Russia, forcing Russia to dramatically scale back the stated goals of the invasion.
However, the letter went on to advocate a limited course correction:
Given the destruction created by this war for Ukraine and the world, as well as the risk of catastrophic escalation, we also believe it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the world to avoid a prolonged conflict. For this reason, we urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.
The pro-war lobby’s response made it clear that even such modest apostasy would not be tolerated. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the caucus, offered an explanation for withdrawing the letter that deserved outright derision: “The letter was drafted several months ago, but unfortunately was released by staff without vetting.”
The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s retreat was another example of opponents of Washington’s Ukraine policy caving under pressure. In August 2022, Amnesty International issued a report criticizing Ukraine’s military for using civilians as human shields and committing other abuses in its war effort. Predictably, the report generated a political, diplomatic, and media firestorm that Kyiv orchestrated. Ukraine’s supporters in the West even accused Amnesty of echoing Vladimir Putin’s propaganda—a smear that should be even less credible than the usual attempts to silence criticism of Zelensky’s regime. In reality, the report was well supported by multiple forms of evidence.
Faced with the tsunami of vilification, Amnesty officials sought to placate their critics while still standing by the accuracy of the document. They issued a statement regretting any “distress and anger” the report might have caused. That ploy did not satiate Kyiv’s zealous supporters. Multiple Amnesty officials connected to the report resigned under pressure during the following weeks.
But the Ukraine lobby was not content with an already significant victory. It pressed for an “independent” investigation into the conclusions reached in the original report. That investigation concluded with the issuance of a report by a “legal review panel” on April 28, 2023. Unsurprisingly, it largely repudiated the earlier criticisms of Kyiv’s conduct. The supposedly independent and objective nature of the review warranted some skepticism, however, since the investigators relied heavily on witnesses that the Ukraine government provided. In addition, at least two members of the five-person panel had significant, longstanding ties to the U.S. military, including publishing articles under the auspices of the Lieber Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
It is deeply troubling when a previously brave and honorable organization like Amnesty International throws its own personnel to the wolves and retracts a credible investigative report of war crimes because of intense, orchestrated pressure. In addition, both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have become strangely reticent about the Ukraine government’s conduct since the onset of Russia’s invasion, in marked contrast to earlier scrutiny. Such behavior hints at the strength of the Ukraine lobby in the West.
Perhaps the retreat by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Amnesty International should not be all that surprising, given the well-funded propaganda effort to back Kyiv without reservation and to harass and smear anyone who challenges that narrative. It is important to note that the pro-Ukraine propaganda and intimidation campaigns were under way long before Russia launched its February 2022 invasion. However, such initiatives have grown much more aggressive since then. The efforts are frequently channeled through organizations, such as the Atlantic Council, that have received generous funding from foreign governments, as well as from portions of the U.S. military-industrial complex.
There are multiple examples of the lobby’s tactics and their effectiveness. Pro-Ukraine propagandists have subjected prominent journalists, such as Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson, to smears that they are nothing more than Russian agents and “puppets” of Vladimir Putin. Once universally respected scholars such as University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer and the late Princeton University Professor Stephen Cohen experienced similar concerted efforts to smear their reputations.
Kyiv’s tentacles even reached me in the spring of 2021 because I dared to expose the Zelensky regime’s mounting domestic abuses and Ukraine’s strategic and economic irrelevance to the United States. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine’s ideological allies in the West, especially the Atlantic Council, led the attack. When I published an article in the National Interest in late May 2021 documenting Ukraine’s authoritarianism, there were two immediate responses under the auspices of the Atlantic Council echoing Kyiv’s official line.
Doug Klain, a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, launched the first salvo just a week later on the National Interest website. A subsequent longer and nastier article appeared on June 19 in UkraineAlert on the Atlantic Council’s own website. The author of that piece was Andreas Umland, a research fellow with the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. Perhaps more significant for the debate on Ukraine policy, though, Umland was based in Kyiv, serving as an associate professor of political science at the government-funded National University of Kyiv–Mohyla Academy.
Umland peppered his piece with “Russian tool” innuendoes about critics who opposed U.S. support for Zelensky’s government. His innuendoes were directed especially at my National Interest article, contending that the arguments in that piece “would be instantly recognizable to Russian TV viewers, who have encountered similar disinformation on a virtually daily basis for the past seven years. One can only guess at Carpenter’s motives.” However, I was hardly Umland’s only target. “Since 2014, commentators on both the left and right wings of Western discourse have joined in the chorus of doubters repeating Russian claims that are designed to poison opinion against Ukraine and take the shine off the country’s narrative of democratic transformation.”
The echoes of George Washington’s warnings against letting a foreign nation’s interests and objectives affect U.S. policy have an eerie relevance to the current effort on behalf of Ukraine. Such favoritism toward a country, he cautioned, “gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity.” Moreover, “as avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils?”
Washington could just as easily have been talking about the current Ukraine lobby as about similar influence campaigns by France’s supporters in his own time. His most explicit warning also has enduring relevance. “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” Such vigilance may be more important now than ever before, as the Biden administration’s robotic political, economic, and military support for Ukraine continues to escalate. The safety, prosperity, and values of the American people are being sacrificed on the altar of a foreign country’s manipulative agenda.
This article appears in the July/August 2023 issue