Across the liberal left, the drumbeat for war against Russia has reached a deafening volume. No longer may one doubt Ukraine’s capacity to win back Crimea, or question whether thousands more troops killed and maimed are worth the cost. Those who do are now deemed Russian proxies or Vladimir Putin stooges.

Never before has the liberal-left manifested such hawkishness. On the contrary, both during the Cold War and after, the left consistently opposed muscular policies of deterrence toward Russia and routinely opposed higher defense spending. As one scholar put it, the left “gave the Soviets every excuse … [and] argued for moral equivalence, that whatever the Soviets or contemporary Russians do, we are doing the same.” Leftists scolded conservatives that “their anti-communist, anti-Russian attitudes would bring war and stop the chance for peace.”

In 1977, this worldview prompted then-President Jimmy Carter’s disparaging call-out of Americans’ “inordinate fear of communism,” which Carter claimed drove America “to adopt the flawed … principles and tactics of our adversaries ….” More recently, after Putin’s 2014 invasion and seizure of Crimea, then-President Obama refused Ukraine’s impassioned pleas for American weaponry.........

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