Douglas Murray on how the MAGA right is wrong on Ukraine

There was a very good piece by Douglas Murray in this week's Spectator on how the MAGA (Make America Great Again) section of the Republican party turned against Ukraine. I used an extract from it as one of my Quotes of the Day on Friday, see link: Quotes of the day 7th March 2025.

If you subscribe to the Spectator online you can find the whole thing here:

The MAGA movement is wrong on Ukraine | The Spectator

The whole thing is incredibly odd.

For most of my life it was the right which stood for strong defence, for NATO, for standing up to dictators and supporting allies including imperfect ones if they were menaced by people who we thought were a threat to us. While it was the left who often joined CND, expected our allies to be whiter than white but made excuses for the Soviet Union (or in Jeremy Corbyn's case, for Putin)

Putin's unprovoked attack on Ukraine was a breach of the international order so obvious and egregious that initially everyone on both sides could see it. The problem is that politics online is so ridiculously adversarial that, not wanting to be suckered into supporting a "Mainstream narrative" and seeing that  Biden and many on the left were backing Ukraine, some on the right wondered if they should too. Then they, and some of their Reform UK acolytes in this country, started to swallow increasing amounts of Putin propaganda.

Two particular ironies here. The first is that as Douglas Murray points out, almost all the criticisms of how Ukraine is supposedly corrupt and imperfectly democratic, are infinitely more true of Putin's Russia than they are of contemporary Ukraine.

The second irony relates to those in Britain who are currently accusing President Zelensky and anyone who wants to support him and doesn't want to pressure Ukraine to seek peace at any price of wanting the war to go on. To a man and woman, during the Brexit negotiations these people were among those who ceaselessly reminded us - quite correctly in my view - that you can never get even an acceptable deal in any negotiation, never mind a good deal, unless you are prepared to walk away from a bad one.  

That's why "Peace at any price" is always a recipe for a temporary truce on awful terms and an even worse war not far down the line. As Churchill told Chamberlain after Munich, faced with a choice between war and dishonour he had chosen dishonour but would get war anyway. 

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