Yemenis displaced by the conflict receive food aid and supplies to meet their basic needs, at a camp in Hays district in the war-ravaged western province of Hodeida on March 29, 2022, as food prices have doubled since last year and the fact that Ukraine supplies nearly a third of Yemen’s wheat imports has heightened fears of a deepening famine.(Khaled Ziad / AFP via Getty Images)
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has settled into an interminable and bloody war of attrition. Even as the consequences of the war, including the disruption of the global food supply that could starve countless poor people, ripples forward, political attention to the conflict has faded. Still, the war presents real dilemmas for the left, especially on the question of how to balance the need to thwart a brutal violation of international norms with the equally urgent necessity of bringing an end to the conflict. Many on the left remain divided on the right balance to seek.
Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, wrote an analysis of why Ukraine matters to the left for The New Republic. I talked to him about the state of the war and the prospects for peace.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.