Douglas Murray Misreads MAGA’s Ukraine Stance

(Photo by Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

As has become all too common in the Trump era, supporters of the foreign policy status quo overlook the proximate and politically legitimate sources of dissent on American policy towards Ukraine and instead myopically fixate on the culture war elements that parallel the conflict. The latest prominent example of such was a piece written by Douglas Murray for the Spectator, titled “The MAGA movement is wrong on Ukraine.” In his piece, Murray advances the argument that the populist right in the United States has wrongly arrayed itself against the cause of Ukraine for culture war purposes and as part of an unprincipled reaction against their liberal political opponents. 

While it is true that some of the populist right’s ire toward Ukraine is motivated by culture war issues and political partisanship, Murray’s centering of them obscures deeper causes of discontent. His thesis is ironic, considering how he has profited greatly from fanning the flames of a Western culture war, which, by his own account, is undermining his favored war overseas. More importantly, however, Murray does not mention the root cause of the conservative and predominantly youthful opposition to staying the course on Ukraine: the generational experience of waging the Global War on Terror. 

Lost on international observers like Murray or American commentators who have never left the Acela corridor is that the populist right has developed a dissenting view on the liberal international order because they have historically served as its enforcers. From this particular experience, the populist right has viewed events in Ukraine with a distinct alarm, concern, and, eventually, disdain.

While Murray wrote opinion pieces in favor of the Iraq War, thousands of future American populists fought, bled, and grew disillusioned there. Many of them were the latest to serve in a generational caste of American soldiers that is disproportionately rural, Southern, and conservative. These geographic and ideological contours mapped neatly onto Trump’s political base. The anguish of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lies that led to and sustained them, and a service gap between the ranks and the political leadership class soured the populist right on the foreign policy orthodoxies that sent them to war. This dissent served as an essential plank of the then-emerging populist perspective on modern American politics. In his 2016 electoral win, Trump benefited significantly from the issue of war and peace, specifically in the Midwest, and did so again in 2024.

For better or for worse, it is through this lens that the populist right viewed America's involvement in the developing Ukraine crisis under the first Trump term and then the full-fledged war that commenced on President Joe Biden’s watch. Russiagate amplified the populism born of the Global War on Terror, as the American political establishment began to openly worry that the grassroots of the Republican Party were wavering on the postwar foreign policy consensus. The flames of populism were fanned further still by a political class who, displaying rank elitism, often mocked Trump supporters as rubes for their oppositional stance on U.S.-Ukraine policy. 

The populist right’s jaded perspective on American foreign affairs from their own past has grown, given the political optics of the war here at home. While Murray rightly notes that the dynamics of the war abroad have influenced domestic debate in the United States, his myopic perspective on American politics strips this debate of its historical context and casts the populist right in the role of a mere gadfly. Murray characterized the populist right as an “essentially reactionary movement,” one that mindlessly responds to the prevailing consensus view of the conflict and moves in the opposite direction, thereby beginning to “absorb Russia’s narrative on Ukraine.”

Murray neglects to mention that his favored side in this domestic narrative war is not without agency and, indeed, blame. Pro-Ukrainian accounts on social media, journalists, and various opinion-makers have been quick to anathematize long-standing domestic concerns about NATO expansion and U.S.-Russian relations, turning once common geopolitical opinions into “Putin talking points.” Nor have such pro-Ukraine voices made their arguments all above board. Not only have such voices displayed the same manner of myopia and partisanship that Murray decries, but they have also assembled “blacklists” to smear American citizens and maligned Americans who wish to maintain neutrality through a PR campaign funded in part by their own tax dollars. It does not take much to see how someone could become a “reactionary” in light of such heavy-handed measures. Furthermore, for those not suffering from amnesia, such efforts look eerily similar to the public relations campaigns of wars past, including the Global War on Terror. 

Murray spends much of this time whistling past the graveyard, obliquely conceding but never dwelling on the sources of populist discontent. He laments that the infamous Trump-Zelensky phone call that led to the first Trump impeachment created in the populist consciousness a sense “that Ukraine was simply a corrupt country” which was full of “‘literal’ Nazis” and “which had enriched and cooperated with its own political opponents.” Unfortunately for Murray, there are large measures of truth to those charges. Ukraine has consistently been ranked as one of Europe’s most corrupt countries (behind only Russia). Its military does have among its ranks far-right militias that proudly display Nazi regalia. And, yes, Ukraine’s patrons in the United States, such as NGOs and arms manufacturers, benefit from American aid. 

As unsettling as these facts are, their validity does not change because they are narratively inconvenient or because populist opponents dwell on them. They have, however, provided additional rhetorical ammunition to populists who also cite the corrupt nature of American clients during the Global War on Terror, the U.S. government’s propensity to arm extremists during that conflict, and burgeoning congressional stock portfolios as notable parallels. Populists, like many Americans, have noticed a pattern here.

Murray attempts to elide these charges with a classic false choice presented to observers of a foreign war: Excusing the excesses of an alleged ally by juxtaposing them with those of an even worse aggressor. Murray asks, “Think Ukraine is cruel in forcing draft dodgers into the army? Consider Putin’s army recruitment processes. Dislike Zelensky for not holding an election during a total war? Have you noticed Putin’s electoral habits?”

The beauty of America First is that one does not have to choose between either side. Perhaps this is the real source of Murray’s torment.