By pitching himself as a hero to the U.S. right, he’s taking a page from the 1960s North Vietnamese playbook to undermine support for Ukraine.

MAY 29, 2023, 9:00 AM

By Jeremy S. Friedman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. 

As the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign grows closer, the war in Ukraine and Washington’s support for Kyiv stands to play a bigger role in the Republican primaries than foreign-policy issues normally do. While Republican candidates of the not-too-distant past portrayed Russia as an enemy, this time around the primaries will feature voices much more ambivalent about the war and U.S. military aid. These voices include those of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who referred to the war as a “territorial dispute” and not part of the United States’ “vital national interests,” and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who saidthat if elected he would “not give another dollar to Ukraine.” Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has refused to say who he thinks should prevail in the conflict. These statements, among others, suggest that Republican candidates are playing to a base that is increasingly skeptical of both the utility and the justice of the war effort.

The specter of an antiwar right is hard to square with the image that generations of Americans have held of the 1960s antiwar movement: long-haired hippies clashing with police, singing “Give Peace a Chance.” Despite their myriad differences, some of those opposed to their respective wars today and half a century ago share a common element: Both base their opposition on deep-seated critiques of U.S. policymakers and institutions, and both see that critique reflected in the United States’ overseas adversaries—the North Vietnamese leadership then, and Russian President Vladimir Putin now. Worryingly, in both cases, the United States’ adversaries have taken advantage of these alignments to try to exploit domestic divisions for foreign-policy ends. Republicans opposed to U.S. support for Kyiv will find themselves played should they fail to recognize Putin’s moves as the gambits they really are.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the majority of the anti-Vietnam War student protestors thought that the United States, which backed the South Vietnamese government in its fight against the communist North and its local allies, had no business being involved in the conflict. They believed that the war was being conducted poorly and the resources deployed overseas could be put to better use at home. Many of the leading figures of this movement, however, were also motivated by another conviction: the belief that their struggle and that of the Vietnamese Communists were really one and the same.

These figures saw the United States as the headquarters of imperialism, at the heart of which was a military-industrial complex that sought power for the sake of wealth and gave the world only violence and exploitation in return. At an antiwar rally in November 1965, Carl Oglesby, president of Students for a Democratic Society, condemned the United States as a “colossus that does not want to be changed,” a corporate-government alliance that in the name of profit suppressed revolution both at home and abroad by calling it communism. He argued that the foreign and domestic issues of his era were cut from the same cloth: “Can we understand why the Negroes of Watts rebelled? Then why do we need a devil theory to explain the rebellion of the South Vietnamese?” Struggles at home for civil rights, economic equality, and gender rights were therefore part and parcel of the same struggle as that of North Vietnam and its National Liberation Front (NLF) against the United States and its allies. As Che Guevara, a heroto many in the antiwar movement, declared, the way to defeat imperialism was to fight more wars against the American empire: to create “two, three, or many Vietnams.”

“The key to Hanoi’s ultimate success … resided with its world relations campaign aimed at procuring the support of antiwar movements around the world.”

This conviction led some key figures in the U.S. antiwar movement to see the Vietnamese Communists as their allies in the fight against American imperialism at home and abroad. At a 1967 conference between an American antiwar delegation and a delegation of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, Tom Hayden, a prominent activist, identified his cause with that of his Vietnamese counterparts, tellingthem, “We are all Viet Cong now.”

North Vietnam saw an opening in this sympathetic audience and was eager to capitalize on U.S. domestic failures to aid its cause. As historian Lien-Hang Nguyen writes, “The key to Hanoi’s ultimate success in the war lay not in launching general offensives or even winning hearts and minds in South Vietnam; rather, it resided with its world relations campaign aimed at procuring the support of antiwar movements around the world.” The goal was to undermine domestic support for Washington’s policy in Vietnam and pressure a U.S. withdrawal—an outcome that eventually did occur in 1973. To this end, the NLF, for example, was tasked with fueling antiwar sentiment in North America and Western Europe.

At the same time, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union Communist Party passed a resolution directing the KGB to organize statements by leading political figures abroad to mobilize public opinion against U.S. policy in Vietnam. A year later, the ruling party of North Vietnam directed its foreign propaganda apparatus to exploit “all the forces and all the public opinion of the world’s people, including the American people, to [make them] agree with and support our people’s anti-American cause for national salvation,” according to documents in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History. Mindful of their target audience, the North Vietnamese politburo passed a resolution calling for framing the war as a “struggle against American imperialism,” rather than as a communist revolution, to make their cause more directly relevant to activists in the United States. Echoing Hayden’s sentiment, in 1969 North Vietnamese Culture Minister Hoang Minh Giam told Black Panther Party leader David Hilliard: “You are Black Panthers. We are Yellow Panthers.”

A crowd of anti-war demonstrators carrying banners that read “No! to Nato. Yes to Peace” and “Money for Our Needs. Not the War Machine” march down a wide street in New York’s Times Square as they protest NATO expansion amid Russia’s war on Ukraine in January 2023.

Antiwar demonstrators march through Times Square in New York on Jan. 14 as they protest the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) amid Russia’s war on Ukraine. Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images 

Long before the invasion of Ukraine, Americans’ views on Russia were increasingly shaped by domestic politics. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, whose administration attempted to “reset” relations with Russia, mocked his opponent Mitt Romney for naming Russia as the United States’ number one enemy. The 2016 election, however, was a turning point in this regard. Prior to then, more Republicans than Democrats saw Russia as an enemy; since the election, however, those opinions have reversed. As Democrats decried Russian interference in the election, Republicans increasingly came to associate anti-Russia sentiment with anti-Trump sentiment, seeing the former as just a way to undermine the legitimacy of their president and party.

The Trump years also saw the crescendo of a right-wing obsession with so-called wokeness, prompting attempts to reaffirm traditional conceptions of gender, growing assertions that the United States was a Christian nation—or, at least, a Judeo-Christian one—and to reestablish a celebratory account of U.S. history epitomized by Trump’s 1776 Commission. Key to this effort was the idea that wokeness had captured the heights of American cultural power—Hollywood, the mainstream media, and higher education—in the belief that, as Andrew Breitbart has famously pronounced, “politics is downstream from culture.”

Sensing an opportunity to undermine his adversaries, Putin has embraced this dynamic and now poses as the avatar of the conservative critique of Western society. Where once the North Vietnamese claimed to embody the anti-imperialist cause, Putin now claims to embody anti-wokeness, positioning Russia—most famously though crackdowns on LGBTQ+ rights—as a bastion of traditional Christian values. In public speeches, he has decried “cancel culture,” “reverse racism,” and gender ideology that he calls a “crime against humanity.” He has married these criticisms to attacks on globalization, asserting that it has led to an “uneven distribution of wealth” and “exacerbated inequality” as some have “attempted to open up other countries’ borders for the sake of their own competitive advantages.” He has portrayedthese policies as serving the interests of a decadent, cosmopolitan elite—a rhetorical move that parallels Trump’s political synthesis of social conservatism and populist economics.

Putin draws on Russian history to lay claim to the mantle of traditional conservatism. He argues that wokeness has already been tried by the Bolsheviks with their revolution: “For us in Russia, these are not some speculative postulates, but lessons from our difficult and sometimes tragic history.” By drawing a clear line between the pitfalls of wokeness and the failures of communism, Putin makes an argument that many among the U.S. right have been desperate to hear. His populist rhetoric holds up a mirror—and an alternative—for many of the United States’ deepest fault lines and greatest discontents, not unlike the North Vietnamese leaders did a few decades ago.

New research indicates that support for Putin is higher among U.S. Christian nationalists, who feel that “liberal democracy is infringing on their religious beliefs.”

So far, this tactic seems to have achieved some success. New research indicates that support for Putin is higher among U.S. Christian nationalists, who feel that “liberal democracy is infringing on their religious beliefs,” Northeastern University religion and anthropology professor Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, part of the research team, said. Beyond his vocal defense of what some consider traditional Christian values, Putin’s notion of defending nationalism from the cosmopolitan global elite is also finding echoes in some corners of the Republican Party. U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, alongside other members of the Trumpist right, have seemingly embraced Putin’s logic, tweeting recently, “[Y]ou can either be the party of Ukraine & the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine & the working people of America.” The idea that “globalists” are out to destroy old established identities—nation, race, religion, gender—in the name of profit animates some to oppose support for Ukraine. Dominick Sansone’s argument in the American Conservative is illustrative of this kind of thinking: “The real issue at stake in Ukraine is whether the future of international relations will involve a continued expansion and consolidation of a transatlantic one-world government.”

Clearly, Putin’s modern-day application of a 1960s strategy has resonated with its intended audience, perhaps in part due to the broader similarities between these movements. Both see their respective wars as the product of an elite that has lost touch with the people in its unaccountable quest for power and profit. They see the United States as dominated by corruption and decadence, a country that has failed to live up to its stated ideals.

Unfortunately, their visions for the future have very little to do with the real aims of the North Vietnamese then, or Putin now. In 1975, when the North Vietnamese army finally marched on Saigon, they did not set up a multi-party democracy as many in the antiwar movement had hoped. Instead, they annexed the South and imposed a violent communist transformation that led hundreds of thousands to flee for their lives. At the time, many in the antiwar movement recognized their mistake, though Hayden was not among them.

Today, Putin does not actually seek to restore American democracy, but to undermine it. A victory for him will not help the causes of traditional morality, or free speech, or whatever else he claims to represent. His pose is tactical, and those who imagine that a foreign adversary will help bring the changes they want to see in the United States will ultimately be disappointed. Republican candidates who seek to cater to this sort of opposition are not helping restore America’s greatness; they are betraying it.

Jeremy S. Friedman is an associate professor at Harvard Business School in the business, government, and international economy unit. He is the author of Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (UNC Press 2015) and Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard University Press 2021). Twitter: @JeremySFriedman