Have You No Sense of Decency, Mr. Kasparov?

The New Center: A Wednesday Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

Enough is enough. For more than two years, proponents of escalation have characterized anyone—left, right, or center—opposed to their preferred policy in Ukraine as a stooge of Vladimir Putin. This, even as developments on the ground have repeatedly vindicated the opponents’ warnings: that Ukraine was structurally set up to lose an industrial war against Russia; that mindless energy sanctions would only backfire against Europe; that relentless escalation risked the physical destruction of Ukraine with very little upside for the suffering Ukrainian people.

Yet instead of showing humility in the face of events, the Ukraine hawks have grown only more dogmatic, more shrill, more paranoid. This tendency reached its apotheosis over the weekend, when the ultra-hawkish Garry Kasparov took to “X,” the app formerly known as Twitter, to slime Sen. J.D. Vance (and Elon Musk) as “pro-Kremlin advocates.” If even a scintilla of American sanity remains, this should be the nation’s “have-you-no-decency” moment.