Wherever you stand on the Ukrainian cause, and I’m reservedly sympathetic, it’s clear that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made an inexplicable error in his now-infamous press conference with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Trump doesn’t care very much about Ukraine’s future. That’s the reality. So, whether Zelensky was right or wrong on factual or moral grounds is largely irrelevant. The United States is his greatest patron. You take what you can get. Publicly challenging Trump, who was elected by American taxpayers, is self-destructive insanity, especially when your nation’s future hangs in the balance and you hold near-zero leverage.
We Americans, on the other hand, have no responsibility to side with the president. The domestic debate over Ukrainian aid has devolved into one of the most unhinged in our discourse, which is saying something. It is riddled with specious and ahistorical claims, meaningless ad hominem attacks — “neocon!” and “globalist!” — and the questioning of the patriotism of anyone who has a different view on how we should conduct ourselves.
White House aide Stephen Miller, for instance, contended that people can learn a lot about politicians who are “standing with another country” if they disagree with Trump’s handling of Ukraine. Really? Was Trump “standing with another country” when he was critical of former President Joe Biden’s handling of aid to Israel? Miller sounds like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who still maintains that “the White House has become an arm of the Kremlin” because Republicans have different ideas about our geopolitical adversaries.
Then there is Elon Musk, who said Zelensky, whose nation was invaded, “wants a forever war, a never-ending graft meat grinder. This is evil.” These were harsher words than Musk would ever have for his Chinese Communist Party buddies.
“Peace” isn’t always necessarily preferable to war. Indeed, it’s completely reasonable for patriots to choose to fight against an invading army than to strike a deal that puts them in an even more precarious position. If Mexico occupied Arizona and claimed it as its own, we wouldn’t seek a “peace” deal any more than we did with Imperial Japan.
I’m told this is different because it’s a foregone conclusion that Ukraine will lose to “a nuclear power.” Nonnuclear powers, far less advanced than Ukraine, have held off nuclear powers before. Ask the Vietnamese or the Algerians or the Afghans, who’ve done it twice. History is littered with underdogs that repelled highly superior armies. You needn’t look further than the U.S. beating a superpower in its war of independence or the Israelis pushing back a massively larger army in 1948.
“Ignore all the blue and gold virtue signaling,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham posted about pro-Ukrainian protesters. “The most telling question is: How many of them are willing to send their own sons and daughters to fight?” None, I assume. Because the question tells us nothing.
For one thing, neither the children of protesters nor any other American children have been asked to fight for Ukraine. Not one person of political consequence has argued that we should deploy American troops to Ukraine. The unconvincing argument made by Zelensky’s defenders is that if we don’t stop Russian President Vladimir Putin today, one day, U.S. troops will have to do it.
To say otherwise is fearmongering. We’ve been involved in proxy wars all over the world without ever sending troops. Not one American has died defending Israel in its wars against Soviet-armed Arabs or the Islamists.
Second, even if we did want to send soldiers to Eastern Europe, civilians, not soldiers or generals, would make that decision. You can be a genteel Quaker and your position on prosecuting war is just as valid as that of a Marine. Indeed, this is one of the central planks of a free nation. And everyone who volunteers to join the military, one hopes, understands this.
The chickenhawk smear, which conveniently only works for isolationists, including ones who’ve never served, is just meant to chill speech.
Moreover, the idea that one can only express support in a conflict if he or she is willing to die is ludicrous. If you support the plight of African Christians being slaughtered by Islamists or Taiwan over the CCP, you don’t need to promise to send your firstborn to die in the Congo or the South China Sea.
For many voters, the Ukraine-Russia conflict is defined by largely unrelated domestic politics. Sometimes, you get the sense that the American Left is so emotionally invested in Ukraine because it sees Putin as an ally of Trump. After all, where was this outpouring of idealism when Putin invaded Crimea or even Georgia? It was former President George W. Bush and then Democrats who were clamoring to reset the relationship with Putin.
I’m sorry, the future of “democracy” doesn’t hinge on whether Ukraine loses its Russian-majority Eastern regions. And I doubt anyone really believes that Putin, who can barely handle Ukraine and in many ways has been embarrassed and weakened, will be rolling tanks down the streets of Paris or even Helsinki should Donbas fall. No, we won’t have to fight Putin in Dayton, Ohio, if he wins in Bakhmut, Ukraine.
And if you’re going to portray yourself as the bulwark of Western freedom, the least you could do is participate in some kind of election, even during wartime, to let the world know that the citizenry really wants to fight on. Yes, yes, I know Winston Churchill didn’t have an election during World War II. But Zelensky isn’t Churchill, and Ukraine isn’t Britain, a nation that has longtime historic bonds, but a swampy, corrupt, and unreliable friend.
Then again, if you’re a “realist” such as Vance, who maintains it’s “moralistic garbage” to concern ourselves with who’s right or wrong in world conflicts, stop pretending you care whether Zelensky has had an election or not. The never-ending excuses for Russian aggression betray a soft spot for Putin among the isolationists. The notion that Russia simply had no choice but to launch a war against Ukraine because of the threat of NATO expansion, as if Sweden and Lithuania would threaten the sovereignty of St. Petersburg, is a myth. The West has gone out of its way to make peace with Putin, resetting and all, and yet he keeps taking advantage. You don’t have to send American troops to Kyiv to acknowledge it.
We’ve gone from Bush-era neoconservatism, in which we acted as if everyone on the planet yearned for us to implement liberty by the gun, to paleoconservatives overcompensating and scoffing at the very idea that we have any national interest in helping nations whose moral causes we share.
THE TRUMP-ZELENSKY MEETING EXPLAINED
But what about peace, David?! Paleocons like to point out that even former President Ronald Reagan forged deals with the dreaded Soviets. It’s true. Peace through superior firepower and economic dominance, which included the U.S. bleeding the Soviets dry by funding a whole bunch of proxy wars around the globe for decades, is why the wounded USSR was willing to come to the table. Reagan referred to the Soviets as the “evil empire” and spent decades denouncing the evils of communism. There’s nothing wrong with diplomatic solutions. But Trump has harsher words and policies for Canada than he does Russia.
This is just another new norm in our new foreign policy debate. American taxpayers might not want to fund the Ukrainian fight. That’s our prerogative. It’s easy for Trump, who wants to brag about forging a deal, to blame Zelensky for standing in the way of “peace” when Ukrainians are the only ones asked to make any real concessions. Sorry, it’s not exactly The Art of the Deal to compel a weaker nation under immense duress to surrender to a more powerful one.