Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo
Residents take belongings from their house ruined by the Russian shelling in Irpin, near Kyiv, Ukraine, May 21, 2022.
This article appears in the June 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The first issue of this magazine, published in Spring 1990 as the Soviet Union was collapsing, carried an image on the cover of a new world being born, breaking out of its old shell. “It is a conceit of new publications that their appearance coincides with an historic change. By good fortune, ours does,” I wrote in the first of these columns. It was a heady time, with the Cold War coming to an end, Europe coming together, and democracy on the rise. As Soviet power over Eastern Europe collapsed, the ghostly fear of nuclear war that had haunted our lives began to lift. We even savored the prospect of a “peace dividend” that could help finance long-neglected domestic priorities.
That new world lost its lustrous hopes a while ago, but no event has so definitively closed the era as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The invasion has taken us back not just to the Cold War but all the way to 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the last time a major power set off a large-scale war in Europe with an unprovoked act of aggression. And once again the United States serves as the “arsenal of democracy,” providing weapons to stave off the Russian assault on Ukraine as this country did under Franklin Roosevelt when it helped stave off the Nazi assault on Great Britain.
But not everyone is on board with this fight, which comes with costs and serious risks. In another throwback to the past, right-wingers rallying to the cry “America First” oppose our involvement or only grudgingly go along with it, hoping we forget the admiration they long expressed for Vladimir Putin. If Donald Trump had been re-elected, the odds are that he wouldn’t have rallied Western opposition to Putin and armed the Ukrainians. On the left, too, some have wanted no part in this war and called for immediate negotiations as though Putin had not made clear both his determination to pursue the war and his larger aim to restore Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe. The longer the war drags on—and it may well be prolonged—the more opposition to U.S. involvement is likely to grow on both sides of the political spectrum.
What stake do we have in the Russia-Ukraine War? I would put it this way: This is a war to prevent the realities of the 20th century from becoming our future in the 21st century. Russia today is an Orwellian nightmare, a dictatorship directly descended from the Soviet KGB that takes brutal retribution against its critics and hardly bothers to conceal it, the better to instill fear in others. It commits war crimes with the same moral indifference and the same strategic purpose. It is also an economically backward regime that has moved from communism to kleptocracy, and from left to right, without changing its basic character.
The Ukrainians have every reason to fear being dragged back under Moscow’s deadening control: Putin himself has said Ukraine has no right to exist, and he has put Moldova, the Baltic countries, and other former Soviet states on notice. No wonder the Swedes and Finns, who long preferred official neutrality, now want to join NATO. We too now have to weigh the prospect of being dragged back into a past when our friends feared for their freedom and the specter of nuclear annihilation made us all fear for our lives.
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Berliner Verlag/Archiv/AP Images
Bromberg, Poland, 1939
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Alex Chan/Sipa USA via AP
Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2022
In Russia today, no lie is too fantastic to be fed to the public. In a perfect example of Orwellian Newspeak, the “special military operation” in Ukraine is supposedly aimed at “de-Nazifying” the only country other than Israel with a Jewish head of government. (“So what if Zelensky is Jewish,” Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said recently in response to a question. “I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.”) In its utter contempt for the truth, this kind of institutionalized lying has its parallel in the practiced deceit of Putin’s greatest American admirer, Donald Trump, and the debasement of Republican leaders and right-wing media that parrot Trump’s lies or stand silent, refusing to contradict them.
Resisting the extension of this kind of regime is what the struggle in Ukraine and the struggle at home are both about. In the world today, we are back to basics, the basics of liberal democracy. Both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s Republican Party are threats to freedom and democracy because they are threats to democracy’s elementary rules and the integrity of public life. The foundations of a free society rest on an array of institutions—including free and independent media and the sciences and professions—that are tethered to truth-seeking norms. Without those institutions, we are lost in a hopelessly disorienting fog of deceit, as the Russian people appear to be now.
Although the Russian invasion of Ukraine has ended the era that began with the Soviet collapse, the project of a Europe whole and free is endangered but not dead. If Russia had been able to march into Kyiv the way it marched into Crimea, it would have sent a clear signal to other countries in the region that they had best make their peace with Putin. We and the Europeans already owe a debt to the Ukrainians not only for resisting Russia but also for exposing its combination of brutality and incompetence. A Russian victory would still threaten a redivision and a remilitarization of Europe with global implications, but the world knows now that Russia can be beaten. Better to do everything possible to stop it in Ukraine than at points further west.
Yet the Russia-Ukraine War does have costs and risks for us, some of them immediate. Together with the COVID pandemic, the war has increased inflation and the risk of recession and thereby contributed to a climate of anxiety and fear. Both the economic and psychological effects are likely to hurt Democrats in the fall, and they may destabilize democratic governments elsewhere. The Russians may also retaliate directly against the United States and European countries: They are masters of poison and cyber, and the Russian media are abuzz with talk of nuclear weapons. We already have direct experience of their interference in our elections. We don’t know how far they will go.
The war has also had a long-run cost in undermining the agenda for climate reform and transformative energy policies. To be sure, the Germans and other Europeans now recognize that they need to free themselves from dependence on Russian gas, which should strengthen their commitment to an accelerated clean-energy transition. But the immediate demands, here and abroad, are for increased oil and gas production and lower prices, and those demands have seemed to validate the case for unleashing the fossil fuel industry. International climate agreements look to be more difficult as long as we treat Russia as a pariah state.
The war makes it harder, in addition, to focus attention and resources on all the domestic priorities that liberals and progressives care about. Many on the left understandably want to get the war over with and move on to America’s “real” problems—except that, alas, Russia and the threat it poses to peace, freedom, and security in Europe are a real problem for us too. The impatience with the failure to resolve the conflict through diplomacy is understandable too—but it was Putin’s decision to go to war, and if he expresses interest in negotiations, it must be Ukraine’s decision how to respond.
Like Roosevelt in 1939, Biden today has been forced to turn his attention from economic recovery at home to war in Europe. No one will mistake him for FDR, much less for Winston Churchill, nor even for the unassuming Churchill of our time, Volodymyr Zelensky. But Americans have been lucky to have Biden as president after the damage Trump did to relations with our closest allies. At just the moment when NATO has again become indispensable, he has reassembled a functioning alliance. He has understood that this country needs to do all it can to aid Ukraine while avoiding a wider and potentially catastrophic war.
That Biden would get no credit from Republicans is entirely predictable. At this point, though, he also appears to be getting little credit from voters—and that too is not wholly surprising in view of the public’s more immediate anxieties, particularly about inflation.
Meanwhile, Republicans wait in the wings, expecting to take control of Congress. Their strategy on Ukraine may be both to weaken Biden and to taunt him for being weak, claiming with a straight face that Putin would not have dared to invade Ukraine if Trump had still been president. In fact, Trump had long threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO and, according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, might have done so if he had been re-elected. “I think Putin was waiting for that,” Bolton told The Washington Post in March. Blowing up NATO would obviously have emboldened Putin, not deterred him.
So let us not be surprised, the longer the war continues, if Trump presents himself as the anti-war candidate for 2024, claiming on the basis of his special relationship with Putin that “I alone can fix it” and achieve peace in our time with Russia.
There are no certainties in the course that Biden and other Western governments are following. The war is asymmetrical in the sense that Russia can throw more soldiers and arms into the fight, while the Western allies are committing themselves only to weapons. That may be enough, or it may not. For Biden, the results are also likely to be asymmetrical. If it works, he will get little credit, but if it fails, he will be sure to get the blame.
On Ukraine, Biden and the Democrats confront the tragic necessity of doing the right thing when there is no guarantee that it will be the winning thing, militarily or electorally. But it is what we have to do, in the hope that it will work and that Americans recognize that it is the right thing, if we are to have any hope of preventing the terrors of the 20th century from revisiting us.
