17 - To Save Europe is to Save the World
Ukraine’s doughty President Volodymyr Zelensky keeps telling legislators – in the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Japan, and lately Sweden – that saving Ukraine from Russian conquest and subjugation will save Europe. “We are fighting for freedom in Ukraine, but also for freedom in the rest of Europe,” he seems to be saying. But in rallying support for his people’s David-like defense against the Putinesque Goliath, President Zelensky also implicitly says far more. By resisting Russia’s assault so bravely and effectively (but not conclusively, so far), Ukrainians are putting their lives on the line for democracy, for decency, for right over might, for the existential singularity of individual proclivities, and for human idiosyncrasies over regimentation and conformity to authoritarianism. There has been no such global test of good v evil since Hitler exterminated Jews and Roma and Stalin butchered Jews, Ukrainians, and Tatars. As President Biden said Saturday in Warsaw: the war in Ukraine is “a test of all time.”
President Biden powerfully declared – “for God’s sake”-- that Putin “must not remain in power,” a sensible assertion that the White House press office later clarified, saying that President Biden had meant merely that Putin must not be allowed to “exercise power over his neighbors.” Putin and his Orcs must not win, else the Ring of Peace be forfeited for eternity.
President Biden also appealed to ordinary Russians – if they could hear or learn of his words – to condemn the killing on innocent Ukrainian women and children and never “to accept” hospitals and schools “being pummeled” by Russian bombs and missiles, a slaughter of the innocents that was still in process early today.
Implicitly, President Biden recognizes along with President Zelensky that because Putin has attacked a large, truly independent nation in the cockpit of Europe, what truly is at stake is not just Ukraine’s autonomy but, more significantly, the integrity of the post-World War II agreed-upon order. With the creation of the United Nations, with the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, with massive U. S. aid to rebuild Europe and Japan, and with the instilling of new democratic parameters globally and in western Europe, national borders are to be respected and disputes settled peacefully, even via judicial proceedings. (The UN International Court of Justice on March 16 voted 13-2 against the legality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.)
Presidents Biden and Zelensky, along with a host of other European presidents, prime ministers, and officials, are right that stopping Putin’s aggression is the absolute defining test of our times. Not only might Putin still – despite the seeming effectiveness of Ukrainian defenders – head into the rest of Europe (Moldova, the Baltic States, Poland?) if he is able to reduce Ukraine to rubble and conquer it. But such territorial acquisitions would demonstrate that world citizens cannot count on the triumph of order. Their expectations of peace and stability would be violated. The peoples of our planet would once more be reduced to dog eat dog, and everyday survival of the fittest. All of that turmoil and oppression was supposed to be behind us, relegated to older centuries and meaner times.
Putin’s threat to reduce Ukraine’s and our belief that clashes of civilization would only happen on the periphery – in the likes of Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, the Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Papua, Somalia, and Venezuela – must be shown to be fundamentally existential, and quickly overcome in Ukraine. So must the notion – common to Putin’s ilk – that dictatorship triumphs. Pushing Russian troops back and reversing Putin’s war advances, will not immediately marginalize the despotic reigns of a Hun Sen in Cambodia, Min Aung Hlaing in Myanmar (Burma), Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and Emmerson Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe, but any Putinesque success would embolden their cruelties and sense of potency.
Then there is autocracy in China. Putin’s gambit is the unwitting stalking horse for China’s ongoing crusade to enhance hegemonic relevance. It is managing to ignore or toss aside Western protests about the abrogation of Hong Kong’s treaty rights, the World Court’s decision that the South China Sea was rightly shared with Vietnam and the Philippines and was not exclusively Chinese, and the abrogation of human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet.
An easy Putin victory in Ukraine would doubtless be followed by an early invasion of Taiwan. Now the resistance of Ukraine and the globe’s criticism of that invasion might give some pause to the legions poised to attack that island nation.
Ukraine’s struggle is therefore our war. Given President Zelensky’s integrity, his courage, his ability to articulate and elicit the nationalistic feelings of his countrymen, a once corrupt and authoritarian-ruled country has been re-born. Ukraine’s destiny is indeed a destiny the rest of the free world shares. We must therefore fully support Ukraine even if Putin attempts to widen the war chemically, biologically, or atomically.
So far, with enormous costs to Ukraine and Ukrainians, President’s Biden’s refusal to put American boots on the ground or provide air cover seems to be working. But, with Putin’s back closer to the wall, for how long?