295 - Why Winning the Ukrainian War Matters More than Ever

China is Watching

            We have been over this ground before. But the knownothings in Trump's Republican Party who look to cut loose from Ukraine are prepared too cavalierly to meet Putin where he wants to be met.  JD Vance largely echoes Putin's talking points.  Too many of his ilk believe that recovering Crimea is a goal too far.

            There are immediate and consequential moral reasons why Ukraine matters. It recovered its freedom and its sovereignty in 1990, when the Soviet Union imploded. It waged an internal people's battle against post-Soviet Russian influence and rampant corruption, culminating in the maidan uprising of 2013-2014.  First the students and then masses of citizens in Kyiv forced a corrupt local ruler loyal to Russia to flee (to Russia) when he acted arbitrarily to reject Europe.

            Ukraine asserted itself then as a free polity, reclaiming an independence that had been buried for nearly a century by Bolshevik domination and rule.  Indeed, it had mostly be subsumed during preceding centuries when much of Ukraine was subordinated to Czarist pretensions and other parts were controlled by Poland and Lithuania.  Only after 2014 could Ukrainians claim to be fully free. Existentially, they had become the masters of their national and personal fates.

            President Volodymyr Zelensky and his followers were supremely conscious of what was at stake for them when Russia invaded in 2022 and quickly came within striking distance of Kyiv before being repulsed by hastily assembled Ukrainian guerrilla militias and regular soldiers.  Ukraine fought back cleverly, took vastly over-confident Russian detachments by surprise, and for at least a few months, halted Russian advances and depredations. In a few places along the meandering Donbas combat front, too, Ukraine's armed forces regained some of the territory and villages lost in 2014, when Russia swiftly and surreptitiously annexed much of the Donbas and Crimea.

            In 2014, a pre-Zelensky Ukraine could not prevent the Russian occupation of its east.  It lacked the moral center that Zelensky later gave his country; it lacked more than perfunctory support from NATO and the West.  President Obama did not see Putin for what he was and is. We and the rest of the West lost a critical moment to both check and checkmate Putin. That is yet another powerful reason why Washington and Brussels must not let Putin win -- again.

            When offered a U.S. sponsored evacuation from Kyiv in 2022, Zelensky powerfully said “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” He was staying put and he and his partisans would battle against Putin's illicit and immoral invasion as long as it took. Freedom was not divisible. Sovereignty could not be bargained away. Ukraine was important for its own sake as well as keeping it free blocked Putin's re-establishing the Soviet empire (and its denial of fundamental human freedoms) in eastern Europe.

            But the war that is now in its third year also illustrates that tyranny is always around the corner. Democracy, the outcome of freedom, is a tender plant (the lesser of all of the governing evils) that too often, and too easily, is overcome by strong armed personalist and populist militarists and by other entrepreneurial despots or wannabe despots like Nicolos Maduro, Kais Saied, the colonels in the Sahel and the generals in Sudan, Hun Sen and his son in Cambodia,  Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, and Emmerson Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe.  Xi Jinping of China and Putin are members of this cohort as well, but their ambitions and their countries are much larger and more destructive.

            Tyranny deprives individuals of agency. It occasionally trades prosperity for repression. But usually, without agency or political participation, despotisms trample freedoms to be oneself, to express oneself openly, to learn for oneself, to read whatever one wants, and to attempt to make the world a better place on one's own terms.  The Taliban has extinguished freedom for fully half of its population, if not for all.  There is no higher calling than freedom; human-made dictates that are Biblical or Quranic cannot substitute for individual explorations of the universe.

            But there are several less abstract reasons why Ukraine's struggle against Putinism is so important to the future of the world and to the existence of the United States.  Putin must be checked to keep Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Poland -- all former Soviet satrapies -- and their peoples free.  Putin worked in Dresden, in the old and now troubled East Germany. He may even dream of re-annexing part of modern Germany.

            But the titanic battle of this century hardly involves Putin. He is but a pawn.  The consummate contest for the planet's future is between China and the United States. Xi Jinping, without any seeming internal opposition, closely watches the struggle between the U.S. and its allies and Putin both to learn how best to confront the U. S. for planetary primacy and how best to overcome U. S. global leadership.

            That is why winning in Ukraine (defeating Putin decisively) is so important, and so essential to the future of humankind.  If Washington and its allies lose to Putin by subordinating Ukraine's fundamental freedoms to Putin and failing to regain lost Ukrainian territory in a negotiated end, China will take note of a decisive loss. If Putin can be removed, say, from Crimea; if Moscow can be made to pay a higher than present cost for the invasion, then just possibly there will be no World War III with the U. S. and its allies facing off against a nuclear armed China and whichever other states it coopts (North Korea, Cambodia?).

            Ultimately, Putin's invasion has become a proxy for the war that China wants, for the achievement of acknowledged supremacy that the new China seeks to impose by military means.  World affairs are poised precipitously on the cusp of an all-out war between those who would deny freedom writ large and those who stand for inalienable rights and fundamental human independence.

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