World War III: Their Finest Hour

The major alliances have held together and continue to execute a proxy war in Ukraine.  Russia and Ukraine are the physical participants with allies providing military and economic assistance.  The US and EU democracies, using the NATO umbrella, are supporting Ukraine, while the autocracies of China, Iran, and North Korea assist Russia.  Ukraine’s assistance has been timid and slow in arriving.  Either the allies don’t understand what is at stake, or they suffer from the inevitable disputes that arise in democratic societies.  Iran and North Korea have no problem providing (most likely selling) military aid to Russia.  China is a critical participant that has yet to support Russia’s military directly, but it has the capability and, at least partially, the will to provide Russia technology that sanctions have made unavailable from other sources.  It is China’s alliance with Russia and the unknown nature of its future participation that produces the worldwide nature of the conflict.  The Russian allies all have local enemies with whom armed hostilities are possible.  They all see Ukraine’s allies as economic and political threats, if not outright enemies.

In World War II, Britain attained “its finest hour” when it demonstrated in the battle for Briton not that they could win a war with Nazi Germany but that they could not be defeated by Hitler.  Ukraine has attained an equivalent status.  Although a smaller country with a smaller military force and unable to match the Russians with personnel and armaments, it has fought Russia and its allies to at least a draw.  It could do this because of the military assistance provided.  However, that military aid came slowly.  The modern tanks and armored vehicles mostly arrived after Russia was granted time to build vast defensive features that rendered them relatively useless.  Modern aircraft have yet to arrive.  Long-range missiles are scarce and have only recently been provided for fear of further angering Putin.  He has been allowed to commit any atrocities he wishes on the Ukrainian citizenry without Ukraine being free to retaliate against even military targets in Russia. 

The US and its NATO allies seem to believe that there is hope that if they appease Putin he will eventually listen to reason and agree to a tolerable negotiated peace.  The Ukrainians know Putin and realize that belief is absurd.  Instead, Ukraine should be provided whatever advanced conventional weapons are available and be allowed to use them as they see fit in what has become a total war.  And the allies must move quickly.  Putin knows if he holds out until the 2024 presidential election in the US, there is a chance that Trump or some other Republican could be elected president.  Trump has already threatened to leave NATO and withhold support for Ukraine.  Few realize just how anti-democratic the Republican Party has become.  There remain a few wealthy voters who support party candidates because they will protect their wealth.  But the remainder of the Trump voters like Trump because they believe he will kick the asses of the peoples they fear and hate, or they love Putin/Trump because he believes in Christian fascism just as they believe in it as a manifestation of God’s will.  The latter group sees Trump as their instrument.

Timothy Snyder provided, in an article for Foreign Affairs: Ukraine Holds the Future, a concise summary of what is at stake for democracies if they do not stand up to the threat provided by Putin’s war in Ukraine.

“Those who took democracy for granted were sleepwalking toward tyranny. The Ukrainian resistance is the wake-up call.” 

“The history of twentieth-century democracy offers a reminder of what happens when this challenge is not met. Like the period after 1991, the period after 1918 saw the rise and fall of democracy. Today, the turning point (one way or the other) is likely Ukraine; in interwar Europe, it was Czechoslovakia. Like Ukraine in 2022, Czechoslovakia in 1938 was an imperfect multilingual republic in a tough neighborhood. In 1938 and 1939, after European powers chose to appease Nazi Germany at Munich, Hitler’s regime suppressed Czechoslovak democracy through intimidation, unresisted invasion, partition, and annexation. What actually happened in Czechoslovakia was similar to what Russia seems to have planned for Ukraine.  Putin’s rhetoric resembles Hitler’s to the point of plagiarism: both claimed that a neighboring democracy was somehow tyrannical, both appealed to imaginary violations of minority rights as a reason to invade, both argued that a neighboring nation did not really exist and that its state was illegitimate.”

Snyder provides this summary of what is at stake.

“A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of self-rule, allow the integration of Europe to proceed, and empower people of goodwill to return reinvigorated to other global challenges. A Russian victory, by contrast, would extend genocidal policies in Ukraine, subordinate Europeans, and render any vision of a geopolitical European Union obsolete. Should Russia continue its illegal blockade of the Black Sea, it could starve Africans and Asians, who depend on Ukrainian grain, precipitating a durable international crisis that will make it all but impossible to deal with common threats such as climate change. A Russian victory would strengthen fascists and other tyrants, as well as nihilists who see politics as nothing more than a spectacle designed by oligarchs to distract ordinary citizens from the destruction of the world. This war, in other words, is about establishing principles for the twenty-first century. It is about policies of mass death and about the meaning of life in politics. It is about the possibility of a democratic future.”

Putin is this century’s Hitler.

Further reading for those who might be interested:

Meet the Real Vladimir Putin 

Christian Nationalists Work with Russia to CreateFailed States in US and EU

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.