Reflections on Ukraine
Max Pollack
I heard, or more accurately overheard, an interesting conversation this past weekend about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I was at a small shop and this woman was talking to the owner when I walked in. She was mentioning how we really shouldn’t be giving Ukraine billions of dollars because “they’re also a bad country”. I am a fairly opinionated person but usually, I know when to keep my mouth shut for the sake of peace but something about this made me feel compelled to reply. I said something about the intelligence the US was getting on Russian weapons and military doctrine along with being able to test a whole bunch of American defense systems. I don’t think she quite understood my point, but I keep thinking about that conversation.
Ukraine certainly has a corrupt government. Some of the corruption is due to the past 30 years of Russian interference in the country, some of it is due to a similar oligarch culture as a lot of the former USSR, and some of it is due to lax anti-corruption laws. But a corrupt government does not mean that we should let Russian flags fly over Kyiv or allow the massacres and mass rapes of Ukrainian civilians to continue.
Another philosophical issue tied to this is the debate over the countries that the US has a special obligation towards. The EU supports Ukraine because of a shared ‘European’ identity (although it really is an anti-Russia European identity). The United States has special promises to protect the national sovereignty of countries within certain alliances (NATO, ANZUS) or with countries we have a previous history of governing or defending (Japan, Philippines, South Korea, Compact of Free Association States) with an exception for Cuba. Others include our fellow liberal democracies (Israel, Sweden, Finland, Taiwan) and the Monroe Doctrine which would theoretically still apply if a European power decided to colonize the Americas again.
Where does Ukraine fit on this list? They are a struggling democracy, but not quite liberal yet. The US is a signatory to the Budapest memorandum in which Russia promised to respect the sovereignty and borders of Ukraine, so there is a previous agreement in place with the United States but it’s nowhere close to a collective defense agreement. So why is Ukraine such a big issue for the Biden administration? Three reasons: intelligence, geopolitics, and ideology.
I have already mentioned the intelligence argument. Every piece of Russian hardware and every troop maneuver is being watched closely by the alphabet soup that makes up the Intelligence Community. Russia has been America’s number one military opposition since WWII, and the number of tanks, helicopters, missile systems, intelligence, and other hardware that has turned out to be crap when compared to current DoD technology is both reassuring and scary. Scary in that it increases the odds that this war will turn nuclear. Reassuring in that a conventional war with Russia would be easily won by American troops. Other western countries are also getting intelligence and practice. The program to train Ukrainian elite troops in the UK is good practice for British forces to train soldiers if there needs to be another draft.
The most famous political adage is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. The post-Maidan Ukrainian government wants to be western aligned. This is better than having a second Belarus situation in Europe. We supported groups with much less moral authority in the Cold War due to their anti-Soviet stances. Russia is no longer communist, but it is still a dictatorship with an anti-western, anti-democratic, and anti-freedom regime. More countries supporting that regime would cause the US to lose soft power. America wants to show that it can support smaller countries militarily to show its allies that they should stick with America. Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan are looking at American support of Ukraine to feel better about tensions with China. Kuwait, the UAE, and Israel are looking in the face of the Iranian threat. The eastern border of NATO is looking at the US in case of further Russian invasion plans. Support of Ukraine will allow the US to restate its hegemony in the West.
Lastly, the Ukrainian government in power is western aligned in thought. Zelenskyy declared martial law and has done things like ban opposition parties, but this is understandable when there is total war in the country. Situations such as wide-scale invasions are why martial law exists.
American ideology is one that encourages human rights and democracy. While we aren’t a perfect country and often do bad things, we have stuck to that goal pretty well. Our allies are the freest in the world, and our enemies tend to be the worst human rights abusers in the world. There are human rights-abusing countries that the US supports such as Saudi Arabia and South Sudan. The countries that America has historically provided support to in Europe, and East Asia all have good traditions of freedom. Grenada has had a stable and democratic government since Operation Urgent Fury in the 80s. The future rebuilding of Ukraine after the invasion is over will allow the US and the EU to help shape a more democratic Ukraine. If done right, there will emerge a New Ukraine that is stable, sovereign, and free that will eventually join the EU and NATO. I am unsure of which future this war is heading to, but that is the best outcome. America has a duty to Ukraine to ensure that it cannot only rebuild physically after the war but heal and improve. If the moral argument doesn’t work, I am sure American construction companies have a few words to say about future rebuilding contracts.
I doubt anyone reading this needs an argument for whichever side they support in the invasion of Ukraine. But there are still people who listen to figures like Tucker Carlson who obfuscate the reality on the ground. Most countries have the right to sovereignty and the US proved that defending sovereignty is a cause of war in the First Gulf War. Kuwait is a monarchy and not the freedom-loving type, but we defended them from an unjust Iraqi invasion. How much more so of a cause do we in the West have to support Ukraine from Russian invasion?
I doubt the woman in that story is a PWAD major or sees things from a national security perspective. But the Biden administration needs to do a better job explaining why aid packages are needed for Ukraine. America is increasingly divided and supporting Ukraine should be unifying yet it is not. Either politics as a whole is divisive beyond anything since the 1960s (or maybe the 1860s), or the messaging is off. And I would much rather end these blaming misconceptions on bad messaging. There is no justification for the behavior of the Russian government and Vladimir Putin. The fate of Ukraine, not just as a political entity but as a culture, language, and ethnicity lies at a crossroads. The fate of the Ukrainian people lies at a crossroads in this invasion. The images of Bucha are just going to be the tip of war crimes that will come out. If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk…and if you give Putin Ukraine….