When the non-NATO nation Ukraine responded to the triggering of NATO’s article 5 by the United States following the horrendous terrorist attacks in 2001 by offering to send her sons and daughters to the front line in Afghanistan, she was probably not expecting to be abandoned by that very ally less than half a century later.
It’s an old truth that you really get to find out about your friends in crisis. Bluff and bluster are easy. It’s when freedom is on the line that we get some truth.
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Just when the strain of the war was showing its effects on the Russian economy and when Ukraine was holding out at the beginning of the fourth year of an unprovoked invasion, when a final push and a committed determination to Ukraine could tilt the balance into a situation favorable to Ukraine, that’s precisely when the US has threatened to exit the European sphere.
The repudiation of the commitment to reject might over right, a cornerstone of the post Second World War-order, has likely left every autocrat in the world in awe of America’s generosity to violence.
The US President has informed the Ukrainians that they are responsible for the attacks they have endured. Now he threatens the demise of the Ukrainian nation itself if Ukrainians won’t comply with his demands. He insists on Ukrainian elections. Never mind that Britain suspended its 1940 election, because that’s what a democratic nation is wise to do when it is under direct attack, fighting for its life.
This is not the first time Ukraine has endured a cold shoulder. In 1991, US President George H.W. Bush arrived in Kyiv to support Ukraine, but to make it clear that the US would not support outright independence. Ukrainians demanded it and implemented it a mere three weeks later, standing up to the combined might of the still considerable Soviet empire and its military capacity. The speech, to this day, is known as the Chicken Kyiv speech, in honor of the famed dish, but also the lack of courage at a critical moment when Ukraine needed the backing of the free.
Ukraine Strikes Russia, Occupied Crimea in Joint Strike
A mere three years later, the US was one of the three guarantor nations, the UK and Russia included, in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. The name is self-explanatory. No amount of legal wrangling over the detail of the text will change the simple fact that in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons, Ukraine believed that it could rely on the signatories to stand with it should it ever be threatened. All of us failed Ukraine in 2014, but at last when a full-scale invasion was launched, we had an opportunity to partially redeem ourselves. In 2022, Ukraine did not ask for a single soldier, it merely requested that its friends come to its aid and defend its right to exist.
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”Originated by: [US Judge Learned Hand]
Last year, when Ukraine faced a critical moment of shortage on the battlefield, with Avdiivka about to fall and the country on the brink of calamity, the US went missing in action for several months, caught up in arguments about border walls, and hobbled by an element within the Republican party who flat out objected to Ukrainian assistance.
Within the recent turn of events has been an abnegation of some of the fundamental ideas and principles that have kept peace in the world for 80 years. Informing the world that Ukraine’s 1991 borders are unrealistic is an unambiguous declaration that if a nation invades another and puts in place sufficient defenses, it is incumbent on everyone else to give up any attempt to prevent this encroachment and that they should declare it legitimate. The repudiation of the commitment to reject might over right, a cornerstone of the post Second World War-order, has likely left every autocrat in the world in awe of America’s generosity to violence.
About America, what comes to my mind right now is an incisive observation by US Judge Learned Hand, who in 1944, said, in another moment of darkness: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.” So too on the international stage; no formal agreements, documents, charters or treaties can ensure that those who believe in the ideals and values of free states will stand together in the moment of need.
One can form alliances, such as NATO, to provide the material and political infrastructure, but ultimately, as Hand recognized, liberty is something that pulses beneath the skin. As it lies in the heart, so its defense lies in trust and the character of your allies.
I have a simple question for my American friends – has the President read The Federalist Papers?
Does liberty lie in the heart of the US? That question is not as clear as many people might have hoped.
Trump exhibits attributes that for many of us are commendably American – his healthy disrespect for convention and that no-nonsense commercial manner which built the nation. It is these that his supporters have embraced. But like a Trojan horse, within them is a man who seems to lack a considered empathy with the founding principles of America.
James Madison incessantly warned and wrote about the dangers of “faction” and the need to subdue it. A person who had read The Federalist Papers would be only too aware that the institutions of free states are a house of cards. They must be handled gently. Behind the tough uncompromising exterior of the leader of a powerful nation must lie a deep and gentle respect for the intricate structures that the American founders assembled, and the character and self-control of a people attuned to the ideas of liberty.
I have a simple question for my American friends – has the President read The Federalist Papers from cover to cover and does he really grasp their essence, their underlying motive? If you are in any doubt about the answer, you need a new President. At a minimum, you need to convince him to read those papers and digest them.
The call of Ukraine is the call of the free and it should resonate with the most basic instincts of Americans.
That other healthy and often invigorating American characteristic, a light touch of the anti-intellectual, has today grown like a cancer, uncontrolled and consuming everything around it. We would do well to remember that many of the founders, Jefferson and Franklin especially, read not merely political philosophy, but science too. Their ideas for an ordered system of liberty were constructed on the notion that a well-educated population was the failsafe of a free republic.
In his enduring tract, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democracy, despite its promise, can lead a people away from its institutions as “it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Equipped with an appreciation of their history, there is no way that a free people cannot have a deep and visceral empathy with a nation fighting for its existence, for a people being attacked as they seek to reach out and secure their independence. The call of Ukraine is the call of the free and it should resonate with the most basic instincts of Americans.
The eve of America’s 250th anniversary of independence is not a time to fail the founders; it should be a time for Americans to reaffirm the values, inspiration and global alliances with which America can help forge a world of liberty.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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