It’s a shame that the Republican Party now leans toward abandoning Ukraine to Russian domination and repression, to be reabsorbed into the old Soviet system.
It is, after all, the party of Dwight Eisenhower, who identified the danger of the Cold War, and of Ronald Reagan, who defeated the Soviet Union.
For more than two years, we and our European allies have supplied the Ukrainians with munitions and supplies to stave off an invasion led by the latest Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin. We have agreed to one more round of aid, shiploads more of ammunition and gear. But many still want to drop them.
President Eisenhower, after retiring once as Army chief of staff, was recalled to form and lead NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to keep Europe united and erect a strong barrier against Russia moving west.
After the first great European war, with Germany defeated, America went home to lick its wounds. We thought we had done our job and could afford to dismantle our mighty army, as we had done before.
Twenty years later, we found we had to go back and fight an even greater battle, against a German army let by a madman who sought nothing less than world domination. And we had to fight an aggressive Japan on the Pacific front. It was a challenge we could not afford to ignore; call it our finest hour.
That brought nearly 80 years of not necessarily peace, but of freedom from the massive kind of challenge we saw in both of the so-called World Wars. We fought wars, none more painful than Vietnam, but found ourselves unsuited to fighting without total commitment.
Today, perhaps, it may seem like the fighting in Ukraine is more of the same. But from our vantage point, the situation looks more like 1938. Putin is not Hitler, and his army is nothing like the Wehrmacht that tore through Poland, Belgium, Holland and France in 1939 and 1940. His ambitions, however, appear to be similar enough.
Putin is fixated on restoring at least a measure of the old Soviet glory — and territory — restoring some of what was lost in the fall of the Soviet Union. The world stood by while Putin gobbled up Ukrainian territory in Crimea and now the eastern region of Donetsk.
But his aggression comes at a time when Europe is stronger than is has been in years, and when NATO has more members and more armed strength than before. Its members have upped their defense spending, partly at the prodding of former President Donald Trump, and have come to the aid of Ukraine. So have we.
Now, some Republicans want us to walk away. They say it isn’t our fight; that we must seal our borders. But this isn’t 1939, when a lot of Americans talked the same way. This is the 21st century, and we live in a world that’s far more interrelated, instantly and economically connected, than before.
If no one cares enough to stop Putin today, what will he want next? The Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia? Moldavia? Romania, next south of Ukraine? Or former Russian colonies Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland again?
Fed, he will not be satisfied. There is only one answer to aggression, and the sooner it comes, the less the cost, the less the pain suffering at the hands of evil.
We should have learned that 85 years ago.
— Steve Haynes, The Oberlin Herald
