As has happened so many times before in European history, an aggressor’s bombs and tanks are wreaking horror and havoc on a weaker neighbor. This time, the victim is Ukraine, a member state of the United Nations inhabited by 44 million people; the perpetrator is Russia, whose repressive ruler, President Vladimir Putin, insists — contrary to black-letter international law — that Ukraine has no sovereign rights he is bound to respect. Once again, civilized life in this strategically vital continent is being overwhelmed by blood and fire. The conflict may be contained — for the moment — in Europe’s eastern reaches. But it threatens to spread. And once again, the United States is called upon to respond.
MANY AMERICANS may wish, instinctively and understandably, not to get involved in a European war, even indirectly, by levying sanctions on the aggressor, Russia. Such measures could trigger disruptions in energy and financial markets, creating costs for the United States, when we already suffer from problems, ranging from a pandemic to inflation to racial injustice. Certainly this country, its service members — and their families — paid a high price, financial and human, in, and for, Middle Eastern wars that ended without clear victory.
And yet, President Biden is right to answer Mr. Putin robustly, even at some risk to the United States and allied nations, which are also isolating Russia economically and diplomatically. The United States has no mutual defense treaty with Ukraine and, thus, no legal or prudential obligation to protect it with U.S. forces. What we do have is a stake in the peace and stability of Europe, a continent of 740 million people with whom Americans share a long-standing commitment to democracy, innumerable familial ties and more than $1 trillion in annual commerce, upon which millions of jobs depend.
To prevent the continent from falling under the sway of a hostile hegemon — as it almost did in 1914, 1939 and during the Cold War — has been a vital U.S. interest for decades. This is the vital interest for which the United States invested in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other institutions. And it is precisely that vital interest that unchecked Russian aggression would sooner or later undermine, with far higher and more lasting costs to Americans than any that we might sustain from the sanctions and other measures Mr. Biden is contemplating now.
“Security,” “territorial integrity” and “international law” are buzzwords — abstractions. What they connote in practical terms, however, is precious: time and space for people and nations to develop freely. In the three decades that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transatlantic community may have taken peace and freedom for granted. Now comes Mr. Putin to explode any and all such complacency, in his characteristic manner: claiming, grotesquely, that Russia must unleash war on Ukraine because it threatens Russia, when his real fear is that exemplary democratic success in a large, culturally similar, neighbor would undermine his own kleptocratic rule.
He must not get away with it. If the United States — firmly, calmly and in concert with like-minded nations — stands with Ukraine, there is a chance he won’t.
