The ‘Right’ View by Francis P. Sempa

The Ukraine Lobby Appeals to Our Hearts, Not Our Interests

Earlier in the Russia-Ukraine War, U.S. politicians and observers who sought to convince the American people that we should make Ukraine our proxy against Russia portrayed the conflict as necessary to stop Vladimir Putin’s armies from overrunning Western Europe. After Ukraine, we were told, the Baltic states or Poland would be next. Then other NATO countries would fall. And soon, Russian tanks would be staring across the English Channel reminiscent of the Nazi blitzkrieg of 1940. In this scenario, Putin was Hitler, Zelensky was Churchill. It was, we were told, a Munich moment.

Three years later, the war in Ukraine resembles not World War II’s blitzkrieg so much as the western front of the First World War—a grinding, pounding war of attrition that has cost countless Ukrainian and Russian lives. Russia has captured some eastern provinces of Ukraine (they captured Crimea in 2014) but they are not poised to overrun western Europe (nor is there any evidence that Putin seeks to do that). The Munich analogy was always a stretch, but you don’t read or hear much about that anymore. The pro-Ukraine lobby has shifted from appealing to our supposed strategic interests to appealing to our hearts.

Recently, war correspondents writing in “National Review” and “Tablet” have shared heart-wrenching reports about the suffering, courage and heroic fortitude of the Ukrainian people in the face of Russian aggression. Both articles dismiss President Trump’s peace plan as too accommodationist toward Russia. But the thrust of both articles is to convince the American people that the “free” people of Ukraine deserve American help. In “Tablet,” Park MacDougald writes: “People who are willing to fight and die to defend their freedoms from barbarians are exactly the kinds of allies that America needs, and should seek, anywhere and everywhere around the world, to keep the world from descending into slavery.” In “National Review,” Mark Antonio Wright claims that “Americans should see Ukraine as a model ally” because “Ukrainians are willing to fight” and “have proven their willingness to sacrifice and pay the price for their own freedom.”

So, the MacDougald-Wright doctrine repeats the mantra of the Truman Doctrine of 1947: Whenever and wherever free peoples are under attack by bad guys, the United States should come to their defense. At least in Truman’s case, the bad guy was our principal strategic adversary (Stalin’s soviet Union), but even Truman’s doctrine was rightly criticized by George Kennan and Walter Lippmann as a “strategic monstrosity” that would stretch thin U.S. resources. Defending “free peoples” anywhere and everywhere is a tall task even for a superpower. Significantly, neither MacDougald nor Wright provides a convincing strategic argument for continuing the war until Russia leaves all of Ukraine—which is Ukraine’s condition for ending the war.

Instead, what we mostly get from MacDougald and Wright are stories of Ukrainians suffering and dying, the destruction inflicted on Ukraine by the Russians, and the heroic defense of their country by ordinary Ukrainians. All of that is true, but also irrelevant to U.S. strategic interests. What neither article provides is a convincing argument that the defense and independence of Ukraine is a vital American interest. What neither article provides is a convincing argument that more U.S. assistance will transform the war into a Ukrainian victory. What neither article provides is that getting more involved in this war is worth the risk of getting the U.S. involved in a kinetic war with Russia.

Appeals to the heart are apparently the last refuge of Wilsonian interventionism. We have seen this before. In Bosnia, we bombed the bad guys for humanitarian, not strategic, reasons. In Iraq, after the weapons of mass destruction argument proved erroneous, the Bush administration fell back on spreading freedom and democracy to continue the war. Other neo-Wilsonians came up with the notion that America has a broader “responsibility to protect” (R2P) other nations. R2P is in essence the position of the pro-Ukraine lobby, including MacDougald and Wright.

The idea that the United States has a responsibility to protect free peoples “anywhere and everywhere” under attack by international aggressors is a recipe for more endless wars. Instead, we should remember and abide by the wise counsel of John Quincy Adams, perhaps our greatest Secretary of State, who said that America was the “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but the “champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Francis P. Sempa is the author of the books “Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century” and “America’s Global Role,” He is a contributing editor to “The American Spectator” and writes a regular column for “Real Clear Defense.”