Of late, I am seeing a political position that is common ground for Trumpist Republicans and many leftists, namely an agreement that the United State should not be sending money or other aid to Ukraine, either because said resources are needed at home or the Ukrainian government—and people, in the most pointed criticism—is too corrupt to deserve help. Or, so the argument goes, the presence of extremists on the right—Nazis, as many would put it—makes any support nothing but a promotion of fascism.
It is strange that so many Trumpists in America are disturbed by the notion that there might be fascists in Ukraine, but a large bloc of this country’s far right are still unwilling to accept what their Christian-nationalist, America first movement is. The blood-and-soil marchers in Charlottesville, for example, can hardly be seen as consistent if they attack a foreign country for ethnocentric nationalism.
And how much of a problem is the far right in Ukraine? Much less than what we are experiencing in the United States, if vote percentages are a useful indication. Two-thirds of America’s adult citizens voted in the 2020 election, of which, 46.8 percent supported Donald Trump, suggesting that around a third of this country’s population overall is on the side of that bumbling fascist. By contrast, the highest portion of Ukrainian voters to support similar candidates was 10.4 percent in 2012, dropping to two percent in 2019. Mutatis Mutandis for the differences between the two systems, that still suggests either that the threat of extremists from the right is small in Ukraine—or that the threat in the United States is far greater than many here would like to admit.
But what of corruption in Ukraine? That country ranks 122 out of 180 in the 2021 Transparency International report, with a score of thirty-two out of a hundred for the perception of the cleanliness of its government, which is nothing to celebrate. If Putin and Russia wish to use that as an excuse for their invasion, however, their own rank of 136 out of 180 and score of twenty-nine out of a hundred would seem to justify the movement of forces going in the opposite direction.
The reality is that Ukraine is not perfect, but it has been working to bring itself into the community of modern liberal democracies, a climb out of the deprivations imposed by repression under the Soviet system—the Holodomor famine created by Stalin to break the will of the Ukrainian people being a famous example—and conquests by the Soviets and by Nazi Germany over most of the twentieth century.
I have to question the right wing’s opposition to helping Ukraine when I recall that Trump’s first impeachment came after an attempt to blackmail Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an exchange of military aid for dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden. The Republican Party of my youth—the time of Reagan and George H.W. Bush—had a clear notion of the dangers that the Soviets and later Russia posed to the U.S. George W. Bush may have believed Putin to be trustworthy at first, but even he learned that a grinning snake is unreliable. Unlike those periods in the party’s history, today’s Republicans, I am truly sorry to say, have abandoned any thought of consistency, replacing a platform with one difficult to define purpose: bolstering Donald Trump’s fragile ego. In this substitution for political philosophy, if the president of Ukraine so much as expresses doubts about some whim of Trump, the entire country must be made to suffer—and Putin is made into a hero for carrying out this objective.
As I said above, there are legitimate concerns about extremism and corruption in Ukraine. But an invasion, followed by terror attacks on energy production and population centers when the invasion failed, is a bizarre way to go about encouraging a move toward enlightenment. By analogy, if my home is on fire, my concern is to extinguish the blaze, or failing that, to get its inhabitants and such valuables as I can carry out to safety. I would have no time to check the beliefs and financial practices of anyone inside. Nor would I inquire as to the political ideology of the firefighters who came to my aid.
The war in Ukraine is an opportunity for all the nations of the world to take a stand either for the rule of law, the development of liberal democracy, and the cooperation of nations or against those things. No nation can claim to be perfect. The United States is not, even now, and we certainly had much to develop and more to atone for in 1818, thirty-one years after we established our current system of government. What this war offers us is the chance to promote better governance and greater freedom and opportunity by aiding a country that wants to achieve those characteristics. Or we can abandon Ukraine, leaving the country to Putin and hope that isolationism—the alternative offered by the Republicans and by too many on the left—will allow us to retain some scraps of these blessings.
That the latter approach has never worked in the modern world is something that I commend to everyone’s attention.
It's sad to see the end of the anti-war Left in this country. Instead, we now get apologetics for European fascism, all the while being told the side that doesn't support the fascists *is* fascist.
All in the name of some vital standard of International Unity(TM) that was never an acceptable excuse for arming or fighting other people's wars.
No blood for oil, they said. No blood for self-serving political advantage, either. Liberalism is dead for a generation to come.