Russia’s war against Ukraine could turn out to be a bloody prologue to a blood-soaked European aftermath.
By George F. Will
September 25, 2024
The Washington Post
“We have now at last got far enough ahead of barbarism to control it, and to avert it, if only we realize what is afoot and make up our minds in good time.” — Winston Churchill, in a 1938 radio broadcast to the United States
Barbarism is on the ballot this year. About Ukraine’s future, as about everything important, Vice President Kamala Harris is largely uninformative, and perhaps uninformed. Even worse, the Trump-Vance ticket is why Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supporters — such as Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (Donald Trump swoons about his being “strong,” a weak person’s adjective of admiration) — eagerly await Nov. 5, U.S. Election Day. And then winter.
Winter rescued Russia from Napoleon’s aggression and, 129 years later, from Hitler’s. Eighty-three years after that, Putin expects winter to help his aggression succeed. Hence, when his barbarian military is not targeting a children’s hospital, a nursing home or civilians’ apartments, it is degrading energy sources, the life-sustaining infrastructure of modern nations. Ukrainians are scavenging batteries from scrapped Teslas for winter power.
Zoltan Barany, a University of Texas political scientist, writes in the Journal of Democracy that Russia’s military “is a quintessential reflection of the state that created it”: corrupt (a Russian prosecutor “admitted that about a fifth of the Defense Ministry’s budget was stolen; other officials said that it could be as high as two-fifths”), brutal, hyper-centralized and institutionally stupid because it is hostile to debate. And until Feb. 24, 2022, inexperienced: Its engagements in Georgia (where Russian officers had to borrow war correspondents’ cellphones to reach troops), Crimea and Syria were “against feeble adversaries and said zero about how Russian forces would perform in a conventional land war against a resolute, well-armed enemy.” Furthermore, “The 2018 decision to revive the post of zampolit (political officer) in units as small as infantry companies harks back to the Soviet era and signals that the state doubts its soldiers’ loyalty.”
This presidential campaign features the least discussion of national security since the nation’s 1990s, post-Cold War holiday from history. Perhaps even since 1936. This, even though the variety and totality of threats is the worst since 1945.
One candidate seems unaware that it is momentous for a powerful nation to lose a war. Even, perhaps especially, a proxy war, in which the most serious sacrifices — of lives — are done by others. The former commander in chief will not say it is vital for Ukraine to prevail.
Imagine what our watching enemies will conclude if U.S. policy, particularly regarding permission for Ukraine to strike military targets deep in Russia, continues to be timid, tentative and subject to minute presidential calibrations akin to those Lyndon B. Johnson made when personally approving bombing targets in Vietnam.
This timidity exists, even though support for Ukraine is not politically risky. The number of Republican senators and representatives who, deviating from Trump, robustly support U.S. aid to Ukraine, and who this year lost in primaries, is zero.
In France in 1917, U.S. Gen. John Pershing reportedly told Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau: “We are here to fight and be killed. Do with us as you will, without counting.” Many wars later, no U.S. leader would talk like that — or need to, regarding Ukraine.
Today, U.S. credibility, the coin that purchases deterrence, depends on the success of Ukraine, which does the dying. U.S. “sacrifices” are merely material and negligible as a portion of gross domestic product. They do not noticeably subtract from government’s domestic spending because the government’s incontinent borrowing has long since severed the connection between revenue and outlays.
So, if U.S. “sacrifices” are deemed too excruciating to be justified by the goal of preventing the destruction of the geographically largest nation entirely in Europe, we will have earned from Russia and its friends (China, Iran, North Korea) what makes enemies doubly dangerous: contempt.
If Putin succeeds, historians generations hence might designate Russia’s war against Ukraine — as they did, after World War II, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) — the “great rehearsal”: a bloody prologue to a blood-soaked aftermath. The politician and novelist John Buchan, Churchill’s contemporary, said: “You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.” We have been warned, redundantly, by wise leaders and past events, and the sound of cracking glass.
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, “American Happiness and Discontents,” was released in September 2021.