Why Ukraine Matters

George Weigel has an essay at First Things (Subscription may be required) in which he explores the meaning of the Ukraine war - for Ukraine, for Russia and for the West, including the U.S. He writes:

So what does Ukraine mean? What has the Russian war on Ukraine this past year revealed?

What Ukraine means for world politics is that the seemingly stable post–Cold War settlement in Europe was in fact a truce.

What Ukraine means for Russia is that its political culture is suffering from a false historical-cultural narrative that has metastasized into a form of paranoia, accelerating the country’s descent into kleptocratic autocracy and international pariah status.

What Ukraine means for Ukraine is that an impressive process of nation-building, which has accelerated since 2013, must be continued and intensified amid a war for national survival.

What Ukraine means for the United States is that there is no holiday from history and no escape from world politics for America and Americans.

At the macro level of world politics, the Russian war on Ukraine has falsified the post–Cold War conviction of many in Western Europe, and some in North America, that a Europe without wars was possible. Perhaps there would be occasional flare-ups in the ever-restive Balkans. But big wars between big states were a thing of the past, it was thought, because alternative security arrangements, underwritten by economic interdependence, were securely in place.

A war whose stated purpose was the restoration of Russian greatness has become the war that has finally stripped the mask from post-Soviet Russian corruption, incompetence, and self-delusion, while further exposing the extraordinary social and cultural damage done to Russia by seventy-four years of communism.

It has also shown the Russian leadership for the savages that they are. Deliberately bombing apartment complexes and schools, shooting unarmed civilians, kidnapping and transporting thousands of children from Ukraine back to Russia, and ghastly tortures of civilians and soldiers:

As Oleksandra Matviichuk, executive director of the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, told Jay Nordlinger, Ukrainians are fighting, not just for the territory that is historically theirs, but for the people living in those areas:

This war started not in February 2022 but in February 2014 [when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and occupied parts of eastern and southern Ukraine] . . . I am very aware of what Russians did to people in the occupied territories. I have interviewed hundreds of people. They have told me how they were beaten, how they were raped, how their fingers were cut off, how they were crammed into wooden boxes, how they were tortured with electricity. One lady reported that her eyes were dug out with a spoon. We will never leave our people alone in these occupied territories. It would be inhuman to leave them . . .

In a recent op-ed that Weigel excerpts, Sen. Tom Cotton explains why the U.S. must help the Ukrainians:

We should back Ukraine to the hilt because the likeliest alternative isn’t peace, but rather another “frozen conflict” that favors Russia and harms our interests. Russia would retain key strategic terrain and much of Ukraine’s industry and agriculture. Food and energy prices would remain high, potentially starving many nations and exacerbating the migrant crisis in the West.

Meanwhile, Russia could rebuild its strength and seize the rest of Ukraine when the opportunity arose. Such an outcome would create millions more Ukrainian refugees, drive inflation higher, and worsen supply-chain disruptions. Russia would also extend its border deep into Europe. Next on the chopping block would be Moldova, site of another frozen conflict. And after that, a NATO nation.

Stopping Russia also will allow the U.S. to focus on the greater threat from China. A Russian victory would force us to divert more resources for a longer time to Europe to deter Russian expansionism, creating persistent threats on both fronts. But a Ukrainian victory and a durable peace will secure our European flank as we confront China.

This excerpt doesn't mention it, but the United States also has a moral obligation to help Ukraine by the fact that we strongly urged Ukraine to give back to Russia the nuclear arsenal that the Soviets had placed there during the cold war.

The Budapest Memorandum (1994) that we pressured Ukraine to sign, and which was also signed by the U.K., Russia, et al. guaranteed that Russia would respect Ukraine's borders in exchange for the nuclear weapons that were left on its soil after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1990-1991). Russia clearly violated the memorandum in 2014 when they first invaded Ukraine, sending a stark message to the nations of the world that if they have nukes they better not give them up, and if they don't have them they better get them.

Russia's further invasion in 2022 imposes on us a responsibility, having been largely responsible for Ukraine's having forfeited a potential nuclear deterrent, to help provide Ukraine with the resources - short of actual troops - necessary to repel the Memorandum's violaters.

Weigel continues:

America is not going to be great, stay great, or become great again — choose your slogan — if we do not soberly face the reality that America’s interests are deeply implicated in the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Rebuffing Putin’s aggression and sustaining Ukrainian sovereignty will make the world, and Americans, safer, while demonstrating to China that the mature democracies that are the backbone of a decent global order have not decayed into fecklessness.

Western civilization is suffering from a wasting disease of self-absorption, based on defective ideas of the human person, human community, and human happiness. The dominant cultural forces in the West insist that we are mere bundles of desires, all of which are morally commensurable or equal; that the gratification of those desires is the meaning of happiness; and that seeing to the satisfaction of those desires is, in the name of human rights, the primary responsibility of the state.

Meanwhile, woke culture, spreading out from our institutions of higher learning like a plague and infecting the bureaucracies of the administrative state, is creating a society of silos in which race-mania, “gender identity,” and “isms” of all sorts are somehow supposed to foster living in solidarity, although they are fostering precisely the opposite: social fragmentation leading to perilously high levels of mental illness, violence, and public irrationality.

Over the past year, Ukraine and Ukrainians have provided the West with an alternative vision of the human condition.

By looking death in the eye and refusing to flinch, Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, have reminded the West that we are more than our subjectivity — that we can know, embrace, and live by truths greater than “me.” We can make sacrifices. We can exhibit courage. We can refuse to be mastered by evil. We can live in a solidarity that is based on the truths built into the world and into us.

Such courage and character deserve our support.