The (sort of) isolationist case for backing Ukraine
J.D. Vance, a senator from Ohio, is tired of having Neville Chamberlain and Munich thrown in his face. A member of the Republicans’ sort-of-isolationist faction (it depends on the conflict), Mr Vance rose recently in the Senate chamber to scold some of his colleagues not only for seeking military aid for Ukraine but also for lacking his erudition. “What happened to our education system that the only historical analogy we can use in this chamber is World War Two?” he asked, not without petulance.
Mr Vance preferred to point to the first world war, when, in his telling, “We didn’t de-escalate conflict when we had the opportunity.” Sure, Mr Vance acknowledged, Russia’s president is a “bad guy”, but, “Why is it that we think Vladimir Putin, who has struggled to fight against the Ukrainians, is somehow going to be able to march all the way to Berlin when he can’t conquer a country immediately to his east?”
Mr Putin’s failure so far to march farther, at least according to the Ukrainians, is in no small part a consequence of American help. Mr Putin has made his ambitions plain. One of his close allies, Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, warned in early November of “the death of Polish statehood” if that country continued to oppose Russia. “History has more than once delivered a merciless verdict to the presumptuous Poles,” he observed. Count Mr Medvedev in the second-world-war analogy camp.
2023-11-23 10:08:13
Article from www.economist.com
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