When It’s Not about Ukraine

H ave you noticed that the advocates of arming Ukraine or further involving the United States and other NATO countries in defending Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity rarely ever talk about Ukraine itself?

We’re told that we can’t allow Russia to have a sphere of influence. What does that mean? Is that something we can decide? Let’s go through some of the basic questions about Ukraine.

Doesn’t Ukraine have a border with Russia? Yes, they have over 1,200 miles of land border. Don’t a significant number of Ukrainians speak the Russian language? Yes, nearly all of them, in fact, though the people who report Russian as their first and primary language is just over a third. And is that one-third of people who have Russian as a mother tongue concentrated geographically? Yes, near that land border. Is that because of historic migration? Yes. So Russia and Ukraine do a lot of trade? Yes historically, but less so recently, in part because Russia’s economy has turned dramatically inward. Does this make Ukraine’s politics particularly unstable? Yes. Doesn’t this have to do with warm-water ports? Oh yes. Russia’s access to Crimea and to the naval port at Sevastopol is a matter over which they’ve engaged in great-power war before now. It allows Russia to project power into the Middle East and prevent invasions from Turkey or through Ukraine.

Having covered the basics, an intelligent person might ask a tough question. So, given Ukraine’s geography and history, its economic connections, internal divisions, and susceptibility to Russian media — it’s relatively easy for Russia to influence or even bully Ukraine? Yes, this happens all the time, really. Russia’s able to influence people who are native to Ukraine.

And then as a follow-up: So detaching Ukraine from the security concerns and economic relationships it has with Russia, and therefore possibly forbidding Russia from accessing Sevastopol, would require utterly extraordinary economic and military commitments from the West, right? Yes, which is why when Ukrainian governments do tilt West, they ask for ironclad things such as EU and NATO membership.

Would giving Ukrainian nationalists everything they asked for change any of the facts about their vulnerability to Russia?

No.

Ukrainian sovereignty and independence turns out to be abject dependence on the West.

As a potential NATO member, Ukraine is basically all liabilities and no benefits, unless like Hunter Biden and other insiders, you get paid by the local oligarchs to continue influencing U.S. policy.

Acknowledging these facts doesn’t “concede” or “grant” a sphere of influence to Vladimir Putin; it is just a matter of consulting an atlas. And understanding what is close, dear, and near to Moscow and what is peripheral, unfamiliar, and treacherous terrain for America to defend from Moscow.

This is why hawks don’t make their case with reference to Ukraine, Russia, and the United States. Instead, Ukraine is conflated with . . . well, everything. We wouldn’t be defending just Ukraine, but “the liberal world order.” What’s that? It’s not our NATO commitments, or our established, agreed-upon trading relationships, but a hazy status quo beyond them. It is the vain wish that Russian power would continue to diminish forever, and that America would progressively take on the responsibility of maintaining the territorial integrity of every nation but its own.

According to these Russia hawks, to not protect Ukraine from Russian subversion is to sacrifice what your grandparents died for at Normandy and Anzio. Writing in Commentary, Brian Stewart holds that Russia enacting its ambitions would “effectively bring down the curtain on the U.S.-led security order that has protected Europe since the end of World War II.”

This is a form of hysteria that holds that if we don’t have everything we want, then we might as well have nothing at all. If we can even speak of just one post-WWII security order in Europe, it is one that has withstood far more difficult challenges than a fight over whether the Khrushchev-era borders of Ukraine are to hold up forever. In the 1950s it survived the previous split between the United States and the United Kingdom over Suez. It survived the Red Army marching into Hungary, nearly 1,000 miles west of where it will be near Sevastopol. In the 1960s it withstood Charles de Gaulle’s intention to leave NATO altogether. Oh — and it survived the 2014 incursion in Ukraine.

Our interest is to avoid a conflict with Russia over matters that it defines as in its core interest, a territory that its own people consider significant to their security interests, and which ours overwhelming do not.

We should also hope to avoid further Russian military action against Ukraine at all. Even if Putin opts for Joe Biden’s “small incursion” — the consequences can be quite serious. The imposition of sanctions, and the subsequent rise of energy prices, could immediately hurt Europe and put to a suddenly perilous test whether Paris and Berlin are as committed to NATO as we are. There is also the fog of war, which took down a Malaysian airliner in the first act of this conflict.

But we have to ask, if we’re not willing to go all the way for Ukraine, what does leading Kyiv on accomplish? Does it make it more likely that Ukrainians will be needlessly killed, thinking that the calvary will ride in to save them? We’ve seen that before, and recently. Just ask the basic questions about Georgia, South Ossetia, and the year 2008.