One Year Later, the Case for U.S. Support of Ukraine Remains Strong

T he one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has arrived, and the conflict shows no sign of ending. This week, President Biden made an unannounced visit to Kyiv to show solidarity with the Ukrainian government and armed forces. David Goldman at the Hoover Institute asks the important question of what the United States’ strategic interests in Ukraine are — and how might they affect the policy of the American republic regarding the ongoing war there. The Biden administration’s inconsistent behavior regarding the conflict, and the inconsistent rhetoric used by much of the diplomatic establishment in Washington in discussing it, have left the United States with rather bleak potential outcomes.

“Having stumbled into a war for which it was poorly prepared, and having then failed to crush the Russian economy through sanctions, the United States faces a dilemma,” Goldman notes. A potential cease-fire would allow Russia “to claim success in its annexation of Ukrainian territory.” A prolonged war of attrition would likely “reduce Ukraine to dysfunctionality” end in a Russian victory. The most probable outcome, Goldman believes, is “a humiliating armistice.”

According to Goldman, the United States’ Ukraine situation is the result of “Utopian illusions about exporting democracy.” These illusions, he writes, have “motivated America’s great blunders of the past generation, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Syria, and ultimately Ukraine.” Goldman is right to doubt the helpfulness of a foreign policy driven by ideology. But if not ideology, what justification does the United States have for helping a nation fight to retain its sovereignty when faced with a violent aggressor?

The answer is a healthy dose of realpolitik.

Russia’s invasion has destabilized all of Europe. Strengthening NATO partners and pushing some, such as Germany, to act more responsibly would be a more constructive use of the United States’ time than blustering about regime change in the Kremlin or the breakup of the Russian Federation, neither of which is in the United States’ interest.

PHOTOS: Russia-Ukraine War

Throughout America’s history, U.S. policy-makers recognized that Russia’s geographic scale, its larger population, and its military strength deserved to be taken seriously — even respected. Indeed, Catherine the Great was among the first sovereigns in Europe to recognize the United States as an independent country, and the United States and Russia maintained a mutual respect even as they used each other for their own interests.

Abraham Lincoln, for example, used Russia to his advantage in the American Civil War. Liberal Western countries such as France and Great Britain acted to check Russian aggression in the middle of the 19th century, while at the same time giving passive support to the American Confederacy. Czar Alexander II feared Britain and France would try to bottle up the Russian navy in the Baltic and Black Seas, so he asked the American government to allow the Imperial Navy to winter in American ports. Lincoln agreed, and the latter half of 1863 saw Russian navy officers entertained in Boston and New York City. American ships had their bands play the Russian national anthem, and balls were held in New York City for Russian officers.

This geniality did not stem from a belief that Russia was a U.S. ally. It stemmed from Russia’s willingness to stand against the doctrine of secession. The czar saw the Confederacy as similar to Polish patriots who routinely rose in revolt in their homeland — then a mere province of the Russian empire — and was more supportive of Lincoln than the rest of Europe was. Lincoln placed the best interests of the United States first, and he believed that accommodating the autocrat Alexander was consistent with those interests.

Throughout the last 200 years, the United States has followed a pattern of accommodating Russia when accommodation was useful for the U.S. (as in both World Wars) and remaining hostile to Russia when it threatened our interests (as in the case of the Cold War). Yet even when the U.S. has accommodated Russia, Americans have looked warily at the Russian tendency to rule other nations through the raw power of its military and autocracy.

Americans have always been sympathetic to quests for national self-determination and the principle of national sovereignty. John O’Sullivan, a journalist in 1830s New York City, argued that the United States had been chosen for the “blessed mission” of destroying autocracy, oligarchy, and all the hierarchies of the Old World that kept nations oppressed. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his plan for the League of Nations sought to actualize national self-determination across Europe. George W. Bush believed that the United States could end tyranny. America’s aspirations, however, were almost always coupled with policy-makers who offered a realistic vision for how the United States should interact with autocratic tyranny. John Quincy Adams’ famous caution that the United States should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy has been echoed by policy-makers for more than 150 years.

Sober-minded thinking on the Russian invasion has been hard to come by. Unfortunately, like nearly every issue in American society, the war has been broken down along partisan lines. The politicization of the 2016 election and the threadbare Russian-collusion accusations have threatened the ability of U.S. policy-makers to interact responsibly with Russia. Both Left and Right are increasingly unable to view the United States’ relationship with Russia with the necessary clear-eyed seriousness, and Ukraine’s American defenders and critics alike have sometimes struggled to articulate a coherent position. There are, however, good reasons to support Ukrainian national self-determination.

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has relied largely on dictatorship and its remaining — but decaying — military power to maintain its seat at the table of great powers. In the last decade, as Hudson Institute’s Rebecca Heinrich notes, Russia has increasingly turned to Communist China, the United States’ chief geopolitical foe, for diplomatic and military support.

The preservation of NATO as the chief alliance defending Western democracy is also a genuine interest for the United States. Germany’s military and diplomatic weakness has emboldened Russia to test NATO’s resolve. While it’s not in the interest of the United States to engage Russia in a ground war, it is in the United States’ interest to show Russia that at least a few liberal democracies — Great Britain, the United States, and France — will not be tested with impunity.

Most skeptics of American involvement in halting Russia’s invasion still acknowledge the salient fact that Russia and Ukraine are far from moral equivalents. “Liberal democracy and communist totalitarianism are two sharply different regimes,” R.R. Reno notes in First Things, “To say the least, the former is greatly to be preferred.” As Reno observes, NATO countries “offer a much better setting for human flourishing than does an authoritarian Russia. . . . We should have no doubts about which side we’re on.”

Finally, while the United States is not an indispensable nation in either a moral or metaphysical sense, it currently occupies the role of a nearly imperial defender of the Western world from forces of autocracy — and in particular from those in Beijing and Moscow. At the end of the 20th century, Russell Kirk argued, “America plays today the role that was Britain’s at the end of the eighteenth century: like the English then, we Americans have become, without willing it, the defenders of civilization against the enemies of order and justice and freedom.” The United States, Kirk added, has “imperial duties, requiring imperial intellects for their performance.” Until European allies are prompted to take a larger role in the defense of liberal democracy, it will fall to the United States to defend it, whether we like it or not.

Today, liberalism and democracy are increasingly seen as useless relics in some corners of the Western democracies, including the United States. In defending Ukraine, the United States has chosen to defend Western liberalism. Niall Ferguson, in his 2002 work Empire, argued that “the United States has — whether it admits it or not — taken up some kind of global burden.” The American republic, he wrote, “considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas.” Many Americans may understandably chafe at bearing this “burden” of defending capitalism and democracy, but the U.S. has nevertheless chosen to do so for seven decades, and choosing to stop now would have disastrous consequences both for our nation and the world. And that reality alone is reason enough to justify our continued support for Ukraine.