Infamy

Yesterday, February 24, marked the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was an infamous day at the United Nations — an infamous day for the United States, in my judgment. Ukraine offered a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression and calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. The resolution passed 93 to 18. But the United States voted against it. So did Israel. So did Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Nicaragua. (And Hungary, needless to say.)

The United States and Israel? Thus did lights unto the nations join the dark side.

There was another vote, on the Security Council. The United States offered a soft resolution, simply calling for a “swift end to the conflict.” Again, Russia voted with us. So did China. Very comforting. Russia and China are enemies of the United States. Our allies — Britain, France, Denmark, etc. — abstained.

I admire them for doing that.

Marco Rubio said, “We didn’t feel it was conducive, frankly, to have something out there at the U.N. that’s antagonistic to either side.” I recall a phrase, from the conservative past: “moral equivalence.” If a Democratic secretary of state had talked the way Rubio has, we would have flayed him.

A realistic foreign policy does not require the abandonment of truth, or moral sense — or realism.

• The American president has blamed Ukraine for the war. Has said that Ukraine started it. He has also called Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a dictator. He has said no such thing about Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Dmitry Peskov is the Kremlin’s spokesman. Is our president bidding to put him out of a job?

• From a news story:

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz both declined to explicitly name Russia as the aggressor in Fox News interviews. Hegseth referred to the war as “a very complicated situation” when asked if Russia attacked Ukraine unprovoked.

The headline of another news story: “Trump’s No. 2 Pentagon pick won’t say if Russia invaded Ukraine.”

Time was, Republicans prided themselves on their moral clarity, in contrast with the fuzziness and moral relativism of the Left. It was not so long ago, really.

• I recall what Arthur Waldron once told me. He is the China scholar who has had a long career at Penn. He was at Princeton once, however. And he got into trouble for saying that the Korean War started when the North invaded the South. Which is like saying that Wednesday follows Tuesday. But which is controversial in some environments.

• Konstantin Sonin is an eminent scholar at the University of Chicago, a Moscow-born economist. To the Wall Street Journal, he said something highly interesting: “Intellectuals in America a century ago imagined and admired a Soviet Union that never existed — a country of equality, of development, of arts and freedom.” Today, the “American right wing” (as he puts it) “imagines a Russia that doesn’t exist in the real world, a place that is conservative, upholds family values and liberties.”

• A question, now pressing upon us: Who will lead the West? If America leaves a vacuum, who will fill it? (“The West” is not a geographical term, as you know, but a political and philosophical one.) Who will lead the Free World? Who will stand for “Western values,” as we said in the old days?

One such value is: Might does not make right. Big powers have no right to erase smaller powers. International borders should not be redrawn by force.

A single country could not take the place of America. But a cluster of countries — a cluster of liberal democracies, confident in their values and armed to the teeth — could make a significant contribution.

• In the Republican Party, there are dissenters from the administration line. Here is a congressman from Pennsylvania:

Here is a congressman from South Carolina:

Here is a senator from Louisiana:

Here is a senator from Utah:

I have reason to believe that others agree with these men but fear speaking up. May they get bolder. Freedom, democracy, and the rule of law — “Western values,” to return to that musty phrase — need all the friends they can get.