Comment: U.S. greatness at heart of why it must support Ukraine

By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion

Surely we have bigger things to worry about than “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” That quote comes from Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of the United Kingdom at the time. He said it in 1938, when Adolf Hitler was about to seize the Sudetenland, part of what was Czechoslovakia. You know what came next.

Now compare that sentiment with some of the notions bandied about today regarding the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. People “have bigger problems than Ukraine,” says Robert Fico, a pro-Russian former prime minister of Slovakia, who just won another election. In the U.S., Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur and aspiring populist firebrand, is more specific: “Why,” he wonders on his own social media platform, “do so many American politicians from both parties care 100 times more about the Ukraine border than the USA border?”

Go ahead and insert your own priority, whatever that may be. Maybe, like Musk, you want the U.S. to focus less on helping Ukraine and more on controlling migration. Or you want dollars slated for Kyiv to go to child and health care instead. Alternatively, you may want to hoard that money to repay the national debt and shrink government spending. Even if you care about foreign policy, you may prefer the U.S. to aim all of its financial ammo at China. No matter where on the spectrum you happen to be, you’re wondering: Why care about that particular quarrel in a faraway country?

The longer the war drags on, the harder to maintain the resolve to help Ukraine. And the biggest question mark hangs over the U.S. as leader of the West. If Washington goes wobbly, so will Europe and the world.

One concern is next year’s election, which may return Donald Trump to the White House. His instincts would be to sell out the Ukrainians for a “deal” with Putin. Another cause for worry is the Republican Party generally, which is split. And behind that tension is a growing rift in the American public.

The divisions within the GOP explain why, over the weekend, Congress had to drop $6 billion in additional aid to Ukraine in order to pass a stopgap measure to avoid a government shutdown. One faction of Republican extremists had in effect held Congress and the White House hostage. They’re still there, planning their next round of mischief.

The American public overall feels by a narrow 55 percent to 45 percent margin that Congress shouldn’t give more money to Kyiv, according to polling in July. Those tallies concealed a big partisan divergence. Whereas 62 percent of Democrats favored continued support for Ukraine, 71 percent of Republicans opposed it, including 76 percent of the party’s conservatives.

They should ponder this timeline of American public opinion between September of 1939 — a year after Chamberlain’s infamous remark — and December of 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II. Until mid-1940, pluralities or majorities of Americans wanted the U.S. to stay out of the war in Europe, even after Hitler invaded Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Only from that point on did they realize that the conflict in Europe, like that in Asia, was not one they could stay out of, and was instead one they had to help their allies win.

One problem then as now is a failure of imagination, which overlooks potential connections across time between disparate events, especially in “faraway” places. A Serbian hothead pops off a Habsburg archduke during a trip to the Balkans in 1914: Why should I care in Iowa? And yet, somehow, I end up fighting in Europe to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Another trap is false dichotomies. Nobody should pretend there’s a trade-off between restoring order at the U.S.-Mexican border and resisting Putin’s genocide in Ukraine, just as nobody would dream of either fighting cancer or developing covid vaccines; or, at a personal level, either putting on seat belts or quitting smoking.

Those Ukraine skeptics who are now posing as oh-so-precise bean-counters about the costs of U.S. support should instead heed the lessons from those polls during World War II. When you veto an aid package to Kyiv now, you’re not actually freeing up funds for something else you hold dear. You’re adding to your own liabilities tomorrow in money and possibly blood. Stopping Hitler in 1938 would have been incalculably cheaper in both currencies than it turned out to be.

What’s happening in the U.S., the West and the world is a battle of narratives not unlike that of the late 1930s. And in this duel of interpretations, the populists are the pied pipers. Here, then, is why all Americans should keep supporting Ukraine.

First, not all foreign conflicts strike at the heart of international law, as encapsulated in the Charter of the United Nations, but Putin’s war of aggression does. He’s a tyrant who attacked an independent and democratic nation in order to absorb it into a revived Russian empire. If he succeeds, he won’t stop in Ukraine. If you doubt that, ask the Moldovans, Estonians, Georgians or others in his neighborhood.

Sending money, ammo and weapons to Ukraine, therefore, is actually the cheapest way to tie down Putin and dissuade him from going further. In terms of net benefits, America and Europe owe the Ukrainians, not the other way around.

Second, Putin isn’t the only one the U.S., by supporting Ukraine, is deterring. His buddies in Beijing, Pyongyang and elsewhere are observing how the Ukrainian conflict pans out. A refusal by Kyiv and the West to give in will make China think twice about attacking Taiwan or the Philippines.

Third, Americans must remember that the U.S., by virtue of its long-dominant position, plays a special role in international affairs. If the world’s hegemon abdicates or rejects that part, as it did between the World Wars, today’s system of states is likely to descend into chaos, and efforts to maintain a modicum of order, and to solve common problems such as climate change, will fail.

This is as true today as it was in 1943, when Chamberlain’s successor as British prime minister, Winston Churchill, spoke at Harvard University about the U.S. role in the world. “The price of greatness is responsibility,” he said. These days, responsibility starts with helping Ukraine to defend itself.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.