Ukraine needs our strong support, not DeSantis’ weak rhetoric | Editorial

Almost nothing has gone well for Vladimir Putin since he invaded Ukraine.

He counted on dispatching his victim as swiftly as Hitler’s blitzkrieg did to Poland in 1941, but a different history has unfolded. The Ukrainian people are as united, heroic and implacable in their resistance as the Russians themselves were to Nazi Germany. And like Hitler, Putin dares not let his own people know how many of them he has sent to slaughter and how much of their costly war materiel he has lost.

His geopolitical goals are backfiring. Russia’s performance broadcasts military incompetence, not shock and awe. Far from being demoralized and divided in the face of aggression, NATO is more unified and resolute. Sweden and Finland are clamoring to join the alliance, realizing one of Putin’s worst fears. Poland has raised its stake by offering MIG fighter jets to Ukraine. The International Criminal Court is accusing Putin personally of war crimes.

‘A territorial dispute’

But at long last, some good news for Putin comes from Gov. Ron DeSantis, the still-unannounced No. 1 rival to Donald Trump for next year’s Republican presidential nomination.

In a statement to the isolationist Fox propagandist Tucker Carlson, Florida’s governor said that helping Ukraine is not a vital national interest for the U.S. because it’s only a “territorial dispute.”

Those weasel words put DeSantis in the same isolationist camp as Donald Trump, and they open up the governor to legitimate criticism that after being a defense hawk in Congress, including supporting he’s flip-flopping for political expediency.

Reducing the war in Ukraine to a border dispute tells Europe’s most ruthless warmonger since Hitler that he should keep the war going long enough for one or the other of his American apologists to be elected.

Then, Putin may hope, the leader of the free world will betray it. Then Trump or DeSantis will force Ukraine to dismember itself much as Britain and France compelled Czechoslovakia to submit to Hitler in the prelude to World War II, a deal that made “Munich” synonymous with betrayal.

Vital to U.S. interests

The U.S. has a clear and vital national interest in helping Ukraine, or any other nation targeted by Putin, which is why our support for aiding Ukraine has strong bipartisan support in a deeply divided Congress.

To lightly gloss over Putin’s murderous rampage as a “territorial dispute” plays as fast and loose with semantics as DeSantis’s claim that he’s fostering “freedom” in a Florida that’s rapidly eviscerating it.

That’s as if Hitler’s demand for Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was only a “territorial dispute.” Was North Korea’s invasion of the South just a “territorial dispute?” Was it a “territorial dispute” when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait?

A column in the conservative National Review said the invasion of Ukraine is a “‘dispute’ over territory in the same way that a bank robber and depositor have a ‘dispute’ over money.”

The U.S. has engaged in wars where we had no rational interest, with horrific consequences. Take Vietnam. It was a civil war in which Ho Chi Minh, the communist North’s leader, had no ambition beyond unifying his country.

There turned out to be no weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which wound up empowering Iran, an actual foe.

Standing up to Putin

European history, and Russia’s insatiable aggrandizing ambitions, demonstrate why Ukraine is where a line must be drawn and defended. Putin wants to reduce it to the slave state that it was under Stalin. He wants to destroy NATO, and with it the ability of united democracies to resist anything else he might do.

The help that Ukraine seeks and needs is limited to political and materiel support, and we should be unstinting in providing it.

Henry Olsen, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post, wrote cogently that the stakes go beyond Europe.

“U.S. security rests on a firm network of alliances that can bottle our adversaries and ensure that global economic power is under American influence,” Olsen wrote. “DeSantis fails to understand that a tighter alliance with Europe is essential to winning the fight he prioritizes: the global competition with China.”

Or perhaps DeSantis does understand it, but simply craves the presidency more than he cares for anything else.

The more sober, internationalist wing of the Republican Party, represented by Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence, among others, have been unequivocal in calling out DeSantis’s apostasy. It makes even clearer the need for a GOP nominee other than Trump or DeSantis.

A stubborn streak of uninformed isolationism is part of America’s history. The aviator Charles Lindbergh was the most visible face of the so-called “America First” movement during World War II. In congressional testimony, he strongly opposed FDR’s Lend-Lease program that was essential to Britain’s survival in the darkest hours of that war and the London blitz.

Fortunately for the free world, Congress stood up to Hitler rather than concede Europe to him.

It is much the same today with Russia and Ukraine. This is no time to give up.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Page Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com .