View from the Right: Why should the U.S. defend Ukraine?

With failing policies dimming their 2022 electoral prospects, Democrats have been busy diverting the voters’ attention with claims that a vast right-wing conspiracy is plotting the “end of democracy” in America.

The Jan. 6 Capitol riot was not just a protest that spiraled out of control, but a carefully coordinated conspiracy to reinstall the Great Dictator, Donald Trump. State efforts to set parameters on the myriad new voting methods allowed during the pandemic emergency are characterized as revivals of the Jim Crow statutes of the Old South, designed not to prevent fraud but to suppress minorities. Show an ID to get an absentee ballot? Prevent political operatives from collecting and submitting ballots? That may be fine in most of the socialist European countries Democrats admire, but not in America!

Worrying about the impending demise of American democracy isn’t enough of a diversion, however. Now Democrats, and some of the surviving Republican neo-cons who dragged us into 20 years of fruitless war in the Middle East, are warning that we also need to worry about the end of democracy in Ukraine, a former Soviet state that has been led for a generation by a succession of corrupt “elected,” administrations. Ukraine’s current democratically elected administration, led by President Volodymyr Zalensky, is the descendant of a coup accomplished by violent riots and protests mounted in 2014 against a duly-elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. He was forced to flee the country before compromise early elections could be held, and the corrupt Petro Poroshenko was elected in a landslide.

The current president has bolstered his pro-democracy credentials by suppressing the county’s large Russian minority, closing opposition media outlets, arresting outspoken critics, and indicting Poroshenko when he returned to the country in January. His trial on terrorism and treason charges is pending. Who needs fraudulent votes when you can stay in power by simply eliminating the opposition?

President Biden, once an ardent international interventionist, has long had an interest in Ukraine’s affairs. As President Obama’s vice president, Biden was designated the administration’s point man in Ukraine. He wasted no time working to protect democracy there, threatening to withhold a billion in foreign aid unless the government fired a prosecutor who was investigating an energy company where Biden’s son Hunter served as a well-paid member of the company’s board of directors. The prosecutor was quickly fired and Hunter, a man with no relevant business experience, continued to collect his pay.

To defend democracy in Ukraine, the administration is willing to bring us to the brink with Russia, an economically insignificant country with 6,000 nuclear weapons that now has around 125,000 troops and fleets of armor ringing their small southern neighbor.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is openly nostalgic about the superpower status of the old Soviet Union, grabbed Crimea from Ukraine during the Obama administration after his ally Yanukovych was chased from office. Putin has warned that a faceoff like the Cuban missile crisis is likely if Biden follows through with his threats to punish Russia for any Ukraine invasion.

Let’s have, as the Rolling Stones might put it, some sympathy for the devil. Putin, like Biden, is in need of a diversion from the real problems facing his country. Although he is a ruthless dictator, Putin takes his role as Russia’s protector very seriously. Since the collapse and dismemberment of the USSR, Russia’s world status has diminished. Russia’s economy is now the size of Italy’s, and its population is aging, shrinking and heavily drinking. Despite that diminution, the West has continued to behave as if Russia still poses a visceral threat. NATO, which includes a reunited Germany that in the second world war rolled over much of Russia while fighting against the Americans, British and French, has expanded into former Soviet vassal states in the Balkans and eastern Europe. NATO, comprised of 31 countries with over 3 million troops and personnel dedicated to mutual defense, routinely conducts military exercises not far from the Russian border.

Recall the military measures America took when Soviet-supported communists seized power in a few small countries this hemisphere. The Cuban missile crisis, which Putin recently referenced, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Is saving democracy in undemocratic Ukraine, a country of no strategic importance to the U.S. but of significant concern to Russia, worth such a confrontation? Buffer states can be strategic assets for both sides.

Biden, knowing the American public is in no mood to send troops to another backwater war, has warned that a Russian incursion into Ukraine will carry a “heavy price.”

Although we have heavily armed the Ukrainians, it’s likely that any resistance would melt rapidly away in the face of overwhelming Russian force. Biden’s heavy price will presumably be extracted through economic sanctions, an approach that has failed every time it was tried in the past.

Ukraine, living in the shadow of the Russian bear, has long sought NATO membership. NATO has politely declined. If Europe doesn’t consider Ukraine a worthy object of defense, why should America? And although Putin has presented a list of demands he knows will largely be dismissed by NATO, the alliance could issue a statement dealing with the big one: rule out NATO membership for Ukraine for a decade, as long as Putin agrees to non-intervention in its internal affairs for the same period. The situation will likely be very different in 10 years. Putin and Biden could both pull back from the brink and collect the accolades of their respective supporters.

The Biden administration, still smarting from the humiliating Afghanistan exit last summer, is thirsting for a foreign policy win that will restore the tarnished myth of our doddering president’s foreign policy acumen. If Biden’s bluster fails to successfully defuse the Ukraine crisis, the opposite is more likely to happen.

Martin Fey is a member of the Quiet Corner Tea Party Patriots.

This article originally appeared on The Bulletin: View from the Right: Why should the U.S. defend Ukraine?