Ukraine saved the west - why the opposition from America’s Conservative Right? asks Victor Rud

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was met with a standing ovation at last week’s Munich Security Conference (pictured). The U.S. delegation was manifestly bi-partisan.

Although bi-partisan support for American support of Ukraine remains strong, bizarrely there is a growing resistance to it by the Republican Party’s far right. An influential national conservative television news outlet and adhering politicians have turned their back on the historic tenet of their own party -- opposing Russian predation.

The GPS is set by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. His antipathy toward Ukraine and empathy for Putin is palpable, coddling Putin as “embattled” and condemning Ukraine’s President as a “dictator.”

Small wonder that Ukraine’s reclaiming its independence in 1991 meant the end of the Soviet Union. That meant America’s strategic slide was stopped, as it recouped an uncontested global primacy that wasn’t seen since the end of WWII. All logic dictates that Ukraine’s status as an independent democracy be preserved. Why any objections?

Independent Ukraine surrendered the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, larger than that of China, France and Great Britain combined. It was, at US insistence, transferred to Russia, of all places. That was under a democratic President Clinton.

This manifestly was not, as today in Iran, a matter of Washington seeking to forestall simply a prospective nuclear capability. Ukraine also imploded a massive nuclear industrial base and what was the USSR’s largest ICBM plant. Moscow used it to manufacture the missiles it placed in Cuba. How much is all that worth to America . . . and the West? What is America’s credibility, before friend and foe alike, if it walks away? Never again.

On the anniversary of 9/11, having annexed Crimea, Putin uncorked a $100,000 bottle of wine at its famous Masandra winery. It was vintage 1775. Apparently a more in-your-face 1776 was not available. Who do you think poses as ISIS threatening to kill US military families?

Troops from 51 NATO and other allied nations (including Ukraine) had assisted the U.S. in Afghanistan in what was essentially a civil war. In the midst of America’s shambolic capitulation, it was the Ukrainians who rescued Canadian bound refugees in a special ops action outside Kabul airport that Canadian, U.S. and other NATO troops would not or could not perform.

Since 2014, Ukraine has been defending against the invasion by the largest country in the world. Alone.

Since 2014, Ukraine has been facing down a colossus where only one of its sub-regions is larger than Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran (combined) or, if you prefer, larger than France, Spain, Japan, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Greece, Sweden and North Korea (also combined). Ukraine bears the highest military burden of any nation in Europe, even though it is not in NATO. Even when adjusted for the thirteen years difference in aid duration, Ukraine received less than one percent of the military aid we funneled to Afghanistan. Ukraine is not asking for U.S. boots on the ground. It needs weapons to survive. Not blankets.

Ukraine is the fount of one of Europe’s oldest democratic traditions, having written a democratic constitution 77 years before our own. Today, Ukraine is democracy in action, with a vibrant civil society that Russia never had. Securing Ukraine as the democratic anchor in that part of the world will stymie Putin’s ambitions and deflect him inward to address Russia’s looming fault lines. This would allow America to more fully deal with China. Indeed, Ukraine is the tripwire for China invading Taiwan, its continued marauding in the South China Sea, its threat to Japan and more.

Destruction of Ukraine’s sovereignty is a core postulate in Russia’s total warfare doctrine against the West, and most specifically the U.S., going back at least to 1997.

Main image: https://www.president.gov.ua

2nd Image: mil.gov.ua