Why Ukraine Matters: Tyranny, Like Freedom, Can Be Contagious
2/23/22
Russian troops and tanks have rumbled into Eastern Ukraine and seem poised to crash into the remainder of Ukraine at any moment. Russia’s authoritarian leader, former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, appears bent on deposing Ukraine’s legitimate government and installing a puppet regime that will do as the Kremlin requires going forward. Many Americans just don’t give a damn.
They are right. And oh, so wrong.
Let’s consider why we should care little if Russia’s tin pot dictator should use the Russian army to sweep aside Ukrainian defenders and the current Ukrainian government so that he can install his own underlings to run the country and bring it back into Russia’s orbit.
Ukraine has the 55th largest economy in the world, just ahead of Hungary and just behind Kazakhstan, among the 216 nations counted in one recent survey. Its resources largely include raising cereal grains and producing and repairing and converting Soviet-era conventional weapons to state-of-the-art tools of war. Its politics have been marked with scandal since it broke away from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1990. It is the second largest country in Europe in land size (Russia is first), although it is no way near as large as depicted in the boardgame Risk you may have played in your youth. It ranks 8th in population among European nations. It has been rated as the poorest and the most corrupt nation in Europe by some. It has already lost its major port, its primary energy resource and its heaviest industrial base to prior Russian invasions in February and March of 2014, 13 months into the Obama-Biden administration.
Ukraine has the misfortune to lie between combative empires for thousands of years. Its Black Sea coast, forests and fertile grasslands have been settled by Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Goths, Huns and Khazars as well as perhaps a dozen other groups that came and went or came and stayed over the course of the last three millennia. It was the site of one of the largest genocides of the 20th century, the Holodomor, when Communist forces starved and otherwise murdered perhaps 4 million Ukrainians (15% of the population) as the Soviet regime beat the people of Ukraine into submission after the fighting died down in the Russian Civil War of 1917-22 and the Russian-Polish War of 1919-1921.
Ukraine was a great battlefield in the epic struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union from 1941 through 1944, first when German forces swept through the region in the second half of 1941 and then again when Soviet forces broke the back of the invading German army in significant part on Ukrainian soil in 1943-44. Ukraine became a hub of Soviet arms manufacturing during the Cold War and the home to about 2,000 nuclear weapons controlled by the Soviet military establishment. The Crimean section of Ukraine was the home of the Soviet Black Seas fleet from the end of World War II until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90.
Ukraine is half a world away. It has but a small trading relationship with the United States. Its fall will not add greatly to the material wealth of our rivals. Gas prices likely will not rise long term if it becomes a new Russian fiefdom. The Ukrainian Orthodox churches in the United States will not close their doors. While there may be weeping and anger in the Ukrainian American community, life on Main Street USA will continue pretty much as before.
But for how long? Should that be the end of the conversation? Why should we care if for the third time in less than a decade an authoritarian despot ignores principles of international law and invades a neighboring country bent on changing its border or its government or both? The answer requires that we shift our gaze from a single moment in time and a single smallish nation to the broader sweep of history and the centuries-old conflict between freedom and authoritarianism.
The United States has the distinction, and with it comes the responsibility, of being the first significant nation to recognize the natural law principles of individual freedom and open consent being the source of all legitimate government power. Since the first shots of the American Revolution were fired in the spring of 1775 through to the present day, the United States has born a special duty to symbolize and defend individual liberty and human dignity in the world. That is a task that sometimes has called the nation to war. More often, it has called us to defend with other deeds and clear words the principles of self-determination, rule of law and to open covenants that best serve to promote peace and prosperity in the world.
One of the most important foundation stones of any free system of government, such as our constitutional democracy, is a societal respect for the rule of law. The Anglo-American tradition in that regard stretches back for many centuries, perhaps as far as Magna Charta, perhaps even to the Roman Republic. Respect for the rule of law, acknowledgement that even (or especially) the government is subject to the limitations set forth in the law may be the most important missing element in recent efforts to jumpstart democratic transitions in nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The absence of this sort of regard for legal precedent, statutes, and constitutional limits on the power of government undergirds all the authoritarian regimes now in power. With this in mind it is worth revisiting the collapse of the Soviet Union and an agreement struck between the United States, the United Kingdom. Ukraine and Russia memorialized in the Budapest Memorandum of December 5, 1994. http://www.pircenter.org/media/content/files/12/13943175580.pdf
At the heart of the Budapest Memorandum was the question of how to deal with the 1,700 nuclear warheads (and 176 ICBMs) Ukraine found in its possession after achieving its independence from the Soviet Union. Broadly stated, the four signatories agreed that Ukraine would ship the nukes to Russia for decommissioning. The United States would pay for that effort and Russia, the UK and the United States would agree to respect the borders and territorial integrity of the newly independent Ukrainian nation.
Russia clearly breached this agreement in 2014 with its invasion of Crimea, and with its apparent dispatch of Russian weapons and soldiers wearing uniforms without national badges to the Donbas region in the late winter of 2014. It did so again by sending “peacekeeping troops” into the Donbas this month. In so doing, Vladimir Putin concretely demonstrates once again his absolute disrespect for and disregard of international law. This should come as no surprise; Russia has been in the business of murdering or attempting to murder individuals in foreign nations on a number of occasions since Putin took power in Moscow when he replaced Boris Yeltsin in 1999. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/19/780759713/in-new-book-journalists-alleges-russian-links-to-mysterious-deaths-abroad
As most citizens of established democracies know from experience, the peace and safety they enjoy while going about their day to day lives depends on a broad acceptance of common values and the rule of law in their communities. In the same way, democratic nations rely on general acceptance of shared values between nations. That is especially true concerning the sanctity of borders and restraint from using military force to coerce, bludgeon or control neighboring countries. With his successive invasions of Russia’s neighbors (including Georgia in 2008), Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that Russia under his direction will never be a safe neighbor for any freedom-loving nation. Agreements, promises, treaties mean nothing compared to raw military power in the world view of the current Russian regime. As George Kennan presciently observed more than 70 years ago, this Russia respects only power. Little has changed in that regard since Kennan dispatched his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in Washington in 1947. Joseph Stalin’s playbook is simply now in the hands of a different authoritarian dictator in the Kremlin.
Most of the people in the world, to be sure, have little time to contemplate such lofty and ephemeral concepts as individual freedom and government by consent of the governed. Achieving a modicum of food, shelter, clothing, housing, and healthcare is enough to occupy fully many of our fellow citizens of the world. For those without the luxury of time to consider such notions, the government system that seems to be on the rise in the world can be beguiling, even if it masks a heart of repression, lawlessness, and a contempt for human rights.
That is exactly why Ukraine matters. For every time a loathsome dictator, be it in North Korea, or Cuba, or Venezuela, or Communist China, or Russia, successfully reduces the freedom of the people in one of those countries or one of their neighbors, the balance tips in some way, small or large, in favor of authoritarianism everywhere on earth. Freedom is contagious, as evidenced in the late 18th century (when the American Revolution helped spark the French Revolution of 1789), in the mid-19th century (when the models of growing individual freedom and prosperity in the United States and United Kingdom helped spur revolutionary movements all across Europe), in the post-war world of the 1950s (when colonial regimes gave way to a bevy of newly freed nations across Africa and Asia) and in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (when all the nations of Eastern Europe, save Russia and Belorussia, threw off the chains of their Russian/Soviet imposed dictatorships to breathe the fresh air of freedom). Importantly, all the newly freed Eastern European nations in that era save Belorussia and Ukraine joined the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, within a few years. In so doing nation states such as Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania all gained binding international guarantees of their independence.
Freedom flourishes most when nourished in a world community marked by free institutions, the rule of law and respect for human rights. The onward march of authoritarian regimes anywhere in the world works to diminish the reputation and thus the attractiveness of democratic forms of government.
Individual nation state democracy is not the inevitable ultimate status for the world. Prior to the successful conclusion of the American Revolution in 1783 there were arguably no functioning democracies of note anywhere in the world. By one set of definitions, autocracies outnumbered democracies 113 to 1 in the world in 1900. https://ourworldindata.org/democracy#number-of-democracies In 1920 autocracy led democracy 137 to 10. By 1960 democracy closed the gap to 126/29. In 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the continuing trend toward decolonialization in Africa and Asia the numbers had changed dramatically: authoritarian regimes outnumbering democracies by a narrower margin of 111 to 57. Then something remarkable happened: freedom and democracy flourished in the immediate post-Cold War world. In 2001 the league table was tied, 88 authoritarian regimes, 88 democracies. A decade ago, democracies opened a lead, outnumbering authoritarian regimes 101 to 78.
But authoritarianism can be contagious as well. Over the course of the last 10 years the building momentum of democracy and freedom in the world has disappeared. The margin enjoyed by the democratic side of the ledger has been maintained but not grown.
In recent years, the forces of authoritarianism, most notably Russia and Communist China, have underwritten sophisticated initiatives to undermine the economic and social power of the democratic world. Sometimes they have acted with economic efforts (the Chinese Belt and Road initiative), sometimes with cyber warfare (such as attacks on American utilities launched from Russian soil), sometimes with sophisticated misinformation campaigns aimed at the American electorate and EU voters, sometimes with good old fashioned Hollywood style glitz (as with the recent Beijing Olympics).
And now, in the latest iteration, the authoritarian Russian regime has resorted to the crudest tool of all, military force, to slay Ukraine’s fledgling democracy.
Can American and European freedom and democracy prosper in a world that grows increasingly hostile to the rule of law and ideas and institutions based on the natural rights of humankind?
Perhaps a wise man of the mid-19th century said it best, in another context: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
The future President Abraham Lincoln was speaking, of course, about the half-slave owning, half free United States of the late 1850s. His comment echoed a bible verse recorded almost 2,000 years ago, Mathew 12:22-28: “…Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.”
The world today is just about half free. Indifference to attacks on the freedom of people beyond our statutory borders will not help decide the issue in the favor of a free world. Those brave adherents to the idea of freedom and the rule of law deserve our energetic support on their own merits. But it is out of selfish desire to maintain our own freedom that we should be motivated to do whatever we can, whenever and wherever possible, to support like-minded peoples across the globe. Our motto could be found in John Kennedy’s inaugural address of January 20, 1961:
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
This much we pledge--and more.
To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do--for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.
To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom--and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”