79 years ago, Allied paratroopers began landing behind the beaches of Normandy.
World War II was long ago, but it lives on in the memory of the United States. And Tuesday’s anniversary of DDay seems particularly poignant this year as we await the moral equivalent of DDay, which arrives whenever Ukraine begins its longawaited counterattack on the Russian invaders (which may already be has begun).
I consciously use the term “moral equivalent”. World War II was one of the few wars that was clearly a battle between good and evil.
However, the “good guys” were by no means all good. Americans continued to be denied basic rights and occasionally massacred because of the color of their skin. Britain still ruled, sometimes brutally, over a vast colonial empire.
Even if great democracies often failed to live up to their ideals, they still had the right ideals; defended liberty, albeit imperfectly, against the forces of tyranny, racial superiority, and mass murder.
If Ukraine wins this war, some of its supporters abroad will no doubt become disillusioned and discover the darker side of the country. Before the war, Ukraine ranked high in the measure of perceived corruption better than Russia, but that’s not saying much. Victory will not end corruption.
And in Ukraine there is a farright movement that includes paramilitary groups that took part in its war. The country suffered terribly under Stalin, with millions dying of a deliberately planned famine; For this reason, some Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans during World War II (until they realized they too were considered subhuman), and Nazi iconography is still disturbingly ubiquitous.
However, like the Allied failures in World War II, these shadows do not create equality between the two sides in this war. Ukraine is an imperfect but real democracy hoping to join the larger democratic community. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a malign actor, and freedomlovers everywhere must expect it to be utterly defeated.
I wish I could say that the citizens of Western democracies, especially the US, are fully committed to Ukraine’s victory and Russia’s defeat. In reality, while the majority of Americans support aid to Ukraine, only a minority are willing to keep it going for as long as necessary. US public opinion on aid to Ukraine today bears a striking resemblance to polls conducted in early 1941 (well before Pearl Harbor) on the UK military aid loan and lease program.
What about those who refuse to help Ukraine?
Some of those opposed to Western aid simply don’t see the moral equivalency with WWII. Especially on the left, there are people for whom it’s always 2003. You remember how the US was lured into the war under false pretenses which, for the record, I knew was happening and was vehemently denied at the time and you can’t see that this situation is any different.
On the right, on the other hand, many of those opposed to supporting Ukraine—a TuckerCarlson faction of sorts—understand what this war is about. And they are on the side of the bad guys. The “Putin wing” of the Republican Party has long admired Russia’s authoritarian rule and intolerance. Before the war, Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz compared what they saw as Russian toughness to the “benevolent and emasculated” US military; Russia’s military failure threatens the entire worldview of these people, and a victory for Ukraine would humiliate them.
The point is that the stakes are very high in Ukraine now. Should the Ukrainian counteroffensive be successful, the forces of democracy will be strengthened around the world, especially in the United States. If it fails, it will be a disaster not only for Ukraine but for the world. Western aid to Ukraine may run out, Putin may finally achieve the victory most people expected of him when the war began, and democracy will be undermined everywhere.
What will happen? Even military experts don’t know, and I have no illusions that I am an expert. To my mind, Western officials seem increasingly positive about Ukraine’s prospects. And military affairs are not like economics, where, for example, the Federal Reserve operates on essentially the same information that is available to anyone familiar with the St. Louis Fed’s economic research site. Louis. Defense officials have access to information the public doesn’t have, and they don’t want to end up looking like idiots, so their optimism is probably not empty bravery.
Still, one doesn’t have to be a military expert to know that attacking fortified defenses which Ukraine must do is very difficult.
On the eve of DDay, Dwight Eisenhower told the expeditionary force, “The eyes of the world are on you.” Now the eyes of the world are on the armed forces of Ukraine. Let’s hope they succeed.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves