What Ukraine Means

December 25, 2014 | By Eliot Cohen
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Tikvah faculty member Eliot Cohen has a new essay in The American Interest on the meaning of Russia’s incursion on Ukraine. The issue is not “whether Khrushchev was wise in giving the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, or how it came to be that eastern Ukraine is largely populated by native Russian speakers,” but rather the kind of action Russia has taken. Comparing Putin’s Russia in Ukraine to Mussolini’s Italy in Ethiopia, Cohen describes just what Russia has done:

it is dismemberment not only by economic pressure and subversion, but by violence and invasion, by fire and sword, by kidnapping and murder. That is the kind of thing, and it has happened not in Africa or Asia or South America but in Europe, and it has happened not to a remote monarchy but to a reasonably free state whose sovereign rights are, to repeat, guaranteed in writing by the Great Powers.
 

And the West’s response? Cohen is blunt: Cowardice, he says.

The Ukrainian crisis is therefore but a manifestation of something more deeply gone wrong in the West. This past September witnessed an astounding spectacle. Great Britain, formerly mistress of the greatest empire since Rome, the home of the mother of parliaments, and the source of notions of liberty and self-government that shaped this country and many others—was on the verge of dissolution. It was a would-be dissolution brought about by a feckless political class that allowed 16-year-olds, intoxicated by overheated commemorations of the 700th anniversary of a medieval battle, to vote to break up a Union older than the United States.
 
And when they suddenly realized that they could actually lose their country, what kind of arguments could British politicians come up with? There was precious little about shared values, an inspiring past, or a common destiny. It was all about whether Scottish banks would need very large sterling balances to maintain the pound, and co-payments for the National Health Service, and how North Sea oil would be divided. It is testimony to the good sense of the people of Scotland—or rather, to their innate caution—that they voted the independence resolution down. But Britain came close to voting itself out of existence in a moment of silliness and selfishness, even as clueless intellectuals and journalists chirped cheerfully about what a model of the democratic process this wanton recklessness was.
 

Cohen looks to George Orwell to explain just what has gone wrong in the West—why national causes are passe and fecklessness is instinctive. “Nearly all western thought since the last war,” Orwell wrote in his review of Mein Kampf, “certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.” What the West needs is not simply more sober policy actions, but “a kind of recovery of spirit.”

We can also refrain from treating terms like “deterrence” or “Article 5 obligations” as a kind of strategic pixie dust to be sprinkled over problems in the hope of making them go away as if by magic. We can acknowledge that what deterrence and Article 5 are really about is a commitment to wage war under well understood circumstances. We can face the bracing fact that we need what John Paul II gave so many people: the courage to stand for freedom and principle in the face of danger and even death.
 
As a teenager, I had a summer job as a tour guide in the state house in Boston. It was then that I learned the meaning of the motto of my home state, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Ense petit placidam, sub libertate quietem. It means, “[This hand, hostile to tyrants] seeks with a sword a quiet peace, under liberty.”
 
To the north of Massachusetts lies New Hampshire, whose motto is simpler: “Live free or die.” The phrase, which may be found on license plates and makes many visitors and suburbanites fleeing high housing prices in Boston squirm, comes from a letter by a hero of New Hampshire, General John Stark. Stark fought in both the Seven Years’ War and in the Revolution and, like Cincinnatus, returned to his farm when his duty was done. At age 81, too ill to travel to a reunion of his old comrades, he sent this greeting to them: “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.”
 
It’s all very old-fashioned stuff. It is not at all sophisticated. And to most erudite people it is downright embarrassing to hear a professor cite it approvingly. But it is true, and free governments, and free peoples, had better believe these things. They have to believe that freedom is not about ample pensions and free college tuitions and a 35-hour work week, that it is about something vastly deeper and more important than that. One sometimes wonders if belief in big, deeper things itself has gone out of fashion in the postmodern West, as if the larger ideals of the past have somehow become an embarrassment. If so, we would probably ignore Churchill himself were he to return to us from beyond the grave and warn, as he warned his colleagues in the jubilant House of Commons following the Munich accords, that all would not be well; he quoted the Book of Daniel: “Thou art weighed in the balance and are found wanting.”
 
What is happening now in Ukraine is not a new Munich. But thus far, we have indeed been weighed in the balance and found wanting. And what will get us out of the Ukraine crisis, with any luck at all, is the same thing Churchill invoked some seventy years ago: “Moral health and martial vigor”, and a willingness to take a stand for “freedom, as in the olden time.” Let us not merely hope so, but act now to make it happen.

 

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