Allies (mostly America) Diddles While Ukraine Burns

Not exactly Nero in the days of the fall of Rome, these current chiefs of state, but close enough to rhyme. Mark Twain famously said “history never repeats, but it rhymes” and I’ll give him that.

A recent article in the Guardian headlined “Former senior diplomats urge west to ‘go all in’ on military support for Ukraine” caught my eye a day or two ago and I very much agree. If you’ve read me at all lately, you know I feel we’ve shamelessly allowed Ukraine to swing in the wind from the very get-go. Part of the American historic rhyme tells us that if France hadn’t jumped in with support back in 1776, there wouldn’t even be an America to embarrass itself in Ukraine.

We’d be dealing with incapable Tory MPs, instead of a shit-for-brains Congress.

Is the West really a force in the free world anymore?

The subtitle of the article says, “Group also made up of former high-level military advisers say ‘actions still fail to match the rhetoric.’”

“The urgent warning comes from an authoritative group including the former UK foreign office permanent secretary Simon McDonald; Christoph Heusgen, a diplomatic adviser to the former German chancellor Angela Merkel; the former national security adviser to Barack Obama, Jim Jones; Stéphane Abrial, chief of staff to the former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin; and Stefano Stefanini, a diplomatic adviser to the former Italian president Giorgio Napolitano.

“We have to provide the weapons and ammunition Ukraine needs to fight, and defeat Putin’s war of aggression. The faster Putin understands that he will not achieve his objectives in Ukraine, the earlier peace can be achieved, and the sooner the suffering of the Ukrainian people will end,” they wrote.

“Ukraine needs the combined force of tanks, longer-range missiles and aircraft to conduct a successful counterattack, paving the way to Ukrainian victory and peace negotiations on acceptable terms.”

Advisors tread where no heads-of-state dare go

Advisors make their opinions known, almost entirely in private (if they want to hold their jobs) but they do not face elections. They are not encumbered with balancing delicate coalitions, nor do they need to test the winds of ever-changing voter preferences and report back to the home folks before the glare of lights, watching their tongues as microphones are thrust in their faces. They will be reminded of this or that misspoken word in tomorrow’s headlines. Ah, the agony of the unfortunate video-clip, forever available on the internet.

“With the prospects of a major Ukraine ground offensive this year possibly being scaled back, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, has called for the US to reassess its refusal to provide F-15 or F-16 combat aircraft. Ukrainian officials and western military analysts warned as far back as last autumn that Ukraine was running critically low on air defense missiles and fighter jets could help compensate for that.”

Autumn has come and gone, winter tested the very core of Ukraine’s forty million citizens to survive through blasted infrastructure and families huddled in unheated basements to wait out the unending Russian missile attacks. Now spring is about to become summer and the front-lines are fragile, Ukranian advances critical.

And yet we dither, undecided, uncertain and agitated

It is, after all, not Rishi Sunak’s children shivering in an unheated basement, nor do the Obama or Merkel families concern themselves with fathers and sons on front-lines with inadequate weaponry. The NATO countries are willing, as is the European Union, but America sets the tone and America has always had its own comforts and satisfactions in mind, protected as it is by its two great oceans and the comfort of never having been bombed.

You know how fond I am of quotations and Churchill once again comes to mind: “You can always depend upon America to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else.” We are the reluctant power of the world, except when we embark upon foolish wars, with foolish evidence and foolish diplomatic purposes. Then, we’re bloody cock-sure.

Reluctance is both provocative and misleading, as Mr. Putin flails away at destroying a nation he cannot conquer

Yet they are not our children who cry themselves to sleep, not our fathers and sons who bleed and die, nor our women who hold the whole damn thing together with more courage than the world has ever seen. Can you imagine a nation that simply said “no” to invasion by a world power. Can you conceive of a president who, when offered safety, said “I don’t need a plane ticket out, I need ammunition.” A country that will not quit stands before us, tested under every possible extreme and only asks of us the military material to survive.

Material we are drowning in, but claim a shortage.

America, at war with itself at this particularly uncomfortable moment, is weary of this whole war in a nation we’ve never heard of, on a continent few Americans will ever visit and distracted by mass shootings, abortion rights, the teaching of our own flawed history and an economy on the edge of yet another recession. We stand before the world, proclaiming our speciality and carrying a sputtering torch of freedom, pointing the finger of accusation at others, with our shoelaces untied and our pants around our ankles.

This is not a foreign war for me

It’s happening 300 miles west of Prague and Europe, where I live, is restless about its affiliation with an America that can’t tie its shoes. The America that funded a Marshall Plan to rebuild a shattered Europe, formed NATO to keep it safe and encouraged a European Union to stop its bickering, now seems a long way away.

Europe looks west at America and east at China, weighing issues that affect its economic future. Britain is gone, having picked up its marbles and left the playing field. America has become more spectator than leader and, where surety and sense of purpose are needed, diddles in self-doubt while Ukraine burns.

There are politicians and there are statesmen

In our present circumstances, we are way short of statesmen, worldwide, and drowning in politicians. Where are those statesmen we hunger for, the Roosevelts, Trumans, Churchills, Merkels and Marshalls of decades gone? Macron? Possibly. Ursula von der Leyen? Quite probably. Volodymyr Zelenskyy? Absolutely, if he survives.

They are the hope, as hopefulness slips away in a right-wing assault on governments world-wide. There’s a great deal of politically parched soil in the world today and the seeds of fascism are always there, lying just below the surface and waiting for rain.

Europe dares not let the rain fall across Ukraine

Is America sufficiently poised to respond? Who knows, but Churchill would agree that they have tried everything else and the hour is very late.

For god’s sake, Joe, be a statesman