From: First Things by George Weigel
Samuel Johnson, that great coiner of aphorisms, averred that “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” In that Johnsonian spirit, here are some reminders about what has been happening in Ukraine, for Sen. J. D. Vance and others who persist in certain confusions about the situation and its implications.
Reminder: NATO did not cause the war in Ukraine by “marching to Russia’s borders.”
NATO is a defensive alliance and always has been; as its first secretary general, Sir Hastings Ismay, once put it, the purpose of NATO was to “keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out.” The new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe were anxious to join NATO in the 1990s, not because they wanted to invade Russia, but because they feared a revanchist Russia wanting to re-colonize them. The same concern about Russian intentions prompted NATO’s two new members, Finland and Sweden (neither known for aggressiveness in recent centuries), to seek admission to the alliance. In February 2022, NATO was as likely to invade Russia as it was to invade Botswana. The claim that NATO threatened Russia is Russian propaganda, rooted in historic Russian paranoia. No serious person takes it seriously.
Reminder: The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not a matter of redressing the grievances of Ukraine’s Russian speakers.
If that had been the case, why did so many Russian speakers in the Ukrainian army fight so valiantly to stem the initial Russian onslaught? Vladimir Putin, a thoroughly wicked dictator who maintains power through an Orwellian combination of the Big Lie wedded to the Big Terror, made his intentions pluperfectly clear days before the invasion in 2022: He intended to destroy Ukraine as a state, a nation, and a culture. That genocidal intent underwrites the barbarism with which Putin’s minions have waged war in Genghis Khan mode, murdering, raping, pillaging, stealing children, and indulging in gratuitous destruction of non-military facilities, including hospitals and kindergartens. Putin, the man who described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” is seeking to reverse history’s verdict in the Cold War, Ukraine being first on Vlad’s Revenge Tour.
Reminder: The United States can well afford to support Ukraine.
Voice of Ukraine 