Ukraine Isn't Worth One American Life

Appearing recently on ABC’s This Week. Republican Representative Michael McCaul, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Democratic Senator John Warner, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized the Trump peace plan for the Ukraine War. McCaul said he would advise Ukraine’s leaders not to sign Trump’s plan without more “ironclad” security guarantees. Warner compared the plan to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.

Now comes New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who writes that the recent Ukrainian corruption scandal is yet another reason for the United States to defend Ukraine. Liberals used to call upon our leaders to abandon important security allies that were corrupt—Chiang Kai-shek in China, Diem in South Vietnam, the Shah of Iran, Somoza in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philippines, to name just a few. Stephens wants us to support a corrupt regime that is not an important security ally. “A nation that can investigate its leaders even as it fights for its existence,” Stephens writes, “is one worth defending.”

Stephens compares Vladimir Putin to Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. He quotes Churchill—it seems all of Ukraine’s supporters do that. He writes that if we pressure Kyiv to sign Trump’s peace plan, NATO will fracture, Russia’s economy will rebound, and its military will get stronger. “Far be it for a columnist writing from the safety of New York to offer his advice,” Stephens writes, but we abandon Ukraine “at our peril and to our shame.”

What neither of these “statesmen” or columnist Stephens would say is that, to paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, Ukraine isn’t worth the bones of a single American soldier. Bismarck, the great Prussian and German Chancellor who fought three small wars between 1864 and 1870 to create the German empire and then established a structure of peace based on spheres of influence and the balance of power in the late 19^th century, predicted that the next great war would result from “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” He also said that the Balkans weren’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Yet, after Bismarck passed from the international scene, conflict in the Balkans did indeed ignite the First World War, resulting in the deaths of more than two million German soldiers, more than two million Russians, more than a million French troops, over a million Austro-Hungarian troops, about a million Serbs, more than 900,000 British soldiers, more than 600,000 Italians, and more than 100,000 Americans.