The sanctions against Russia—both the official economic sanctions and the unofficial, often petty-seeming sanctions such as banning Russian owners from cat shows—arguably represent the first great “geopolitical cancellation” of this new feminized era in the West.

This cancellation obviously goes far beyond the usual diplomatic noises that are made when the blame for conflicts is murkier and the victims more remote from us. It is a public reaction to an outrage that rises explosively above the usual outrages, involves fellow Westerners, and is available to tug at the heartstrings 24/7 on a variety of electronic media.

Moreover, it really does look like a broad translation of the usual domestic cancellation strategies to the geopolitical scene, including economic punishment, censorship, general ostracism, threats of judicial action, and indirect assistance for those who fight the Cancelled One, but of course no direct, overt involvement in that fighting.

Given the scale of this response, the scale of the atrocity that triggered it, and the scale of Russia’s ongoing losses in Ukraine, Putin’s downfall seems inevitable. After killing many thousands of innocent Ukrainians, destroying probably trillions of dollars’ worth of Ukrainian buildings and other infrastructure, utterly breaking Russia’s army and air force, and of course lying through his teeth about his actions and motives, he does not appear to have any way out—any peaceful “off ramp.” He is our generation’s Hitler, and I suspect he already knows that his days, in office at least, are numbered.

There are many potential pluses to a Putin downfall. One is that Russia again will have a chance to achieve what it could not achieve in the 1990s, namely a more mature form of government and economy, oriented towards and not against the West. Such a transformation of Russia, which I think is somewhat more likely than the alternative, would mean a final unification of all the West’s major powers, and at least a temporary “emboldening” of them. That in turn could usher in one of those periods of history, like 1990-2010, in which the West reigns supreme over all earthly comers. In this scenario, bad actors such as Iran, China, and North Korea would have to watch their step, at the very least, and the world in that sense would be a safer place.

But here’s the bad news. Even if the “best case” scenario happens—including a glorious Russian uprising and overthrow of the dictator, maybe even on Easter Sunday (April 24 in the Russian Orthodox calendar)—the West has suffered a blow in its own ranks that I think is of dire significance.

If you’ve read any of my previous essays on this site, you know that I have taken a generally dim view of the West’s future. Cultural/political feminization; mass immigration, multiculturalism and wokeism; and the lack of political tools for solving these problems, have doomed the West in the most basic ways, as I have seen it. On the other hand, conservatives in the West have been gaining strength and coherence in recent years in reaction to the excesses of Letfism/wokeism. As recently as a month ago, it had seemed plausible to me that a Zemmour-ization of the Western Right (Eric Zemmour is explicitly against both cultural feminization and mass-immigration/heavy-multiculturalism) could, eventually and with a lot of luck, restore the situation.

But what Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed all too clearly is that much of the Right in the West is, well, wrong, and about fundamental things. Sadly, these Wrong Rightists include Zemmour as well as prominent commentators in the US, Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance among them.

The Wrong Rightists hate, first and foremost, what they call the Globalist American Empire (GAE). Fair enough—I hate it too. The problem is that they view Putin not as a murderous kleptocrat and global troublemaker (as I view him), but rather as a valuable counterweight to the hegemony of the GAE—a counterweight they want to strengthen, not weaken. These pro-Putin rightists have seemed quite willing to nullify the sovereignty of Ukraine (and, since the invasion started, have been willing to let Putin’s murders of tens of thousands of Ukrainians go unpunished), in order to preserve this counterweight—this bastion of old-fashioned Christian values according to the peculiar delusion afflicting some of them.

Of course, quite a few of the Wrong Rightists are backpedaling now, saying they deplore what Putin did, etc. They understand, at least at some level, the parallels between their sentiments and the discredited sentiments of say, Laval in France and Lindbergh in the USA during 1939-41. They therefore tend to exhibit their distress over the impending collapse of Russia as a Great Power, and the impending destruction of Putin and Putinism, in ways that are more or less indirect. They are peevish about Ukrainian “propaganda.” They lament the “lost opportunity” to have prevented the horrors of this war by barring Ukraine from NATO, thereby calming the nerves of their sensitive hero in the Kremlin. They speak darkly of Ukrainian “Nazis.” They yearn for a swift settlement that preserves Putin in power (and, not incidentally, conceals the fatuity of everything they have claimed or predicted about all this). They emit copious cope about how Russia is still destined to “win.” Above all, they say the West should care less about Ukraine and more about problems at home.

Here are just a few examples of this output (to which I may add soon as time permits):

What I think all this means is that the Western Right in general now is left with much less credibility in the eyes of the average normie citizen, just as occurred in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. In particular, the pro-Putin, “America First” sector of the Right, the sector that happens also to be most deeply concerned with the most serious issues, such as mass immigration, has grandly shot itself through the foot—or maybe through the heart. This has left the Left/center-Right “GAE” coalition in a much better position, so that there won’t be a Zemmour-type president in the USA any time soon—and I’m guessing now there won’t be one even in France. Thus the West’s demise will have been hastened at the very moment of its own apparent triumph over its longtime mortal enemy.

***

World War II ended less than two decades before I was born, yet I’ve always felt that it belonged to much more distant age—set off from modern existence by its different ways of thinking and doing, different patterns of speech and dress, grander scale of horrors and heroism, even the monochrome of its newsreels. The bad things, especially, seemed mostly unrepeatable in the world where I grew up.

American isolationism is a good example. Conservative Americans, for the longest time, didn’t want to help Britain, or Western Europe, with their struggles against Hitler and Mussolini. The USA had helped out Britain and France in 1917-18, and felt that they shouldn’t have to do anything like that again. Let Europeans sort out their own problems, they said.

That was part of their public reasoning, anyway. Another part of it seemed much more instinctive and tribal, much more driven by the false logic of “the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend”—their enemy being FDR, of course, their new friends being the Axis dictators.

It might seem facile to criticize the American isolationists of 1939-41 from our postwar perspective, but really they should have known better just from the information available at the time. In any case, it’s always striking now to read and hear the things they said. Here, for example, is aviator Charles Lindbergh, on September 11, 1941 (Europe conquered, Britain under siege, Wehrmacht nearing Moscow etc.), blaming the British, Roosevelt, and “the Jewish,” for pushing America towards war:

The Pearl Harbor attack, less than three months later, embarrassed the America First movement into silence. Lindbergh himself spent much of the war trying to get into combat to redeem himself, and eventually succeeded—in getting into combat, not at redeeming himself.

But anyway, here we are again, with the same kind of geopolitical setup (armed dictator on the prowl abroad, liberal Democrats in control at home), resulting in the same strange mindset on the part of American conservatives.

By the way, in case this is the first essay of mine you’ve read, I’m pretty conservative too (notwithstanding David Goldman’s swipe at me, below, as a “neocon/GlobLib”). Yet the fellow conservatives who, in defiance of recent history, have started talking up Putin and talking down Ukraine, the US and the Western alliance, are now as alien to me as DEI consultants.

I’ve already set down my own anti-isolationist, fight-the-bad-guy thoughts on Putin and Ukraine, a month ago on this site. Here I just want to record, mainly out of sheer amazement and chagrin, some of the sentiments I’ve been reading in recent days from elsewhere on the American right.

To keep things manageable, I’ve focused mainly on two prolific and very widely followed commentators, Goldman and Richard Hanania, and I’ve organized their comments by their major themes.

“Ukraine is a corrupt and backwards place that isn’t worth defending—or invading”

“Ukrainians are So Dumb”

“It’s All NATO’s/Neocons’ Fault for Expanding NATO and Threatening Russia”

“Putin is Smart and Will Win”

“The Woke are the Real Enemy—not Putin”

(See also “No Viet Cong Ever . . .“)

“You Neocons are So Dumb”

“Love Ukraine = Hate America”

“We Should Cut a Deal With Putin”

“Our NATO Allies Won’t Help Us—In Fact, NATO will collapse”

“We’ll Be Better Off When Russia and China Have More Power”

“Enough with the World War II Analogies!”

“And Now For Some Other Clever Ideas”

I’m aware that, as readers go through all these posts, they might find themselves agreeing with the sentiments expressed. But, as I post this, the long-awaited Russian offensive to conquer (presumably) Ukraine is just starting. It’s unlikely to be as dramatic for Americans as Pearl Harbor was, especially since it’s an attack on Ukraine, but modern electronic media, and weaponry, are going to be amplifying factors. I hope it will shock many of the Putin apologists and associated naysayers into rethinking their attitudes.

***

This short essay was prompted by the debate surrounding the ongoing Russian threat to invade Ukraine. But it is really a more general argument about state-vs.-state conflicts—even human-vs.-human conflicts.

My train of thought here was first tugged into motion when I read some of the remarks by Twitter nomenklatura, to the effect that the US shouldn’t lift a finger to help Ukraine and countries like it, should focus on its own problems, should stop “warmonger” talk, etc.

To me, such arguments reveal not just that a lot of Americans have failed to learn the lessons of history, but also that they’ve lost touch with some of their most basic and useful moral instincts.

(I should note here that I have no “axe to grind” where Ukraine is concerned: I don’t know any Ukrainians; I’ve never been to the place; I probably never will go there.)

Some quick background

In the 1980s, severe economic divergence between the Eastern Bloc and the democracies of the West, and the related weakening of the Soviet state, led to the emergence of durable pro-democracy movements in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other captive nations. These movements came to successful conclusions in 1989, when they brought down the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Wall, and the entire Iron Curtain. Two years later, the USSR itself disintegrated, its constituent “republics,” including the core Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Russian Republics, seceding from their union in late 1991. Most of the government offices and instruments of power in Moscow reverted to the control of the newly named Russian Federation, which became, initially, more of an ally than an adversary to the West.

This was, for the West, a victory almost on the scale of the Second World War’s. Indeed, it seemed to bring to a close not just the Cold War but also the broader process of European upheaval that had begun with the start of the First World War in 1914.

But the waters did not stay calm. The first post-Soviet leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was an alcoholic and a clumsy and corrupt administrator, and was forced to resign in 1999. He was replaced by his appointee Vladimir Putin, an ambitious former mid-level KGB officer who had entered politics after the fall of the USSR. Putin had a mess on his hands at first, and had to contend, among other things, with a much more democratic political system than had existed in the old USSR. But he eventually got things under control, in the traditional Russian way one might say—he smothered Russian democracy in its cradle, enriched himself and his cronies, and made Russia yet again an adversary of the West.

Putin never achieved a Stalin level of power, but he had enough control to bully and imprison political dissidents at home, and assassinate them abroad. He also was increasingly able and confident enough to impose Russia’s imperial will on some former captive states that had become too independent-minded, namely, in the oughties, Chechnya and Georgia, and, starting in 2014, Ukraine—following a popular Ukrainian uprising against that country’s pro-Russian leader, Viktor Yanukovych. Russian troops, not very convincingly described as volunteers and separatist freedom fighters, invaded Ukraine in that year, ultimately occupying the Crimean peninsula as well as a resource-rich eastern region called the Donbas.

Now Putin has positioned Russian troops and equipment seemingly for a new invasion, and has issued the West (principally the USA) a set of extreme demands that essentially convey the message: Ukraine is part of Russia, or at least should be forever under Russia’s thumb.

While Putin has acted boldly (by timorous Western standards) against Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya, he has not dared to attack other former Soviet satellites, such as Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. There is a simple reason for this: In the wake of the USSR’s collapse, the latter all eagerly joined NATO to protect themselves against their ancestral Russian enemy. Being a NATO member carries the solid-gold guarantee of full military assistance—troops and weaponry—from other alliance members in the event of Russian invasion. This has, to all appearances, been a sufficient deterrent against Russia since NATO’s inception. Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya are not members of NATO.

Reasons to Leave Ukraine to its Fate

There are true, mostly unspoken reasons why Americans, and Westerners generally, don’t want to help Ukraine in a decisive way, and there are essentially false, justification-type reasons that are provided for public consumption.

The true reasons are 1) having troops killed and precious military hardware destroyed on behalf of a country that is out on the margins of Europe would be costly—above all politically; and 2) opposing Russia too strongly would interrupt its supplies of natural gas to certain European countries (e.g., Germany) that badly need this resource, which, again, would be politically and otherwise costly.

These reasons strike me as quite similar to the reasons schoolchildren use, or feel, when they observe a bully threatening someone else: Although they at least vaguely recognize the value of stopping the bully, they fear the cost of “sticking their neck out” to fight, and feel that it would simply be cheaper to look the other way. The bullies, of course, understand this reasoning and exploit it.

The public reasons for not supporting Ukraine, a relatively democratic European state facing invasion by an authoritarian semi-Asiatic aggressor, largely have to do with Ukraine’s not being part of NATO, with Russia’s alleged right to control states on its periphery—sometimes referenced with the phrase “sphere of influence”—and with a general feeling that leading Western countries, especially the US, are overextended already and shouldn’t always try to be the world’s policeman. There is even the notion, apparently popular among many right-wing Americans, that Ukraine in recent years has become an American colony, the creation of warmonger “neocons,” and should now be liberated from the American empire so that it can return to the natural, bosomy embrace of its Russian mother.

Reasons to Stand Up for Ukraine

Firstly, the people of Ukraine, despite their ancestral brutalization and periodic annexation by Russia, consider themselves—and are—a distinct Western, Christian people, with their own culture and language. If there is one broad political-philosophical priority that Western societies should stand up for, it is the political independence of their distinct peoples—the same “inalienable right” of self-determination on which the USA was founded.

Secondly, NATO intervened decisively in Bosnia in 1995, to defend the independence of that country from what was essentially an attack by neighboring Serbia as well as by Bosnian-resident ethnic Serbs. What did the beleaguered Muslim Bosnians possess, to justify NATO’s protection, that Christian Ukrainians now lack?

Thirdly, and just obviously, the only broadly applicable and effective way in which small states can protect themselves from much larger aggressors is by joining alliances or other collective security arrangements. Ukraine naturally would like to do this, but for various reasons, including the terminal pusillanimity of Germany (which still flinches when anyone mentions the Red Army), has not been allowed membership in NATO. Thus, the fact that Ukraine is “not part of NATO” is more a cause of Russia’s bullying than a valid justification for acquiescing in it.

Fourthly, the US and Russia in 1994 inveigled Ukraine (along with Kazakhstan and Belarus) to give up the Russian nuclear weapons stationed on their soil, in exchange for various security guarantees, under the so-called Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Twenty-eight years on, Russia has blatantly and repeatedly violated this agreement. The US, though it promised at the time to come to Ukraine’s aid if Russia turned against it, has instead sought to weasel out of any real commitment. However, the agreement was explicitly meant to provide a security assurance—it’s there in the title, folks.

Fifthly, failing to stand up to Putin will embolden him. I notice the mockery some on the right have leveled, not only at this obvious argument, but also at the obvious Munich 1938 comparison. If there’s anything about this debate that really sparks my ire, it’s that smug “you can’t compare now to 1938” stuff. This is not an argument requiring fine, scholarly distinctions between historical events! This is about basic human nature. And, while it’s true that Putin’s aims now might be limited to Ukraine (or mere threats to Ukraine), it’s also true that Hitler’s aims were limited, vis a vis Western Europe, in 1938—but of course his aims got bigger as the threat from those who opposed him got (as he assessed it) smaller. Another way of putting this is that the manly instinct to fight the bully, even at considerable cost, even when the bully doesn’t directly threaten oneself, is not a useless atavism, as some commentators seem to think. It is still an adaptive reflex and, along with antibully systems such as NATO (imperfect as they are) underlies the relative peace of the developed world.

Sixthly, failing to stand up to Putin, allowing him to carry out his rape of Ukraine, will have demoralizing effects on the people of the West. The revealed weakness of the leading Western countries also could nudge any country that had hoped to get the West’s protection to instead become a minion of Russia.

Finally, failing to stand up to hegemonic bullies is a bad long-run strategy, just in simple logical terms. With no credible alliance to oppose him, the bully can subjugate his victims one by one, conceivably until he is too powerful even for an alliance to oppose.

What should have been done?

In general, those in a position to do so should have provided Ukraine with a worthy alliance to join as soon as the country started moving away from Russia. Although Germany and France (which are partly to blame for the current situation) have long opposed Ukrainian membership in NATO, the US and UK should have helped organize an alternative alliance, perhaps including other, highly motivated ex-Soviet Republics. Even now the US could tell Germany: agree to admit Ukraine to NATO immediately or the US will quit NATO and form a new alliance. In any case, the moment Ukraine enjoyed the formal protection of NATO or some other strong alliance, the Russian threat—if so far uncommitted—would recede.

It’s important to emphasize that last point. The purpose of having alliances is to not to be a “warmonger.” It is to deter war by showing the would-be hegemon that he will get a bloody nose if he takes a step further.

In future, it would also be a smart move for the US and other Western countries to encourage their former regular military men to serve as paid volunteers, equipped with gray market hardware, in conflicts like these. The presence or even the possible presence of such experienced mercenaries would be a significant additional deterrent to an aggressor.