The Reason Ukraine Fatigue Is Not An Option For the Civilized World

This is not just a battle between Ukraine and Russia. It is a battle between autocracy and democracy, between subjugation and freedom. 

It is the epochal battle of our time. Ukraine is all in, sacrificing blood and treasure in defense of civilized society. There is no room for fatigue. JL 

Daniel Henninger reports in the Wall Street Journal:

This is the Ukraine war’s first anniversary, but it feels like 10 years. With all media all the time, we are saturated with Ukraine’s war. (But) the autocratic alliance of China, Russia and Iran is no longer content to accept an indefinite standoff of competing ideologies and commercial interests. They have decided to make Ukraine a test, which they believe the U.S., Europe and Asia’s democracies will fail. History’s greatest killer is unchecked xenophobia. The U.S.’s strategic objective in Ukraine is to prevent Russia, China and Iran from winning. Ukraine has proved they will fight to the last man, woman and child. Our fatigue is not an option.

This week is the Ukraine war’s first anniversary, but it feels like 10 years, not one. Ukraine “fatigue” is understandable. But let’s try to put the sensation of war fatigue in context.

Vietnam came to be known in the 1960s as the television war, shown on the TV news every night. News programs then lasted a half-hour, with Vietnam usually just a segment. Still, the unsettling daily footage eroded public support for the war.

Today, with all media on all the time, we are saturated with Ukraine’s war, as we are with mass murders, weather disasters or a train derailment. The sense of feeling worn down by events has become the natural order of things. I had Super Bowl fatigue before the opening kickoff.

In recent months, the argument over Ukraine has been about its importance for the U.S. Is this really “our” war? It is almost eerie that an answer to that legitimate question is emerging almost at the moment of the war’s first anniversary.

 

It has become clear in the past several weeks that the tectonic plates of global power are shifting. The autocratic alliance of China, Russia and Iran is signaling it’s no longer content to accept an indefinite standoff of competing ideologies and commercial interests as the status quo. They have decided to make Ukraine a singular test, which they believe the U.S., Europe and Asia’s democracies will fail.

I’m not predicting World War III, at least not as conventionally understood. This new alliance—two significant nuclear powers and Iran on the brink of becoming one—seems to recognize that the self-destruction of nuclear war means they have to win on a series of conventional fronts, such as Ukraine, Taiwan or the Baltics.

Nor should we forget history’s lesson that unlikely events can push an already tense world off the rails. The assassination in 1914 of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo tipped the world toward war. A Chinese spy balloon, presumably pushed off course by the weather and floating across the U.S. land mass, may prove to be such an event. It’s hard to ignore that China’s response to the U.S.’s pro forma shooting down of the balloon has been unapologetic belligerence.

On Tuesday this newspaper reported that Chinese leader Xi Jinping plans to visit Moscow in the spring. China wants us to believe that Mr. Xi will use the visit to push Vladimir Putin toward a peace settlement. More credible is the assertion by the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that China may be about to send lethal war materiel to Russia, joining Iran as an active equipper of Mr. Putin’s long war.

As in the past when an alliance of adversaries turned more aggressive, some Republicans have rediscovered the centuries-old belief that the U.S. can insulate itself from the tides of history. On the same day this week that President Biden went to Kyiv to join Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis aligned himself with the Republicans’ isolationist minority in Congress, criticizing Mr. Biden’s “blank-check policy” and saying “we have a lot of problems accumulating here in our own country” that Mr. Biden is neglecting.

 

A political realist would view Mr. DeSantis’s statements on Ukraine as mainly an attempt to peel off more of a Trump base that may be open to alternatives. Like some of the other neoisolationists in Congress, Gov. DeSantis did add that he considers China a more important threat than Russia. This has become a distinction without a difference.

Messrs. Xi and Putin have been explicit in citing the restoration of nationalistic and territorial glory as justification for their jacked-up militarism. The West, properly understood as the world’s determinedly free peoples, has spent much of the past several centuries defeating messianic nationalists content to spill buckets of blood beyond their borders. History’s greatest killer is unchecked xenophobia.

The bet being made in Moscow and Beijing is that their will to win can eventually cause American and European leadership to break. That “win” isn’t about merely defeating the Ukrainians. It’s about finally proving to the other nations these two have courted—in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and in resource-rich Africa—that the time has arrived to join the world’s winners and pull back from the losers.

If several Republican presidential candidates as well as Germany and France look willing ultimately to abandon the Ukrainians, similar recalculations will be made in India, Australia, Japan and South Korea.

The U.S.’s strategic objective in Ukraine is to prevent Russia, China and Iran from being able to declare persuasively to the watching world that they are winning.

Only one nation in the whole world is actively fighting to stop this alliance from winning. Ukraine merely wants the U.S. and Europe to send them the necessary instruments of war—not next summer, but now—with which, as the last year has proved, they will fight to the last man, woman and child. The Ukrainians have already written their blank check. Our fatigue is not an option.