It’s rare that conservative opinion writer Brett Stephens catches my attention. But at a time like this, with conflict imminent in Eastern Europe, there remain a few, even on the right, who still want to believe in who we profess to be when belief itself is out of fashion.
Stephens confesses to the country’s past mistakes. They are many. “Who are we … to hold ourselves up as paragons of freedom and human rights?” he asks, with our history of “slavery and discrimination,” with our record of “supporting friendly dictators, and the ongoing injustices of American life.”
Stephens does not go so far as to call for direct U.S. military engagement to preserve Ukraine. But he acknowledges that our cautiousness born of past errors empowers Russia. Putin wants Ukraine and will pay a higher price to get it than the West will to protect it. “Putin wants to change the geopolitical order of Europe and is prepared to take large risks to do it,” Stephens writes. Lacking formal defense agreements, the West is unsure Ukraine is worth fighting for.
Chalk it up to too much “intellectual humility” born of past mistakes leading to “moral confusion” and “a fear of unknown risks.” Vladimir Putin’s appetite for reclaiming the Russian empire may be reprehensible, Stephens explains, but stems from strong self-belief.
Stephens dodges saying so, but the Ukraine challenge comes, conveniently, during post-Jan. 6th moral confusion. Many Americans demonstrated that they yearn more for an authoritarian strong man than for defending democratic self-rule at home except as public charade. Why would they do so abroad? Putin’s advance on Ukraine now is not a product of alleged weakness on the part of President Joe Biden. It is the result of another serious American mistake Stephens fails to acknowledge: electing an anti-democratic authoritarian in 2016.
Putin’s self-belief is his strength, and our lack of it his asset:
The United States used to have self-belief. Our civilization, multiple generations of Americans believed, represented human progress. Our political ideals — about the rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, democratic governance — were ideals for all people, including those beyond our borders. Our literature spoke to the universal human experience; our music to the universal soul. When we fought wars, it was for grand moral purposes, not avaricious aims. Even our worst blunders, as in Vietnam, stemmed from defensible principles. Our sins were real and numerous, but they were correctable flaws, not systemic features.
It goes without saying that this self-belief — like all belief — was a mixture of truth and conceit, idealism and hubris, vision and blindness. It led us to make all sorts of errors, the acute awareness of which has become the dominant strain of our intellectual life. But it also led us to our great triumphs: Yorktown and Appomattox; the 13th and 19th Amendments; the Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Marshall Plan and PEPFAR.
These victories were not the result of asking, “Who are we?” They came about by asking, “Who but us?” In the crisis of Ukraine, which is really a crisis of the West, we might start asking the second question a little more often than the first.
Trumpism’s response is “not our problem.” Putin’s actions may in fact help Republicans rescue their party from it.
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