It’s not exactly a sign of a healthy democratic discourse that it’s virtually impossible to ask a critical question about the United States’ role in the Ukraine-Russia conflict without being smeared as a Putin apologist or an “isolationist.”
We’ve been bombarded with bromides about a civilizational struggle that pits the forces of autocracy and liberalism against each other. “It’s not just about freedom in Ukraine,” Biden tells us. “It’s about freedom of democracy at large.”
Yet Ukraine — which, before the war, regularly slotted in somewhere beneath Burma, Mexico, and Hungary on those silly “democracy matrixes” left-wingers used to love — isn’t any kind of liberal democracy. Maybe one day it will be. But today Ukraine still shutters churches and restricts the free press. Maybe you believe those are justifiable actions during wartime, but under no definition are they liberal. Ukraine has never been a functioning “democracy.” Its people defend its borders and sovereignty in the face of a powerful expansionist aggressor. That’s good enough.
But a person is capable of rooting for Vladimir Putin to be embarrassed, beaten, and weakened, without accepting the historical revisionism and a highly idealized version of Ukraine. A person is fully capable of rooting for Putin to be embarrassed, beaten, and weakened, and also asking questions about where this is all headed.
Last week on “Fox and Friends,” probable presidential candidate Ron DeSantis answered a few foreign policy queries about the war. Perhaps one day the governor will morph into the next Charles
