Why Support Ukraine?

Let's change "Ukraine" to "Britain" and go back in time

On social media, I recently noted that I’d run a new flag up the pole at my cottage.

I’m Canadian. Knowing that, I’m sure you can decipher the sentiment here:

Unsurprisingly, my vexillological vehemence was derided by the sort of people who spend too much time watching Fox News and dusting their Donald Trump bobblehead collections. The word “warmonger” made an appearance. One man mocked me for not having volunteered for duty in Ukraine, as if Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made an urgent global appeal for 55-year-olds with bad backs and large English vocabularies.

(I know what you’re thinking. “Dan, you’re not completely useless. ‘Vexillological vehemence’ is clever. You could hurl bon mots at the Russians. After translation, of course. And maybe with a little explanation. To be honest, I had to use Google to work out ‘vexillological vehemence.’ But it was clever. Sort of.”)

I haven’t written much about the war in Ukraine, or why I feel strongly that the West should support Ukraine in every way short of directly knocking Russian jets out of the sky (as satisfying as that would be.) That’s because geo-political strategy isn’t my jam. And frankly, the case for supporting Ukraine has always struck me as being so thunderingly obvious that it doesn’t need to be stated.

But this newsletter is all about making use of the past in the present to shape a better future. And history offers an astonishingly apt case study.

I offer it for your consideration. For those who support Ukraine, you’re already right, but you may get a fuller appreciation for why you’re right. For those who would deny Ukraine military aid, and urge that benighted country to negotiate, not fight, I suggest you have a look and consider whether you are articulating thoughts whose folly was exposed long ago.

The Arsenal of Democracy

Below are excerpts from a prominent radio address made by Senator Burton Wheeler, a Democrat from Montana, on December 31, 1940.

But first, a little context.

The Second World War started with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. By the time of Wheeler’s address, Nazi Germany had overrun Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Norway. Britain and the British Empire — including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — fought on.

To keep going, Britain depended on a flow of weapons, oil, and other materiel from the United States, which was still neutral. This aid was not given freely. Under the “Neutrality Acts,” passed by Congress in the late 1930s, the president was forbidden from giving military aid to belligerents at war. The president could only sell Britain weapons on a “cash and carry” basis, meaning Britain had to pay gold and transport the weapons itself. By late 1940, British gold reserves were running out. If supplies from America stopped flowing, Britain was doomed. The war would end when the Nazis crossed the English Channel, or Britain would sue for peace. Either way, Nazi Germany would be master of Europe.

Franklin D. Roosevelt saw all this clearly. On December 29th, 1940, Roosevelt gave what became known as the “arsenal of democracy” speech.

The president announced that it would be the policy of the United States to do all it could for Britain short of going to war. To enable this, FDR called on Congress to pass a bill that permitted the president to "sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” materiel to any government whose defence was deemed to be vital to American security by the president. This became known as the “lend-lease” policy.

In his speech, Roosevelt warned that if the war in Europe ended in a Nazi victory, Germany and its Japanese ally would command colossal military and economic forces — so colossal that not even the United States would be safe behind its oceanic walls.

The “America First Committee” was a group dedicated to American isolationism and keeping the United States out of the war. Senator Burton Wheeler wasn’t a member but he was a strong supporter. And on December 31, 1940, he delivered a radio address that responded directly to Roosevelt’s address and policy.

I’ll include much of it here, verbatim, with commentary to follow.

The views I express to you tonight… are not the views of any international banker, nor are they dictated by interventionists or warmongers.

In 1917, the US had abandoned years of neutrality to enter the First World War. The war was immensely popular at the time. But by the 1930s, opinion had swung fiercely in the opposite direction and it was widely believed that Americans had been manipulated into the war by, among others, corporations and international bankers. (If if you were wondering, yes, when people said “international bankers,” a great many Americans heard “Jews.”)

The thoughts I am about to express are not based upon any fear of wild boasts of American conquest by Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini. I know that neither they nor their ideologies will capture the people of the United States or our imagination to the point that we would adopt fascism, communism or nazism as an American doctrine.…

We sympathize with the oppressed and persecuted everywhere. We also realize that we have great problems at home, that one-third of our population is ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clad, and we have been told repeatedly, upon the highest authority, that unless and until this situation is corrected our democracy is in danger. I fully subscribe to this view.

Believing as I do, in this thesis, I cannot help but feel that we should settle our own problems before we undertake to settle the problems of Asia, Africa, Australasia, South America and Europe. As Americans, interested first in America, what is our present stake? Our stakes are our independence, our democracy and our trade and commerce. Every red-blooded American would fight to preserve them.

What is the best way to preserve them? There are two schools of thought. One group feels, as they felt before the last World War, that England is our first line of defense, and that we must go to England’s aid every time she declares war, and that some European dictator is after rich loot in the United States, perhaps our gold buried in the hills of Kentucky.

This group wants to repeal our Neutrality Act and the Johnson Act. They want to loan our ships, our guns, and our planes, even though it may involve us in the European conflict. They profess to believe it is necessary for the preservation of our country, our religion and civilization. We were told the same things in almost the same terms before the last war.

The other group feels that we should build our defenses to meet any emergency that may arise. But we do not believe that the preservation of the American people depends upon any foreign nation. It is hard for us to visualize a nation of 130,000,000 people so weak that we cannot defend ourselves when our forefathers in the thirteen original colonies, poor, divided and weak, were not only able to conquer an army already in our midst but to build the greatest democracy the world has ever known.

Just as I love the United States so do I dislike Hitler and all that he symbolizes. My sympathy for the British is both deep and genuine and is exceeded only by the depth and sincerity of my Americanism. No anti-British feeling dictates my opposition to the evasion or repeal of the Johnson and Neutrality Acts. I oppose all these because they lead us down that road with only one ending, total complete and futile war. And Mr. William Allen White chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, agrees that the convoying of British ships by American vessels and the repeal of the Neutrality and Johnson Acts would mean war for us.

Remember, if we lend or lease war materials today, we will lend or lease American boys tomorrow. Last night we heard the President promise that there would be no American expeditionary force, but we received no promise that our ships and sailors and our planes and pilots might not at some time within the near future be cast into the cauldron of blood and hate that is Europe today.

Our independence can only be lost or compromised if Germany invades the Western Hemisphere north of the equator. This would be fantastic, as it would require the transportation of at least 2,000,000 men, with planes, tanks, and equipment, in one convoy across the Atlantic. This would require two or three thousand transports plus a fleet larger than our Navy, plus thousands of fighter-escorted bombers.

Such a fleet cannot possibly be available. Certainly it cannot be trained efficiently before our two-ocean Navy is ready. It is not possible for the German Navy to prepare an effective plan for such an invasion which our Navy and Army with our air force cannot defeat. Remember, Hitler has already been seven months in vainly trying to cross twenty miles. If Hitler’s army can’t cross the narrow English Channel in seven months his bombers won’t fly across the Rockies to bomb Denver tomorrow.…

The cost of this war will come out of the millions of poor people, the common folk of the world who will toil for generations to pay the cost of destruction. War inevitably means back-breaking debt, blighted lives, bedeviled futures. War means the end of civil liberties, the end of free speech, free press, free enterprise. It means dictatorship and slavery, and the things we abhor in nazism, communism and fascism. It means Stalin or Hitler will have achieved their boasts for a totalitarian world without conquering America.…

Regardless of when or who is proclaimed victor in the present war, it cannot last forever. Peace, fleeting though it may be, will eventually come to Europe. At some time in the future representatives of England and Germany will sit around a table. Some time they will agree upon peace, and until that day the world suffers. Each of us, from the President of the United States to the most humble citizen, should exert his every effort for peace now.

…I firmly believe the German people want peace just as any people prefer peace to war. And the offer of a just reasonable and generous peace will more quickly and effectively crumble Hitlerism and break the morale of the German people than all the bombers that could be dispatched over Berlin.…

The United States is no longer trudging along the road to war. We are running. Some feel that we have gone so fast and so far that there can be no stopping—no return to complete peace except via war. But we are at peace and we can remain at peace if either one of the two lines of action is pursued. First, Americans in greater number must firmly resolve and express themselves that we will fight no offensive war. And, secondly, we can remain at peace if the horrible European debacle of death and destruction ends in the near future.

Though today we stand as close to the brink of war as we stood in January of 1917, some people still oppose a European peace. War-mongers, sordid romanticists, reckless adventurers and some whose sympathies and sentiments are stronger than their reasoning powers would plunge this nation into war. Plunge us into a war from which we would gain nothing. Plunge us into a war that would destroy democracy, that would bring deep harrowing anguish to millions of hearts. And how would they bring this to pass? They would take us in today as they did in 1917.…

My friends, it is this satanically clever propaganda that appeals to Christianity, the idealism, the humanity and the loyalty of the American people that takes us into war. It is this that we must resist. It is this that we must cast aside if we truly love our country and democracy. We must remain at peace and dedicate ourselves to effecting peace for a war-torn world.…

I do not believe that the great majority of our people are eager to be embraced by war and I call upon them not to be afraid to say so. I, for one, believe the policy advocated by the interventionists is insane and it will lead to total war, and war is insanity… Americans! Do not let yourselves be swayed by mass hysteria. Do not travel again the road that took you in 1917. You hanged Bob LaFollette in effigy because he opposed war—and lived to repent your action and put him in the hall of fame.… Are the facts of yesterday no longer facts? Has this war a sweeter odor than the last? Don’t let yourselves be misled by the so-called notables. Numerically they are few—even though they command the newspaper headlines. But they do not speak for the mass of Americans. They do not represent labor, the farmer, the youth, the mothers or fathers of America. The great mass of our people are inarticulate, but it is time you were heard. You must not be driven like sheep to the slaughtering pens.… America’s war ought to be against industrial unemployment and low farm prices.… Let your representatives in Washington know that you have not surrendered the independence of America to war-mongers and interventionists, and God will bless America.

There are four core arguments in Wheeler’s famous speech.

1. If we send aid to Britain, we must be dragged into the war, making it all the more terrible.

2. We have big problems at home. Why should we spend money helping people elsewhere when that money is needed at home?

3. We’re strong and safe, and “America First” is our only concern. Let the rest of the world take care of itself.

4. The war must end in a negotiated peace. To minimize the destruction and loss of life, we should push both sides to sit down and negotiate sooner rather than later. Arming Britain only prolongs the suffering.

These arguments sound more than a little familiar, no?

So let’s zero in on them.

Number one? It was wrong. For the better part of a year, American aid to Britain ramped up, to the point where the US was an ally of Britain’s in all but name, but Germany didn’t go after American shipping (which had prompted the US entry into the First World War) and the US was not forced into the war. Only after Japan attacked the United States, and the United States declared war on Japan, did Hitler declare war on the United States. Why he did that is debated among historians. Some see nihilism and impulse. Others, calculation. But even if you agree with the latter, it’s hard to see Hitler moving against the United States absent Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Which is to say, American support for Britain did not lead ineluctably to the US entering the war.

Number two? Military aid for Britain was not charity. It was a calculated belief that a world in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were superpowers was very much not in America’s interests. Wheeler claimed that was nonsense because Germany and Japan couldn’t possibly cross an ocean and invade the United States with immense armies. Let’s be conservative and assume that was true, at least for the foreseeable future. Pearl Harbor nonetheless demonstrated they could cross an ocean and hammer America hard. Now, imagine Europe and Africa dominated by a Nazi Germany enriched by its conquests, with a military greater than anything in history; imagine Asia dominated similarly by Japan. At a minimum, American power — military, economic, cultural — would be gravely diminished. The ideals of Americanism — the ideals of liberal democracy — would wither everywhere. The idea that the American security would not decline under those circumstances was fantasy. Even if Nazi battleships never shelled Manhattan, and Nazi tanks never rolled in North America, the United States would be a smaller, weaker, less-secure country.

Number three? This is exactly the go-it-alone thinking that allowed Nazi Germany to conquer Europe, as Norman Angell wrote. The strongest defence is collective defence: “No nation in the modern world can possibly defend itself effectively against the form of violence most likely to threaten it unless it is prepared to take its part in the defense of others. By refusing to concern ourselves with the defense of others we make our own impossible.”

The Second World War taught Americans the folly of isolationism. That’s why the US and its allies formed NATO, and why NATO is doing what it’s doing today. Apparently they don’t teach this in high school any more. Maybe they should.

Number four? The Second World War ended with unconditional surrenders but that is an anomaly. Most wars do indeed end in negotiation. The war in Ukraine almost certainly will, too. But the circumstances on the ground at the time of the negotiations matter enormously. A country badly mauled on the battlefield will accept loss of territory and industry, even whole regions and populations. It will accept being pulled into the invader’s orbit. It will accept restrictions on its foreign and domestic policy. Because it has no choice. When Finland “negotiated” peace with the Soviet Union in the latter stages of the Second World War, it was less a negotiation than a dictation.

But a country that fights its attacker to a stalemate, or even manages to push the attacker back, inflicting terrible losses on the attacker, is in a radically different bargaining position. It has real power.

Roosevelt understood that. It’s not complicated, after all. But for some reason, Elon Musk and the other strategic geniuses of Silicon Valley who have counselled “negotiation” from the start of the Ukraine war, can’t seem to figure that out.

One final point is what Wheeler did not mention. And what those who would deny aid to Ukraine do not mention.

What comes after the war?

What you reward, you get more of: That’s a universally applicable rule of human affairs. If authoritarian leaders see that invading their neighbours is an effective way to enrich themselves, we should expect a lot more invading and enriching. Which would mean the end of the international stability most of the world has enjoyed since the end of the Second World War.

If we want peace, we must respond to an invasion by handing the invader his ass.

That means fighting with courage, tenacity, and skill, as the Ukrainians have done and continue to do. And if you’re not in a position to join that fight directly — because that would risk nuclear war, or because you’re a middle-aged sad-sack — then you should support those who fight however you can. My country is doing that. So are the other members of NATO, and many other countries besides, because they all recognize that it is vital for the whole world that dictators who start wars must regret their evil.

That's why I fly that flag.

Does that make me a “warmonger”? No, it means I’ve read some history.

I suggest those who would hang Ukraine out to dry do the same.

Postscript

When Roosevelt’s lend-lease bill went before Congress, a Gallup poll found 54% of Americans supported it. Another 15% gave qualified support. Only 22% opposed the bill.

Support split along partisan lines. Among Democrats, 69% were in favour and 13% opposed. Among Republicans, 38% supported lend-lease while 30% opposed.

As the old jokes goes, history may not repeat but it does rhyme.