Keep discourse open-minded

Leora Levy’s opinion piece appeals to her reader’s conscience. But her criticisms of President Joe Biden’s responses to the events in Ukraine are unjustifiable. I am in complete agreement with her moral outrage over the unprovoked Russian military assaults in Ukraine that we have witnessed since late February. She relates to the current refugee crisis of the Ukrainian people from a personal perspective, having escaped the communist regime of Fidel Castro in 1960. I concur with her humanitarian sympathies.

But politics, not ethics, shape her argument. Levy claims that by not seizing Russian tankers in U.S. waters and opening “the spigots of American oil and gas” Biden is “immoral and cruel” to the current workforce in those industries and to consumers who must pay higher gas prices. Her ad hominem criticism of Biden’s environmental policies since taking office in 2021, including cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline and protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil exploration and drilling implies a false equivalency. Those policies do not affect the lives of Americans in ways comparable to Putin’s military forces that are killing innocent Ukrainian civilians and loyal soldiers defending their homes, as she suggests. Her further unfounded claim that Biden’s leadership has “enabled” Putin’s forces is merely divisive political rhetoric.

Ms. Levy wants the United States to act unilaterally to send planes and armaments into Ukraine. I would ask her to consider the example of the Cuban Missile Crisis, comparable in several aspects to the current crisis. Diplomatic negotiations and military restraint brought an end to the tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States and to the threat at the time of a nuclear war. In response to the events in Ukraine, President Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, with a coalition of allies in the EU and NATO are exerting diplomatic, economic, and political forces to end the violence of Putin’s invasion. Yes, those efforts will have economic and political costs at home as well. But the hope is that collectively they will secure a less explosive international alignment and support democratic footholds in the region.

As to the obligations to our children and grandchildren, open-minded debate and embrace of known science must shape our environmental ethics to attain a legacy we can be proud of. Politics is only a way to create practical compromise on a path to energy independence. There’s no use for a rigidly fixed mindset in finding constructive compromise. If Ms. Levy has high-minded political aspirations, she would be wise to promote unbiased opinions.

Martha Moore Crowley, Ph.D., Greenwich