Why Americans have a stake in the fate of Ukraine

Post-1945 attempts to transform “Europe” from a geographical to a political designation have resulted in a baroque accretion of bureaucracies, but no answer to Henry Kissinger’s reported question: “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?” The European Union is the world’s second-largest economic entity, with member nations’ combined gross domestic products ($15.3 trillion) larger than that of China ($14.7 trillion), and dwarfing Russia’s ($1.5 trillion). Geopolitically, however, it is much less than the sum of its 27 parts, as the Ukraine crisis is demonstrating.

French President Emmanuel Macron would like to be designated to take Kissinger’s telephone call. This month, when he began a six-month term in the rotating office of EU president, he displeased the febrile portion of the French right by flying the European Union flag alone under the Arc de Triomphe. He then delivered to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, a speech that demonstrated why no Kissinger would bother placing that call.

Macron rhapsodized about Europeans “sharing a civility, a way of living in the world, from our cafes to our museums, which is incomparable,” and about making “Europe a democratic, cultural and educational power.” Military power went unmentioned.

Of NATO’s 30 members, just 10 are fulfilling the commitment, first announced 16 years ago, to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense. He called for the EU to have “our own security doctrine, in complementarity with NATO, and with a genuine technological independence, industrial and defense strategy.” It is, he said, Europe’s “vocation” to be a “balancing power, particularly in its dialogue with Russia.”

This will not happen. Leave aside the priority EU members give to social spending — especially pensions and medical care — for their aging populations over military spending. Macron’s blurry notion of “complementarity” with NATO would inevitably mean discord with NATO. Eastern Europeans, who live with memories of Russia rampant, know better than to trust their security to Europe “balancing” its cafes and museums against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tanks and missiles.

An irony of 2022 is that Ukraine yearns to affirm and buttress its nationality by associating not with NATO but with the EU, which many nationalists throughout Europe disparage as inimical to national sovereignty and a solvent of national cultures. Ukraine is wiser than the EU’s despisers for reasons that illuminate Americans’ stake in today’s clash of civilizations: Universal human rights protected by sovereign nations’ commitments to the rule of law is a trans-Atlantic ideal.

In “The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in America Foreign Policy,” Michael Kimmage, who served on the State Department’s policy planning staff from 2014 to 2016, reminds us that for our Founders, “the United States was more vividly European before it was ever palpably American.” There has been a “Euro-American path to liberty.”

“The United States,” Kimmage insists, “is a country carved from the stone of Enlightenment thought,” which migrated west from England, Scotland, France and Germany “in Europe’s East to Philadelphia in the American colonies.” Ukraine is looking to the West, away from Putin’s ethnoreligious, blood-and-soil notion of nationhood, toward the community of nations of shared Enlightenment values. For the West to look away from Ukraine would be an apostasy foreshadowing a dark future.