Why U.S. has a stake in Ukraine’s fate

WASHINGTON — Post1945 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), which is less than Italy’s ($1.9 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 E.U. 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’s speech began with some continental chauvinism about Europe’s supposed “democratic singularity,” such as the idea of “universal human rights which need to be protected from the fervors of history.” This idea animated the American Revolution before, and better than, the French Revolution, but Macron was not under oath. He 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. Macron waxed optimistically about better batteries and more women on corporate boards before getting around to mentioning something unpleasant: Ukraine.

He called for the E.U. 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 E.U. 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 in a dangerous neighborhood and 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. The farther Europeans are from the Atlantic Ocean, the more trans-Atlanticist they are.

It is fanciful to talk, as Macron is merely the latest European leader to do, about Europe speaking with a “single, powerful voice” on behalf of “principles and rules … established not against or without Russia, but with Russia.” These principles, he said, include “rejection of the use of force, of threats and of coercion; the free choice for states to take part in the organizations, alliances and security arrangements they wish; the inviolability of borders, the territorial integrity of states and the rejection of spheres of influence.”

Macron noted that European nations and Russia signed such principles “30 years ago.” As he spoke, Russia was violating all of them.

An irony of 2022 is that Ukraine yearns to affirm and buttress its nationality primarily by associating not with NATO but with the E.U., which many nationalists throughout Europe disparage as inimical to national sovereignty and a solvent of national cultures. Ukraine is wiser than the E.U.’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, “from Königsberg” — Immanuel Kant’s home — “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.