The Atlantic - Daily , December 22, 2022
A Call to Defend Freedom
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stood before Congress last night and asked for yet more help in his fight to stop Russia from erasing his country from the map. His visit to Washington was something of a surprise, but its purpose was clear. Zelensky is facing a terrible winter, when the Russians, after terrorizing and murdering Ukrainian civilians, may well try to return to offensive operations. He came to make his case to the American people that his fight is our fight—and that the money and weapons we have sent to Ukraine are being used responsibly.
Zelensky’s address, however, was much more than a plea for assistance. The speech was brilliantly written, and the Ukrainian president delivered it in English with real emotion. He made an effort to speak both to U.S. political parties in the chamber and to the entire country watching at home. Most important, Zelensky issued a call, as the leader of a nation at war in Europe, for Americans to remember who we are, what we stand for, and why our destiny is inextricably bound to the eternal fight for freedom and democracy.
Three moments stood out as inspiration and as lessons.
In a brief allusion, Zelensky name-checked the Continental Army’s 1777 victory at the Battle of Saratoga, an excellent historical analogy for present-day Ukraine. If you’re a bit rusty on your Revolutionary War history, recall that the fledgling United States was trying to break away from one of the strongest empires on the planet, and Britain’s competitors had little interest in helping what seemed to be a doomed crusade by a bunch of colonists. At Saratoga, a British plan to divide the Colonies and thus isolate and strangle the troublemakers in New England failed, resulting instead in a stunning British defeat. At that point, the other major powers in Europe—including Britain’s avowed enemy, France—realized that the Americans could fight, and fight well. Four years after Saratoga, the British suffered a final defeat in North America at the hands of a combined French-and-American force at Yorktown.
Next, Zelensky insisted that the world cannot do without American leadership. He invoked the concept that global security is indivisible, a principle that goes all the way back to the Helsinki Accords of the mid-1970s and that was reaffirmed in the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, signed by most European governments as well as the U.S. and Canada—and the then-soon-to-be-extinct Soviet Union. (Whoever wrote this speech didn’t just craft the language well; they did their homework.)
“This battle,” Zelensky warned, “cannot be frozen or postponed.” He continued:
It cannot be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide a protection. From the United States to China, from Europe to Latin America, and from Africa to Australia, the world is too interconnected and interdependent to allow someone to stay aside and at the same time to feel safe when such a battle continues.
This almost sounds like a paean to globalization, but it is actually a restatement of America’s own Cold War foreign policy. (Indeed, Americans took this to an extreme in the 1950s when then–Secretary of State John Foster Dulles growled that neutrality in the Cold War was “immoral.”) Despite being better-traveled and more aware of the rest of the world than previous generations, many Americans still think that what happens in faraway places will never touch them. The shock of 9/11 wore off long ago, and traditional American provincialism—along with its toxic by-product, isolationism—has been on the rise, especially in the Republican Party.
Finally, Zelensky reminded us that national security abroad is intrinsic to our well-being at home: “Your well-being,” he said, “is the product of your national security; the result of your struggle for independence and your many victories.” Americans once instinctively understood this reality. After World War II, the United States helped build an international system based on laws, institutions, and trade, on the free movement of human beings and the free exchange of ideas. We did this imperfectly, and sometimes we cruelly violated our own principles. But this system of global cooperation outlasted the Cold War, and it is crucial to our own security and our ever-increasing standard of living.
We have, however, become victims of our own successes. When the Cold War ended, we experienced a new era of peace and plenty. We outsourced anti-terrorist operations and other military dangers to overworked and over-deployed volunteers while the rest of us enjoyed low unemployment and ridiculously cheap credit. We could not imagine a world controlled by our enemies, because we had no real competitors. We were ill-prepared to grasp the reality of a major war raging on NATO’s borders.
Zelensky knows what a world without American leadership looks like: It is a world, as my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today, in which he and his family are dead, and the Russians are preparing their assault on Poland and the Baltic states. China, seeing Ukraine subjugated and NATO in disarray, might have moved against Taiwan; Iran would likely complete its dash to nuclear status; and every dictatorship on the planet would almost certainly think their day had finally arrived, while from “Washington to London, from Tokyo to Canberra, the democratic world would be grimly facing up to its obsolescence.” Anne’s depiction of what could have happened, and what could still happen if Russia rallies to defeat Ukraine, should be a bracing blast of cold reality to anyone who thinks that America can simply pull up the drawbridges and ignore the global assault on democracy.
In the end, Zelensky made the case that Ukraine is the main front in a global fight. He’s right. Vladimir Putin is counting on America and NATO to tire and to falter. It is up to us to prove him wrong, and to warn the other dictators on the planet that they will never extinguish human liberty while America and its allies in this great battle—including Ukraine—are still standing.
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