John Rachal's Blog

As Ukraine enters its second winter of war, American support for continuing aid to Ukraine in the form of arms and humanitarian assistance has dropped from 65% in June, almost sixteen months after Putin’s invasion, to 41% currently. This erosion of support was probably as inevitable as it is odious. Trump and other right-wing Republicans oppose the aid, and so naturally Trump voters, whose moral compasses seem so often wanting, oppose it as well. Their tax dollars shouldn’t go to some country we don’t give a damn about! Putin’s not a threat to us! And, as I and many others have noted elsewhere, Trump’s failed attempt to extort Zelenskyy is the very thing that led to the former president’s first impeachment.

I have already mentally compared Zelenskyy to Churchill (see “Churchills, not Chamberlains” in a previous blog). So it is “altogether fitting and proper,” to use Lincoln’s words from Gettysburg, to note what Churchill said to then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 after the latter claimed “peace for our time” by sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler, resulting in the Munich agreement: “You had a choice between dishonor and war. You have chosen dishonor, and you will have war.” After Zelenskyy’s country was invaded and he was advised to skip the country, he said, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” I swear I can hear Churchill cheering.

In 1948, ten years after the infamous event that became known to World War II history simply as “Munich,” Churchill published The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his monumental memoirist history of the war. In the chapter “The Tragedy of Munich,” he offers a moral lesson for the future that our time, and our country, should heed:

“It may be well here to set down some principles of morals and action which may be a guide in the future. . . . There is, however, one helpful guide, namely, for a nation to keep its word and to act in accordance with its treaty obligations to allies. This guide is called honour. It is baffling to reflect that what men call honour does not correspond always to Christian ethics. . . . Here, however, the moment came when Honour pointed the path of Duty, and also when right judgment of the facts at that time would have reinforced its dictates.”

His future is our present. He continues:

“For the French Government to leave her faithful ally, Czechoslovakia, to her fate was a melancholy lapse from which flowed terrible consequences. Not only wise and fair policy, but chivalry, honour, and sympathy for a small threatened people made an overwhelming concentration. Great Britain, who would certainly have fought if bound by treaty obligations [as France was to Czechoslovakia], was nevertheless deeply involved, and it must be recorded with regret that the British Government not only acquiesced but encouraged the French Government in a fatal course.”

It should be noted that France and Britain had already sacrificed Austria without a fight. It was not until September 1, 1939, a year after Munich and after France and Britain had shamefully allowed a weak Germany to violate the 1919 Versailles treaty by re-arming to the point of military supremacy in their vain hope of “peace,” that the war officially began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Who knows how long the U. S. would have remained isolationist had not Japan done Britain and France—and Europe itself—the enormous favor of attacking Pearl Harbor over two years later?

It should also be noted that in 1994 the United States, along with the United Kingdom, Ukraine and, of all countries, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, which provided Ukraine with security assurances in exchange for its surrendering of its nuclear weapons.

So let’s change the countries and a few tenses in Churchill’s lead sentence of his second paragraph: “For the American government to leave her faithful ally, Ukraine, to her fate would be a melancholy lapse from which will flow terrible consequences.” Not only is helping Ukraine and its “small threatened people”—in the form of money and arms only, let us remember, not American troops—“wise and fair policy,” but also the right thing to do, the honorable thing to do, the absolutely necessary thing to do.