Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

The drama over whether or not we should continue sending money to Ukraine for it’s fight against Russia’s invasion has taken a political twist.

The United States has always stood to support democracies around the world helping Europe in WWI and WWII and other lesser conflicts.

These participations haven’t always brought the intended results. WWI and WWII were successes as was the Korean War. Democracies were saved or allowed to grow.

Vietnam proved to be a different story as did Afghanistan. Iraq started as a different mission, to get rid of perceived weapons of mass destruction.    What made those incursions different was the desire of the people of those nations to understand what a democracy was, how it might benefit them and how to operate one. More powerful people in those countries had monopolies of power they did not want to surrender and for the average person there wasn’t the will to fight.

One can argue that in some cases we should have stayed longer and been more involved in nation building. That means giving a generation or two of people a peaceful place to live so that a reversion to the previous means of governance would not be acceptable to them. We apparently don’t have the political will for that.

That is a huge commitment of manpower and money, although that is exactly what we did in Europe, Japan and Korea following WWII.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been viewed as an event as significant as the rising of Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. When a nation like Sweden, a long time neutral nation, seeks the protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) you know that Europeans are concerned in a big way. When Russia claimed  Crimea, other nations voiced objection but took no action. Going after the rest of the country sent out alarms around the world.

When the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight around 1990 a number of eastern European nations became free countries, Ukraine was among them. It prospered as a free nation and might have been the most economically successful of the nations that became free after the Soviet Union collapse.

Freed from communism’s inefficient collective farms, its agricultural economy took off and that success was something Russia apparently thought it could use to it’s benefit.

What is different between Ukraine and some of our other military adventures is that the Ukrainians are not asking us to do their fighting for them. They’re willing to do the dirty work if we help them with weapons and ammunition. And for two years they have largely held off a larger and better equipped army thanks to their own grit and weaponry donated by free nations.

Russia became a big problem near the end of WWII. Back then it was ruled by Joseph Stalin who was a brutal dictator. Stalin wanted much of Germany as reparations after Germany had invaded Russia as part of WWII and later lost the war.

There was a time after the collapse of the Soviet Union where Russia was led by leaders who were open to dealing with others in the world. The arrival of Vladimir Putin changed that, Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Union. Not all former members want that.

It can be hard to argue why we should send billions to Ukraine when there are needs here at home. The answer is that problems in other parts of this world often find their way here in one way or another be it decreased exports to those nations, increased emigration from those nations as residents flee and general instability of a part of the world that impacts sea and air travel and terrorism.

The more democracies in this world the better off we are in the United States. Supporting Ukraine to keep this democracy and therefore Russia in check is a wise investment.