Do Americans really care about Ukraine? Ordinarily, this would be a strange question to ask. But it has received a bevy of attention this week after the highly publicized off-mic altercation between NPR host Mary Louise Kelly and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. After an interview on Kelly’s show, Pompeo allegedly berated her off the air for her queries about former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. F-bombs were thrown around. And then came the question from Pompeo: “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”
William Taylor, the two-time U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, decorated combat veteran, and longtime public servant, believes people in the United States do care about Ukraine and the war churning in the country’s eastern region. He thinks if people don’t care, they should.
Writing in the New York Times, Taylor subtly condemned his former boss, Pompeo, repeatedly referring to Ukraine as the “front line” between democracy and Russian authoritarianism. “The Kremlin is attacking the rules that have guided relations among nations since World War II, rules that kept the peace among major European powers for 70 years,” Taylor writes. “To support Ukraine means to support a young democracy, fighting to regain sovereignty over its internationally recognized borders.”
Taylor’s piece is largely a recitation of what we already know about Russian behavior. We already knew, for instance, that Moscow’s annexation of the Crimea Peninsula was illegal. We already knew that without Russia’s military and financial support, the separatists in eastern Ukraine would have likely folded by now. Russian President Vladimir Putin could end this five-year conflict if he withdrew that support. (Newsflash: This isn’t going to happen.) We also knew, courtesy of the U.S. intelligence community and the Mueller report, that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election through a sophisticated disinformation campaign.
Nothing Taylor stated in his opinion piece is news. Indeed, the media has been inundated with Russia-related coverage for what feels like an eternity. The question is whether any of this warrants the top-level attention of Americans, many of whom are frankly far more concerned about finding a way to pay for their children’s tuition than what Putin has up his sleeve in a country of marginal value.
One can certainly understand and respect where Taylor is coming from. As a top U.S. official in Ukraine, Taylor traveled to the front line in the east and saw with his own eyes just how intense and ingrained the war between Kyiv’s and Moscow’s proxies is. Parts of the front line look like replicas of World War I, with both sides huddling in trenches that stretch for miles. Mortars and artillery fly back and forth on a weekly (if not daily) basis, making a mockery of the ceasefire that both sides agreed to in 2015. About 14,000 people have been killed in this conflict, although the figure could be higher.
Yet nowhere in Taylor’s piece does he make a cold-blooded case for why Washington should stick its nose in this conflict. The argument the ambassador makes is an emotional one — and let’s be honest, it’s also steeped in quite a bit of threat inflation. Taylor ties Ukraine’s national security to the hip of U.S. national security, starting with the proposition that a Russian triumph in Ukraine will have lasting, earth-shattering effects on the health of other Western democracies. If Ukraine falls, the civilized world falls with it.
This is the type of rhetoric, while emotionally powerful, that clouds unsentimental debate. It leads to terrible judgment, which in turn leads to even worse mistakes. U.S. history is riddled with examples of where policymakers and political leaders in Washington ran around with their hair on fire: Vietnam 1965, Iraq 2003, and Libya 2011 are the most notable. All three were mired in unsubstantiated theories and assumptions, and all three turned out to be tragically counterproductive.
Nobody is saying Ukraine should be written off. Ukraine is obviously important to the Ukrainians. It’s quite important to the Europeans as well. Nobody wants a frozen conflict on the Eurasian continent.
But let’s put Ukraine in the proper perspective: It’s not a vital U.S. national security interest. If Washington wants to help Kyiv, it can start by working with Germany, France, the European Union, the Ukrainian government, and the Kremlin on a diplomatic exit ramp. The U.S. has bigger fish to fry.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
