Frontpagemag Editors' note: Below is an exchange between Frontpage
contributors Robert Spencer and Joseph Puder on Russia's invasion of
Ukraine -- and what America and the West must do about it. We hope our
readers will find this dialogue/debate between two of Frontpage's finest
to be thought-provoking and enlightening.
Joseph Puder: The West Has Not Learned The Lessons of World War II.
We need a Churchill in the White House, not a feeble Chamberlain.
The scenes of the Russian invasion into Ukraine are reminiscent of
81 years ago when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in what was
called “Operation Barbarossa.” Nazi troops stormed the Ukraine fields
with thousands of tanks and Stuka dive bombers. Behind them was Hitler’s
Einsatzgruppen, SS murderers set out to murder every Jew in the
territories of Ukraine that the Nazi army occupied.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s President, has copied the same tactics.
Claiming his armies were merely on military maneuvers and that he had no
intention of invading Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, he ordered his
armies with thousands of soldiers, tanks, and jets to invade Ukraine. In
1939, Adolf Hitler, who had committed Germany not to attack the Soviet
Union under the Treaty of Non-Aggression known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov
agreement, broke the treaty and invaded the Soviet Union with massive
force. And, like the murderous Nazi Einsatzgruppen, Putin sent a similar
group of Chechen murderers to assassinate Ukraine President Volodymyr
Zelensky, and members of his government.
Hitler, in the summer of 1941, already had Europe almost entirely
under his brutal boot, but his “lebensraum” or living space concept,
which he specified in his book, “Mein Kampf,” and speeches, required
him, in his mind to remove the Slavic and other so-called non-Aryan
peoples in Eastern Europe from their land and populate them with German
people. So naturally, Hitler was not going to stop anywhere ‘while the
going was good.’
Let us be clear, Putin is not Hitler, he is not the sadist, and
antisemitic murderer that Hitler was. Nevertheless, he too has a dream
of restoring to Russia the title of the super-power that the Soviet
Union became after World War II. He is a Russian nationalist whose
formative years in the Soviet Union were spent absorbing Soviet
propaganda, and subsequently becoming a KGB officer. It made him a
staunch believer in Russian power. His father fought with the Red Army
in WWII, and his native Leningrad suffered enormously during World War
II. He also learned from the example that Hitler had provided, that when
your potential enemies are weak, it is time to strike.
Hitler had British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to deal
with. An appeaser who desperately wanted to avoid war at all costs, and
indeed, the costs were much higher for Britain and the world for not
recognizing that evil can only be stopped by force and not by
appeasement. Had the allies stopped Hitler early on in 1936 when he
occupied the Rhineland, World War II would never have occurred. Even in
1938, before Hitler annexed by force the Czechoslovakian territory of
the Sudetenland under the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain
sold out the Czechs, and got in return World War II. Had the western
powers used the military option, the German military High Command (the
Wehrmacht) would have removed Hitler from power, as was revealed in
later years.
Putin, like Hitler, views US President Joe Biden as weak and feeble,
just as Hitler saw Chamberlain. A person who refuses to use the
military option with the radical regime of the Ayatollahs in the Islamic
Republic of Iran, and would certainly not dare to challenge Russia’s
military might. Putin figures that Biden and the Western leaders would
scream ‘bloody murder,’ but won’t challenge him militarily, not even
using a ‘no-fly zone’ over the Ukrainian civilian population, for fear
of entanglement with Russia. Putin doesn’t want a nuclear war any more
than Biden, Johnson, or Macron. He knows, however, that he is dealing
with Chamberlains, not with Churchills.
It is apparent to Putin that President Biden and the other major
western leaders fear him enough not to challenge his actions other than
with words and economic sanctions that hitherto have had little impact
on Putin and his regime. He took Crimea in March, 2014 from Ukraine, and
the Obama administration’s reaction was so anemic that it only
encouraged him to go further and initiate the separatist violent
rebellion against the Ukrainian government in the Donbas region of
southeastern Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts of Ukraine), less than
a month later. As the case of the US imposed sanctions on Iran has
proven, sanctions cannot alter the behavior of a radical authoritarian
regime, and only the unpleasant choice of a credible threat of Military
action will make Russia or Iran change its course.
There was a time when the US did just that, used the military
option. President John F. Kennedy did it during the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis; he took military action after diplomacy failed. True, the Soviet
missiles in Cuba posed an existential threat to the US… And yet,
President Lyndon Johnson did it in the Middle East, when the Soviet
Union threatened to send its troops to aid Syria against Israel during
the Six Day War of June 1967.
Uri Bar-Noi, in a report for the Wilson Center dealing with the
Soviet Union and the Six Day War had written his article based on
revelations from the Polish government archives, “The Soviet Union
military took practical steps to assist Syria in stopping the advance of
Israeli troops into Syrian territory toward the end of the war. These
steps included a naval landing, airborne reinforcement, and air support
for ground operations. Military operations were, however, eventually aborted for fear of American retaliation.” President Johnson responded by putting American forces on standby, ready to respond to the Soviet’s moves.
In today’s climate of near pacifism in the US and the western world,
there are no Churchills to be found. There is however one inspiring
Churchill-like person and that is the leader of Ukraine – President
Volodymyr Zelensky. He alone has stood up to the bullying of Vladimir
Putin with the determination of David facing Goliath, and that in spite
of the odds facing him. He inspired his people and the world by taking
on a nuclear superpower with its enormous military machine and an
abundance of natural resources, particularly oil and gas. He alone put
into deeds what it means to fight for freedom, and human dignity.
While Biden and others filled the airwaves with platitudes, they
fear facing the Russian bear. Fortunately for Winston Churchill, he was
able to, after Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) enjoy the benefits of the
“Arsenal of Democracy,” Zelensky and Ukraine remain alone in fighting
an unrestrained aggressor. Sadly, never has America needed a Churchill
more in the White House than now. Instead, we have a feeble
Chamberlain.
*
Robert Spencer Responds: What Are the Real Lessons of World War II?
It’s true: we need a Churchill, but we don’t need a world war.
It’s interesting that Joseph Puder begins his article calling for
the U.S. to stand up much more firmly to Putin than it is doing now by
likening the Russian army’s actions in Ukraine to the German army’s
invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Puder doesn’t mention the fact
that many Ukrainians fought tenaciously on the side of the Nazis in that
conflict; nor does he mention that fighting in Ukraine now against the
Russians is the Azov Battalion, a gang of actual neo-Nazis,
not the kind the establishment media sees whenever a guy goes out
wearing a MAGA hat. Nor are they some outliers: in 2014, then-Ukrainian
President Petro Poroshenko called them “our best warriors.”
This is not to say that Russia’s invasion is justified, or that
Americans should not support Ukraine’s resistance; it’s only meant to
illustrate that sometimes matters are much more complicated than meets
the eye, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict is a quintessential example of
that.
Puder is correct that Neville Chamberlain “desperately wanted to
avoid war at all costs,” and appeasement failed before World War II and
will fail to stop Putin. He is also correct that Putin, like everyone
else on the face of the earth, sees Old Joe Biden as “weak and feeble,
just as Hitler saw Chamberlain.” According to Puder, Putin “figures that
Biden and the Western leaders would scream ‘bloody murder,’ but won’t
challenge him militarily, not even using a ‘no-fly zone’ over the
Ukrainian civilian population, for fear of entanglement with Russia.” He
sees Putin’s statement that this would be considered an act of war as
an empty threat: “Putin doesn’t want a nuclear war any more than Biden,
Johnson, or Macron. He knows, however, that he is dealing with
Chamberlains, not with Churchills.”
It is undoubtedly true that Putin sees Biden as weak. It is less
certain that if the U.S. sets up a no-fly zone in Ukraine, the Russians
will not see it as a casus belli and start World War III. And
as odious as Putin’s actions in Ukraine are, they aren’t our fight.
Volodymyr Zelensky, for all his heroism, is tied into
the World Economic Forum cabal. Ukraine is a corrupt kleptocracy with
still-unexplained ties to the Biden family; it was a Ukrainian energy
firm that gave Hunter Biden a high-paying job for which he was
completely unqualified, in an obvious case of buying influence. Except
for brief periods, Ukraine was part of Russia for a thousand years,
until 1991. Putin may go on from Ukraine to menace NATO states, and that could be a legitimate casus belli,
but Ukraine is no hill to die on, or to start a world war on. It is not
actually the United States’ responsibility to solve the problems of all
the people in the world, and there will always be tyrants, and
invasions, and occupations. We can’t fix them all, especially with our
woke military spending time on gender theory that it could be spending
on learning to fight.
In this connection it is important to recall that even as the Nazis
stormed across Europe in 1939, 1940, and 1941, swiftly conquering
Poland, Norway, France and more, the United States did not enter the
war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted very much to get into the
war, but he could not sell to the American people the idea that it was
the responsibility of the American people to fight for Poland, or
Norway, or France. It was much more widely understood then than it is
now that the United States of America is not the world’s policeman or
repair man, and will only expend its resources fruitlessly when it tries
to act as such (see, for example, Iraq and Afghanistan).
Roosevelt didn’t enter the war, in fact, until the Japanese bombed
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and Adolf Hitler declared war on the
United States on December 11. It was at that point, and not before then,
that World War II became our fight. Roosevelt had given all manner of
aid to the British before Pearl Harbor was bombed, and Biden’s handlers,
if they have any spine at all, should do the same in this case, but the
idea that, as Puder says, “only the unpleasant choice of a credible
threat of Military action will make Russia or Iran change its course”
runs the risk of provoking a real war, one that could be far more
catastrophic than any war the planet has seen up to now.
There is no doubt that Puder is right: America needs a Churchill in
the White House. But when Churchill became prime minister of Great
Britain, the war in Europe had already been raging for eight months. He
didn’t start the war by reckless actions in a conflict that did not
involve his country. We need a prudent leader of his type now, one who
will know how much is enough and how much is too much in dealing with
Putin. As it is, our feckless State Department and dementia-ridden
president are foolishly writing checks their woke military can’t cash.
*
Joseph Puder Responds: Evil, If Not Stopped, Will Swallow Us All.
If Vladimir Putin wants a global nuclear war, he could choose multiple reasons to serve as a casus belli and
wage war. If pressed hard by western sanctions, including the cutting
off of his oil and gas revenues, he is as likely to consider it a casus belli,
and turn against the NATO allies. Putin, I have no doubt, feels just as
intensely about his economic strangulation as he does about a no-fly
zone in and around Lviv, to protect the fleeing Ukrainian refugees,
should the US and NATO allies consider imposing it.
Robert Spencer is correct about Ukrainian collaboration with the
Nazis, and I should add the rabid antisemitism on the part of many
Ukrainians during WWII, and even to some extent today. Naturally, there
were some Ukrainians who saved Jews as well. My own parents escaped
being murdered by Ukrainians during WWII. My mother’s courage and
Russian troops nearby saved them from certain death. Modern Ukraine is
different, it seeks to be democratic, and share western values, and
Volodymyr Zelensky is not Petro Poroshenko. In the late 1930’s or
1940’s, the thought of a Jewish president in Ukraine would have been
impossible. Today, Ukraine looks to the west – not to the east, and it
should be embraced.
Spencer isn’t exactly accurate when asserting that “the Ukraine was
part of Russia for 1,000 years.” In fact, Russia, as we know it today
has its roots in Kiev – Ukraine’s capital. The Kievan state existed
until the year 1240, when the Mongol hordes crushed it. Actually, Putin
has claimed Ukraine for historical and religious (Russian Orthodoxy)
reasons. He forgets however that Kiev was the cradle of what we know as
Russia. Kiev originated the Cyrillic alphabet, and Russian Orthodoxy.
Let’s be clear, I am not advocating a military and possibly a
nuclear confrontation with Putin’s Russia; understandably, such a
conflict could lead to World War III and an end to life as we know it.
We must however understand that Putin is not some crazy monster who is
set on incinerating the west, and his Mother Russia. He is though,
succeeding in intimidating the west. When he took Crimea and effectively
tore the Donbas region out of Ukraine, the Obama administration and its
western allies whimpered, and condemned, but did nothing. And when
Obama set up a “red line” against the Syrian dictator upon his use of
chemical weapons on his people, he pathetically let it slide…President
Joe Biden’s responses to foreign aggression is even more pathetic, as we
have seen last year in the Afghanistan debacle.
Putin believes that Russia has some justified reasons to fear the
expansion of NATO eastward, and at the same time, he seeks to recreate
the former Soviet Union. A child of Soviet propaganda, Putin envisions a
superpower Russia with all the natural resources of its former
republics such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc. In a 2014
interview with the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, marking the
25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he
(Gorbachev) stated that he thought that the NATO enlargement and
incorporation of former Warsaw Pact countries was a “big mistake,” and a
“violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made in 1990.”
All of the above notwithstanding, Ukraine held democratic elections,
and elected Volodymyr Zelensky as president. The Ukrainian people,
moreover, have the right to determine their future, a right Putin does
not have. And, if the people of Ukraine choose to join NATO, or the EU,
as a sovereign state they have the right to do so.
The real question is where will Putin stop? Will he be satisfied
with subjugating Ukraine against the will of most of its people? Poland,
Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary, all of them border Ukraine;
will he push further into these states to punish them for supporting
Ukraine? Putin is obviously not deterred by the likes of Joe Biden,
Boris Johnson, Emanuel Macron, or Olaf Scholz. He recognizes the near
pacifism in the western world, and he is not frightened by western
economic sanctions, since they have not hitherto impacted him
personally, or for that matter, Russia.
Spencer is correct about FDR wanting to fight Nazi Germany but he
could not sell the American people on entering the war to save Poland,
France, or other conquered nations. There is a difference however this
time around. Article 5 of the NATO charter specifies that the US is
committed to fight against any aggression committed against a fellow
NATO member. True, Ukraine is not yet a NATO member, and therefore the
US has no legal obligation to protect it. But the American people today
are far less isolationist than in the 1930’s or the period just before
Pearl Harbor. Most Americans see it as a moral obligation to defend
innocent civilians, and they are aghast by Russia’s naked aggression. I
agree with Spencer that “America is not the world’s policeman,” but we
must also realize that evil, if not stopped will swallow us all.
While acknowledging Joe Biden's desire for world peace and avoidance of war is understandable, warning Putin with a credible military
option against further Russian expansion is essential. At some point a
no-fly-zone will become an imperative. Sadly, America needs a Churchill
in the White House right now. Instead, it seems, we have a Chamberlain.
*
Robert Spencer Responds: There's a Fine Line Between Strength and Provocation.
Joseph Puder is certainly correct that if Vladimir Putin wants war
with the United States, he could start it now, trumpeting any number of
actions by the U.S. and its allies, from expanding NATO ever eastward to
arming Ukraine and more, as the reasons why he had no choice but to
declare war. It is clear by now that he doesn’t want a world war, which
would almost certainly be a nuclear war of unimaginable devastation, any
more than Joe Biden and his handlers do. But Puder believes, not
without reason, that Biden’s handlers can and should present a much
stronger front to Putin, and that doing so would deter the Russian from
continuing to pursue his expansionist goals. While strength is always to
be preferred to appeasement of a tyrant, however, the current regime of
socialist internationalists and spineless dreamers cannot be trusted to
know what constitute a reasonable show of strength and what constitutes
an unwarranted provocation.
Take, for example, that expansion of NATO. In his February 24 speech announcing the invasion of Ukraine, Putin said:
“In December 2021 we once again made an attempt to agree with the
United States and its allies on the principles of ensuring security in
Europe and on the non-expansion of NATO. Everything was in vain. The US
position did not change. They did not consider it necessary to negotiate
with Russia on this important issue for us, continuing to pursue their
own goals and disregarding our interests.”
If this is true, it is not hard to imagine Antony Blinken and his
team too concerned with making sure the State Department had the right
number of racial minorities and proper instruction in Critical Race
Theory to concern themselves with Putin’s overtures. They could have and
should have known that Russia considers the expansion of NATO into
former Soviet republics to be an unacceptable attempt to encircle
Russia, as Putin explained in his speech: “I am referring to the
expansion of the NATO to the east, moving its military infrastructure
closer to Russian borders. It is well known that for 30 years we have
persistently and patiently tried to reach an agreement with the leading
NATO countries on the principles of equal and inviolable security in
Europe. In response to our proposals, we constantly faced either cynical
deception and lies, or attempts to pressure and blackmail, while NATO,
despite all our protests and concerns, continued to steadily expand. The
war machine is moving and, I repeat, it is coming close to our
borders.”
One doesn’t have to accept Putin’s argument or consider his invasion
of Ukraine justified to see that his characterization of Biden’s
imperious, elitist State Department is entirely plausible. It is
important to point this out now, after the invasion, because the same
ham-handed, blinkered, pseudo-intellectual Leftists whose
short-sightedness and wrongheadedness let the invasion happen in the
first place are still in charge. If a show of strength to Putin can be
bungled, they can be counted upon to bungle it.
As for Puder’s claim that it is not accurate to say that “Ukraine
was part of Russia for 1,000 years,” he actually demonstrates that it is
accurate by noting that “Russia, as we know it today has its roots in
Kiev – Ukraine’s capital.” One may quibble over whether Kievan Rus was
Russian or Ukrainian, but the telling fact is that it was both, and that
throughout history the two have been more one people than two. The fact
that, as Puder claims I forgot but which was actually the basis of my
argument, it is true that “Kiev was the cradle of what we know as
Russia,” and that is precisely why Putin believes he has a claim to
it. This is not to say that Ukraine should not be independent, unless
one wishes also to argue that Austria and Germany should be one state, a
proposition I am not at all disposed to favor.
Puder says that he is “not advocating a military and possibly a
nuclear confrontation with Putin’s Russia,” but the weak and feckless
socialist policy wonks who inhabit Biden’s State Department and entire
administration have never demonstrated anything comparable to the
judiciousness and wisdom of Churchill or anyone else who ever brought a
major war to a successful conclusion. Puder is in effect asking that
Biden’s gang of arrogant, miseducated children, with no understanding of
history, culture, religion, or economics stand up to a canny,
unscrupulous, utterly ruthless authoritarian. The consequences of their
miscalculation, and the hopeless Blinken is certain to miscalculate,
would be, as Puder says “World War III and an end to life as we know
it.” Putin may not be, as Puder says, “some crazy monster who is set on
incinerating the west,” but the foreign policy establishment is a bunch
of self-infatuated grad students with no understanding of how the world
works; he can and would take advantage of their attempts to draw some
“red line” that both he and they would know from the outset was
spurious.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is a corrupt kleptocracy that gave Hunter Biden a
high-paying job in a field in which he had no experience, in an obvious
attempt to curry favor with Joe Biden. It was a phone call with
Zelensky that got Trump impeached, in an obvious partisan witch-hunt,
the first time. This is not to say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was
justified, or that Putin is not a scoundrel, or that the Ukrainians are
not noble in resistance, or that Zelensky is not courageous. But once
again, this is not our fight, and making it our fight could so easily
spiral out of control that it is imperative that we keep a cool head
amid all the prevailing war fever. Haven’t we learned the lessons of
Iraq and Afghanistan yet?
Puder admits that Ukraine is not in NATO and so we have no
obligation to defend it, but thinks that we should anyway, for “we must
also realize that evil, if not stopped will swallow us all.” Well, yes.
But that’s why NATO has members and non-members. We are bound, for
better or worse, to defend NATO’s members. If this means that we have an
obligation to fight evil anywhere else in the world that it may appear,
we might as well bring every country in the world into NATO, so that it
is clear that we are obligated to fight for them all and to combat evil
wherever and whenever it may break out.
That may be a wonderful sentiment, but it is utterly impracticable.
Our resources are not infinite, and our self-serving, corrupt leaders
are already pouring out our substance for all manner of boondoggles that
benefit the American people not a whit. At some point, the gravy train
is going to run out. What we really need is a strong America-First
president, who would have made clear to Putin from the outset that his
adventurism would have terrible consequences, and who would have always
acted in the best interests of the American people. If only there were
someone on the scene like that.
*
Joseph Puder is a regular Frontpage Mag contributor. Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
US PRESIDENT Joe Biden holds a news conference in the East Room of the
White House, on Wednesday. (credit: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS)
