On Ukraine:What if?

History Gave Biden the Chance for a Munich Do-Over

Here’s a thought exercise I have not yet seen committed to print.

It’s very likely too late now, but what would have happened if President Biden had told the world something quite similar to what President Kennedy said in the Cuban missile crisis, declaring that an attack by Russia on Ukraine would be viewed as an attack on the United States and that as he was making this declaration every rapidly deployable element of the US Armed Forces was in route to Ukraine to help shore up the country’s immediate defenses and to serve as proof of the American commitment.

Would Putin have attacked American planes inbound or proceeded to invade and perhaps killed thousands of American soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen? Would NATO or any of its main members have renounced the US action and sided with the Russians? Would Congress have prohibited the expenditure of funds to support the troops in harms way?

What if, in the same address, the president had told the American people that while they might not see an immediate threat to their own lives from whether Russia invades and conquers Ukraine, might not immediately understand why it was worth the lives of young men and women from Kansas to defend Kyiv, that in fact this was a historical moment quite like when Adolf Hitler demanded control of Czechoslovakia, a moment in which the free nations of the world had rolled over for an ever so dangerous dictator?

What if the President had explained that those who had sought to prevent war then had actually guaranteed a much larger war, which began only one year later and that he, President Biden, was determined to be another Churchill, not another Chamberlain?

What if he had told the American people that while there was an unquestionably large risk from the path he had chosen, he believed with his heart and soul that it was a lesser risk than letting Russia seize the freedom seeking people of Ukraine by force, giving a greenlight for sure for Communist China to seize the free people of Taiwan — the Saudi Arabia of the computer chips which make the whole 21st century world work?

What if he had told the American people that the conclusion a dozen or more major countries, all with the capacity to develop nuclear weapons, would have to draw from the US allowing the conquest of Ukraine is that the only way for them to ensure their security, as the North Koreans have now done, is to get the bomb, an inevitable lesson given that it is inconceivable Russia would be invading Ukraine today if the Ukrainians had not agreed to relinquish their arsenal of nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union, in exchange for assurances from the United States and Britain of their future security?

Thus, he would have correctly argued, letting Ukraine fall now, in an effort to avoid confrontation between nuclear armed nations almost certainly increases the likelihood of many future such confrontations, between many newly nuclear powers, far less experienced than the US and Russia in such situations.

In the face of such a case laid out by the president, would the American people have deserted him and the troops he had put in the field or would they have rallied to him and to the historic vein of understanding in this country that while the oceans offer us some measure of protection from the chaos of the old world, ultimately our own freedom and prosperity, even our own physical safety, require a willingness to risk sacrifice when the freedom of others in far off lands faces extermination under the tank treads and boots of foreign invaders?

I think the answers to these hypothetical questions would have supported such actions and arguments, and yet it seems there was never a time in this slowly unfolding crisis in which there was essentially anything greater than zero chance that any of this would happen in the real world.

So we may indeed be living through another Munich moment. God help us if the consequences are the same.