The West is failing to rise to the challenge of Russia’s threat

Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs Espen Barth Eide recently told a Ukrainian journalist that “I think we should all be honest and say: Nobody does enough” to help Ukraine defeat Putin’s Russia. Eide had in mind the countries of NATO, which is currently celebrating the 75th anniversary of its founding on April 4, 1949.

Let’s look more closely at Eide’s statement. The logical proposition underpinning it is this: If you believe, as Eide and most NATO countries claim to, that Putin’s Russia is an existential threat to Europe, then you will do everything possible to counter that threat by helping Ukraine win.

Now consider the “contrapositive,” whereby the negation of the conclusion logically implies the negation of the premise: If, as Eide says, one is not doing everything possible to help Ukraine, then it follows that one does not consider Putin’s Russia to be an existential threat to Europe.

The conclusion is inescapable: NATO countries talk about the Russian threat, but their dilly-dallying, their insufficient support of Ukraine and their unwillingness to impose truly punitive sanctions all testify to the fact that they don’t really mean what they say.

In this respect, Hungary’s tinpot authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and his counterpart in Slovakia, Robert Fico, are being honest. They openly support Putin because they share his totalitarian values and admire his hard-knuckled regime. Ditto for Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican base. Why worry about Ukraine and Russia if a Russian victory means only that “family values” will triumph and lucrative commercial relations with Russia can resume?

Some instances of Putinophilia are less explicable. Consider the well-known Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, who still believes that NATO wanted to accept Ukraine into its ranks and that the U.S. engineered a “coup” during the Revolution of Dignity of 2014. Not only is there absolutely no evidence to support his claims — if anything, NATO suffered from “Ukraine fatigue” and couldn’t even begin to imagine Ukrainian membership in anyone’s lifetime — but to reduce Ukrainian “people power” to a CIA plot is not only preposterous, but deeply insulting to the millions of Ukrainians who took to the streets and risked their lives in 2014. Small wonder, alas, that Sachs is a regular on some of the crudest Russian propaganda talk shows.

At this point, critics of Putin, like me, will jump into the fray and insist that Russia is a mortal threat, not just to Ukraine, but to all of Europe, the United States and indeed the world. We’ll also insist that this is so obviously, so manifestly the case that only a dolt would fail to recognize that Putin is the 21st century’s answer to Adolf Hitler. Our arguments are legion, and few have made the case for immediate assistance to Ukraine better than Yale University historian Timothy Snyder.

And yet, not only do the Orbáns and Ficos and their cheerleaders remain unpersuaded, but evidently so too do the Americans and most Europeans, including Eide’s Norway. The Baltic states definitely see the threat — their geographic proximity to Russia makes sure of that. French President Emmanuel Macron has recently seen the light and gone over to the side of Putin’s strongest critics, albeit rhetorically, but even Poland, which is one of Ukraine’s most steadfast allies, doesn’t seem to get that blocking its border to Ukrainian trucks and ruining Ukraine’s economy is no way to show its understanding of the Russian threat.

The U.S. is the biggest hypocrite. Except for a small group of Trump’s diehard supporters in Congress, the American political class claims to overwhelmingly support Ukraine and to comprehend the magnitude of the Russian threat. And yet, Washington has proven to be incapable of subordinating election politics and personal ambitions to the distinct possibility that a Ukrainian defeat would spell continued Russian expansion and World War III — and the deaths of thousands of Americans.

It’s hard not to conclude that most Western states just don’t really believe that Putin is Hitler. How is that possible?

It may be that policymakers and publics are just hoping that it’s all a bad dream and that all will be well when they wake up. Unfortunately, if Putin has his way, their sleep may prove to be permanent.

It may also be that democracy’s wheels turn slowly and that aid to Ukraine will come, eventually. But back in the 1940s, the United Kingdom and the United States evinced the requisite political will, adopted radical measures and managed to turn out phenomenal numbers of weapons in the shortest of times.

In other words, it may all come down to leadership, a point that Atlantic Council President Fred Kempe emphasizes in his columns. The West lacks a Winston Churchill or Franklin D. Roosevelt to mobilize their nations and meet the Russian threat squarely and unflinchingly.

The irony is that Putin is a serial bungler, a strategic nincompoop who could easily be outmaneuvered and outfoxed by a Western leader with the guts to try. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has, for all his faults, risen to the occasion and, despite his lack of political experience, managed to rally the nation and say no to Putin. So it’s possible for strong leaders to emerge even today. And Zelensky proves that one doesn’t have to be a heavyweight to punch like a heavyweight.

Unfortunately, President Joe Biden has failed to lead the world against Putin. Donald Trump has demonstrated that he can’t lead, period.

That may leave the fate of Ukraine and the West in Monsieur Macron’s hands. Can he rise to the occasion and become Charles de Gaulle?

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”