Capitol Hill’s darkest hour

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military forces are slowly advancing along multiple key fronts in Ukraine. Capitol Hill now finds itself dancing on the freshly dug grave that the Kremlin is preparing for Western democracy. Aid to Ukraine, for now, appears hopelessly lost amid a self-defeating tug of war between the Senate and House. 

We as a country are no longer being led by sage statesmen, yet rather by self-interested men and women who put party above country, personal ambition before duty and partisan political expediency ahead of the long-term national security of the nation.

Simply put, we have become a nation of Neros, dancing at our own funeral. Meanwhile, the flames of democracy are in danger of being extinguished on the battlefields of Donbass and along the southern front leading to the Crimean Peninsula.

It truly is Capitol Hill’s darkest hour. 

Meanwhile, in the myopic world of domestic grassroots politics, party stalwarts are cheering on the demise of American power. Effectively, they are rallying to burn it all down, including America’s true greatness.

Distrust of the media is at an all-time high. Civil discourse in the public square has given way to partisan lynch mobs. Undeserving men like Tucker Carlson are elevated to high esteem, while deserving men such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) are nearly chased out of office.

The question now is not who can save us, but whether we as the public can save ourselves from the fate of countless fallen empires before us: our own self-inflicted demise. 

A new Pearl Harbor is happening all around us — in Ukraine, in the Indo-Pacific and in the Mideast. Far too many among us are blind to the ideological global war rapidly engulfing us as a nation. Instead of racing toward the danger, we are running away from the existential challenges of our time, believing that somehow they will not affect us.

It is time we as a country take heed of Captain John H. Miller, the fictional World War II U.S. Army Ranger Battalion company commander played by Tom Hanks, and “earn this” democracy of ours anew. We are blithely standing in front of the graves of nearly 16 million American men and women who fought and won World War II to preserve our liberty.

They have tried to pass the torch to us in this time of national peril, but far too many of us are not even looking. Instead of “earning this,” we are burning it — and in the process we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

It does not have to be this way. 

American history is replete with examples of the power of the common man and woman to do great things, even when our leaders in Washington falter. In the Civil War, that grassroots power was used to root out slavery and start a long, still uncompleted march toward equality. In World War I, imperialism was defeated. In World War II, the tyranny of fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust were vanquished. In the Cold War, democracy and capitalism prevailed.

Now it falls to us as a people and as a nation to put a decisive end to Putin’s growing revanchist machinations in eastern Europe — and to do so before he can harness the powers needed to imperil all of Europe and by extension the economic and military security of the U.S. Putin and his “Arsenals of Evil” allies, including Iran and North Korea, are gunning for democracy, and increasingly they are actively doing so from within using disinformation and propaganda.

It is said that it is darkest before dawn. If true, then we need to fully appreciate that Washington vis-à-vis our national security is currently almost as dark as it can get.

It is time, therefore, for us as a people to safely see the nation through to a new dawn — to earn once again this democracy we have collectively inherited.

Victory in Ukraine is that much-needed dawn, if only we can find the resolve to see our country through this darkest of times and, as former President Abraham Lincoln said in his 1861 Inaugural Address, find “the better angels of our nature.”

The gamesmanship on Capitol Hill has to stop. Too many of us, alongside our political leaders, are blindly playing Putin’s and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s zero-sum game. We are failing to realize that the U.S. is in danger of losing. Washington, collectively, must confront their disinformation.

Ukraine, as we have repeatedly argued, needs added offensive military capabilities to take the fight to Putin’s military forces head on, and to strike within Russia’s borders to shape the battlefield and interdict Russian troops and weapons before they can target Ukrainian civilians and military positions.

But Ukraine also urgently needs something arguably far more important from Capitol Hill: an FDR-like unconditional resolve to completely defeat Putin in Ukraine, including expelling his forces from Crimea. To achieve that, Washington must get its collective act together.

That means a winning plan from President Biden and his national security team. To date, his vague promises to defend Ukraine for as long as it will take is just a recipe for another forever war. It also means former President Donald Trump must stop recklessly attacking our NATO allies with statements that he would encourage Putin to attack NATO member-states who have not met their 2 percent military funding obligations.

We are effectively already at war with Russia. And Putin, to a certain degree, has succeeded in pitting Americans against each other in a domestic civil war. As Lincoln aptly noted in 1858, paraphrasing from the Gospel of Matthew, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” 

Yet here we are, 166 years later, as badly divided as ever. We are standing in the dark of a self-imposed night, being confronted by a new and emerging ominous Russian space capability described by House Intel Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) as “a serious national security threat.”

It is time for Capitol Hill to wake up and relight the torches of American liberty in Ukraine and around the world. 

Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer.