What is utterly bizarre about the situation is that the MAGA gang is not even pretending to have some morally cognizable motive for their opposition. It's not clear what benefit they stand to gain or principle they seek to vindicate by blocking Ukraine aid. Yet, they are so profoundly dug into this position! Vance seems to nurse an outright grudge against Ukraine. He actively seems to want Putin to win this conflict. Same goes for Trump. And I don't even know why. I can't come up with any policy explanation, apart from just having an outright love of dictators and contempt for U.S. allies.
This bigoted opposition to aiding Ukraine is reminiscent of the complacency with which the Great Powers crushed the national aspirations of Central Europeans in the wake of 19th century revolutions. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in protesting against the British government's indifference to the fate of these popular revolutions, spoke of the "Refusal of Aid between Nations" as a sign of the times. Yet what Rossetti warned against in the poem was mostly apathy on the part of the English to the fate of Continental freedom-fighters. What we are seeing today is something closer to outright hostility.
The politicians pushing most for another "Refusal of Aid between Nations" today are guilty of all the sins Rossetti described. They fail to ask, as Rossetti writes, "why thou dost thus," when they see a "wrongful blow" being struck against their neighbor (in this case, Ukraine). They fail to ask this question because, as Vance told us, he frankly "do[esn't] care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other." But, they are guilty of more than Rossetti describes too. Beyond apathy, they actively seem to want Ukraine to fail. They want to see Putin succeed—perhaps because they prefer his autocracy to their own democracy.
The situation at the moment can frankly seem rather hopeless. With people of such power and influence openly working against Ukraine's future, it's not clear that U.S. support for the country can be sustained any further. And in the absence of concerted U.S. support, all the analysts agree, Ukraine will fall. And don't think that Putin's ambitions will end at gnawing off some corner of Ukraine. If people once thought this was the case—and if Tucker Carlson set out to prove as much by interviewing the despot—they have been disappointed. Putin doesn't even pretend otherwise at this point. He wants the whole pie.
But as dark as things appear right now for the future of Ukraine—and with it, of democracy in the West in general—we can take heed from Ukrainian history itself that such reversals can be overcome. I was reading today Byron's poem about the Ukrainian national hero Mazeppa, who fought alongside the Swedes against Czar Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava. I heard about the poem because it is quoted in Sir Edward Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, which features Poltava. Prophetically, Creasy sees this battle as the one that launched Russia on its career as an autocratic world power.
Byron's poem is more about Mazeppa's past romantic intrigues than it is his career as a soldier—the latter serves merely as a framing device for the account of his earlier exile from Poland. But the poem does end with a gentle reminder from the titular narrator that we shouldn't count out the military underdog. No one could have foreseen, he says—when he was still strapped to the back of the nobleman's horse—that he would eventually return as a conqueror. The implication is clear. Even as the poem opens with the victory of the Russian Czar, that does not mean the Russian state will be victorious in all the wars to come.
Though at the start of the poem, Byron writes, "The Power and Glory of the war,/ Faithless as their vain votaries, Men,/ Had passed to the triumphant Czar," nonetheless, Mazeppa bids us keep in mind: "What Mortal his own doom may guess?/ Let none despond – let none despair[.]"
I am reminded of a similar admonition from Arthur Hugh Clough's "Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth"—which was written in response to the same betrayal of popular revolts in Central and Eastern Europe to which Rossetti was responding in his poem, referenced above. Clough, framing the same sentiment here as Byron's Mazeppa, writes:
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers
So it is in Ukraine today. For all the Putins, for all the Vances, for all the Trumps of the world, and all the arrogance of their power and the cowardice of their betrayals, no one can foresee whether they will triumph in the end. No matter how dismal the situation may seem for Ukraine today, it may be that the country's future victory is even now being prepared. If Putin succeeds on the battlefield one day, he may fail the next. "Tomorrow the Borysthenes/ May see our coursers graze at ease," Byron's Mazeppa says. Or, to return to Clough:
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
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