Channelling Lincoln and FDR

The EU has announced it will negotiate membership with Ukraine. It’s a statement of solidarity and a signal to Russia’s autocracy that the EU is committed to the great moral challenge of the war. When Russia invaded its neighbour in February last year the result appeared inevitable – its air attacks would make Ukraine’s cities uninhabitable. Russia’s armies would roll over those of Ukraine. Ukrainians would give up the unequal struggle and accept that a return to their historical subordination to tsars and politburos in distant Moscow was the price of bread and life.

It did not happen for many reasons – the resolve of the Ukrainian people, the courage and competence of its citizen soldiers who outmatched Russia’s military, hollowed out by decades of corruption. But two years on it still could happen. Not a Russian parade in Kyiv but an armed truce, where Ukraine gives up territory and pride, remains a real risk for as long as Vladimir Putin stays in power. What will stop it is a grand alliance of NATO, the US and their allies, including Australia, supplying Ukraine as the US did for beleaguered Britain before 1941. The Biden administration, with $US75bn in assistance, and the EU with $US90bn have kept Ukraine functioning. But US funding has become a near-run thing in congress. Republicans now are making $61bn ($90.8bn) more in aid to Ukraine dependent on tougher border controls. This plays to the GOP base. It beggars belief that Republicans are not up in arms against Russian aggression. It was their hero, Ronald Reagan, who defeated the Soviet Union, spending what it took to bankrupt the “evil empire”. But the party has always included isolationists inclined to the “America first’’ view, now a core message of Donald Trump.

The challenge for President Joe Biden, who understands what is at stake, is to channel two US presidents: one Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and one Republican, Abraham Lincoln. In 1940, when the US was still neutral in World War II, Roosevelt made the case for equipping Britain. He called for the US to be “the great arsenal of democracy”. In 1863 Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The civil war, he said, was between democracy and slave-owning autocrats who refused to accept the rule of law and voters’ sovereignty. It was about protecting the principle “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth”. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could not put it better.