Unlike the Marxists and other determinists who think history is shaped by vast impersonal forces beyond anyone’s control, the obvious truth is that individuals make history.
Think of how the world would have been different had Lord Halifax and not Winston Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain as British prime minister in 1940: Britain would have sued for peace on the best terms it could get from Hitler.
Likewise, how different would history have been if anyone other than Margaret Thatcher had been British PM after the invasion of the Falkland Islands; or if Pope John Paul II had not been there to inspire the Christians of Eastern Europe against their godless communist overlords?
Imagine if John Monash had been killed by a sniper at Gallipoli, or if King Harold hadn’t looked skywards at the wrong moment at the Battle of Hastings.
Indeed, the more we’ve learned about the Nazi sympathies of Edward VIII, the more grateful I am that twice-divorced Wallis Simpson caught his eye, and the world instead got his brother to lead us through those dark days of World War II and give us his daughter for a historic 70-year reign.
Who’s in charge, at critical moments, can determine the fate of nations and the wider world. Indeed, nothing is more significant than the human factor in history, given that it’s individuals’ responses to circumstances that determine their ultimate impact.
Suppose Volodymyr Zelensky had accepted then-president Joe Biden’s offer of a chopper ride to safety on February 24, 2022, when Russia’s tanks first rolled across the border in what was expected to be the quickest of conquests.
No doubt some Ukrainian military units would have put up a sporadic resistance before being slaughtered, and a few hardy civilians would have been defiant before being butchered.
But organised resistance would inevitably have collapsed as soon as the nation’s leader had decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
And just like the earlier Biden-orchestrated scuttle from Kabul, that may have emboldened Vladimir Putin’s military adventurism, and the wider West would again have been humiliated at the hands of the Islamist, fascist and communist dictatorships seeking its destruction.
Instead, Zelensky stayed at his post, survived the numerous death squads sent to kill him, and the precision munitions targeting his various headquarters, to lead his nation in an against-the-odds struggle for three years.
And yes, his country has paid a heavy price: with millions of Ukrainians sheltering in neighbouring countries, many cities devastated under indiscriminate bombardment, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed or maimed because they decided that it was better to risk death than see their national freedom and independence once more crushed by an imperial bully.
Would it have been better for Zelensky to have told his people that resistance was futile, and they might as well resign themselves to once more living in an oppressed corner of the Russian empire?
Almost certainly, fewer people would have died, even in a brutal Russian occupation, but this raises the existential question that’s echoed through history of whether it’s better to live on your knees or die on your feet.
That’s the question more than 100,000 Australians have resolved in the course of our national existence, largely fighting for others’ freedom, and who earlier generations decided should be honoured at the Australian War Memorial.
In any event, the Ukrainian people, almost to a man and a woman, made the choice to fight, and who is any outsider to say they were wrong – even the President of the United States.
After initially saying a “limited” incursion would be no great issue, Biden and America’s erstwhile European allies gave the Ukrainians enough weaponry not to lose but not enough to succeed in ejecting the Russians from their land. Now, Biden’s successor has decided that none of that should have been gifted to the Ukrainians as America’s contribution to the defeat of contemporary fascism in Europe, but that it must subsequently be paid for by the gifting of much of Ukraine’s latent mineral wealth.
After falsely claiming Zelensky was a “dictator” who’d “started the war”, and was only keeping it going to ride on an American “gravy train”, the leader of the free world unceremoniously expelled from the Oval Office the world’s greatest freedom fighter for the temerity of explaining the mineral deal should also be accompanied by security guarantees.
Could Zelensky have handled it better and said what he said off camera? Absolutely. And of course, if an apology is what it takes to get a renewed American commitment to his country, Zelensky shouldn’t be too proud to make it.
But it’s almost unimaginable that any previous president would have made a media spectacle of a brave ally so that he could look strong. Some have likened Donald Trump’s seeming willingness to force the Ukrainians to make peace with the Russians to Chamberlain’s surrender of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis – but that’s not quite fair because at least Chamberlain, in anticipation of a coming war, massively ramped up aircraft production.
To give the President his due, it should be conceded that – Ukraine and Israel aside – America’s allies have largely been free-riding on America and should have been doing much more for their own national security for at least a generation.
And his domestic agenda, such as securing borders, eliminating government waste, ending the gender confusion, and stopping the net-zero madness, will make America stronger.
There is much to support.
Even the tariffs make sense if applied against China, which has taken advantage of free trade but not practised it; or if applied in a highly selective way, to restore America’s industrial base rather than to punish friends like Canada.
Still, it’s hard to see America made great again if the Trump administration’s message to the world is that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
If, as is claimed, the real objective is to force the Europeans to do more for their own defence, why humiliate Zelensky?
And if, as is further claimed, the objective is to pivot from Russia to the greater challenger, China, why signal disinterest in the fate of a country just because, in Ukraine’s case, it’s far away and perhaps not a perfect democracy?
If all that might commit America to defending another country is immediate self-interest, Taiwan must be deeply regretting starting semiconductor manufacturing in the US.
Likewise, the South Koreans and the Japanese must be wondering how their freedom can be made sufficiently important for this administration to think it worth a single American life.
And what about us, even more reliant on an American alliance for our security; what must we do to make a transactional president think we matter to him?
If it’s the human factor that makes history, it’s the human factor that shapes the present and the future too.
When al-Qa’ida terrorists flew planes into the twin towers, we all knew that life had changed in new and terrifying ways.
“America is great because America is good,” de Tocqueville is supposed to have said; and “if America ever stops being good, it will stop being great”.
Is this what’s ahead, or will last week’s Oval Office meeting see the rest of the West lift their efforts, as they surely should, and the US stay the course? We live in challenging and dangerous times.
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