The Republican Party was founded in clean repudiation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the greatest evil ever committed by Congress. This law gave each region the power to vote on slavery, thereby emphasizing popular sovereignty over freedom. On Saturday, the House passed a $61 billion bill for Ukraine by a vote of 311-112, with 112 despicable House Republicans voting to give Ukraine the death penalty for lacking military basics like artillery shells. How many of those 112 people know or care that more than half of the $61 billion will go toward replenishing U.S. munitions inventories and buying U.S. weapons from Ukraine?
President Biden has been criticized for what can rightly be condemned as the “drip supply” of weapons to Ukraine. It would be natural to say the same thing about him as Theodore Roosevelt said about President William Howard Taft: “He’s weak.”
The Senate’s ratification of Ukraine aid on Tuesday proves that Dwight Eisenhower’s baton of Republican internationalism has passed from Ronald Reagan to Mitch McConnell. They are his three most important Republicans of the past 100 years.
Parliamentary support for Ukraine is alongside two other parliamentary laws defining the state.
In March 1941, Congress approved Lend-Lease aid to Britain and other countries (235 Democrats and 24 Republicans in favor, 25 Democrats and 135 Republicans against). This “the most despicable act in the history of the nation” (Winston Churchill) marked the end of America’s feigned neutrality. By authorizing aid to Greece and Turkey in May 1947, Congress confirmed the Truman Doctrine that the United States would support democracies threatened by authoritarians (161 Democrats, 126 Republicans). (13 Democrats and 93 Republicans opposed). Isolationism will not return even after World War II ends.
A grotesque cabal may still prevail in today’s Republican Party, dominated by figures who deny the internationalism that Eisenhower committed to the party 70 years ago.
That includes Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who thinks we gave Ukraine a “blank check” (actually 5 percent of defense spending and half the amount of European aid). Less than). But Hawley said since we can’t protect both Ukraine and Taiwan, now is the perfect time to reduce U.S. forces in Europe that are preventing Russia from invading NATO allies. Another grotesque Ohio senator, J.D. Vance, is the itinerant Neville Chamberlain who visits his dressing room and would welcome the death of Ukraine in an installment plan (see Czechoslovakia, 1938-1939). Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (who wonders if Jewish space lasers will cause forest fires) and Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas (who doubts whether Jewish space lasers will cause forest fires) say they are caused by Russian propaganda. He has expressed his hatred for Ukraine with insane accusations that support the judgment of the Republican Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. She said it has “infected a significant portion of my party’s base.”
We authorized a House vote by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to support Ukrainian resistance to indiscriminate bombing of populated areas, ethnic cleansing, rape, torture, and child abductions. We have defined heroism by including doing things. “One woman I interviewed had her eyes taken out with a spoon,” added Ukrainian Oleksandra Matvichuk, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
Heroism is not required of Ukraine’s NATO and other allies, whose combined GDP is 20 times that of Russia. The cost of losing through reckless frugality in a proxy war against a barbaric power with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal would be enormous.
The Economist columnist Charlemagne said Ukraine’s defeat would be a “Suez moment” for the West. In other words, it is a humble display of waning power. Two months ago, Estonian intelligence said that “Russia calculates, in their own opinion, that a military conflict with NATO is possible within the next 10 years.” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s chief diplomat, said: “High-intensity conventional war in Europe is no longer a pipe dream.”
Today’s Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis is just as watchful as the axis of the 1930s. Writing in Bloomberg, Johns Hopkins foreign policy analyst Hal Bruns reminds us: “Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 prompted Hitler to send troops back to the Rhineland in 1936, just as Germany’s Blitzkrieg of Western Europe in 1940 encouraged Japan to invade the southeast. “Asia. “
We now know that the great unraveling that was World War II probably began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Only by looking back can we be sure that World War III has not begun.
