Follow this authorGeorge F. Will's opinions

It includes Missouri’s Sen. Josh Hawley, who thinks we have given “blank checks” to Ukraine (actually, 5 percent of defense spending, and less than half the monetary value of European support). Yet Hawley says we cannot defend both Ukraine and Taiwan, so this would be an excellent time to reduce the U.S. forces in Europe that are deterring Russia from aggressions against NATO allies. Another grotesque, Ohio’s Sen. J.D. Vance, an itinerant Neville Chamberlain visiting green rooms, would welcome Ukraine’s death on the installment plan (see Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939). Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (she who wonders whether Jewish space lasers cause forest fires) expresses her loathing of Ukraine with lunatic accusations that confirm the judgment of Texas’s Rep. Michael McCaul (Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee) that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”

We have defined heroism so far down that it encompasses Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) allowing a House vote on assisting Ukrainians’ resistance to indiscriminate bombardments of population centers, ethnic cleansing, rape, torture and the abduction of children. Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Ukrainian winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, adds: “One woman I interviewed had her eye extracted with a spoon.”

Advertisement

Heroism is not required of Ukraine’s NATO and other allies, whose combined GDPs are 20 times that of Russia. The cost of losing, by ill-conceived parsimony, this proxy war with a barbarian power possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal would be steep.

The Economist columnist Charlemagne says Ukraine’s defeat would be a “Suez moment” for the West. Meaning, a humbling demonstration of waning power. Two months ago, Estonian intelligence said: “Russians in their own thinking are calculating that military conflict with NATO is possible in the next decade.” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s chief diplomat, says: “A........

© Washington Post