The brutal war of Russia against Ukraine is consequential for the West

“War is hell,” wrote General John Sherman, who fought for and in his country in an especially brutal and destructive one. This clear-eyed assessment by a largely victorious Union officer in our Civil War is no less true today about Vladimir Putin’s war to bring back the “old” Soviet Union as multitudes of Ukraine’s soldiers and civilians die and many others flee to safer ground to the West.  If prudence is undoubtedly necessary to determine how best to help this besieged nation which is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, far more than sentimental feelings impel Western nations to take the risks that this war entails.

If President Joe Biden can be legitimately criticized for the weakness he displayed prior to the current war in his disastrous Afghanistan pullout, we can sympathize with him as he tries to thread the needle of providing or facilitating the delivery of weapons of war not merely defensive, while attempting to avoid a possible world war with Russia. The central question is, Is substantial U.S. and NATO involvement worth the risk? I believe it is, not only because the Russian nuclear threat has been exaggerated but because the health of the Western world may well depend on it.

I am not a military strategist, but I have learned that the Russian threat consists in the use of low-yield nuclear weapons rather than, say, ballistic missiles. When Republican Presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1964 proposed doing so in the Vietnam war, it caused apoplexy among liberals who were hysterical on the subject. Yes, tactical nuclear weapons would bring more destruction but not usher in intercontinental ballistic missiles. If the West’s military hand is stayed by Putin’s threat here, in effect Putin will have won.

More is at stake here than the future of a single European nation. If one of them can be conquered by this possible escalation, then all of them can. That means that we must not be deterred by the tactics of the West’s worst enemy at this time.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and its numerous “republics” became independent, the United States promised to protect Ukraine afterwards, particularly given the fact that it had given up the nuclear weapons on its soil, thereby leaving it vulnerable to re-annexation. Ukraine’s absence from NATO, therefore, is not an argument for abandoning it to Putin’s imperial whims.

Last December the conservative fortnightly National Review dedicated most of an issue to why Western civilization is worth defending. Twelve concise and thoughtful articles made the case. Even the millions who have never heard of National Review, much less the authors of the timely pieces, already know that the West must be preserved. From the moment the tanks rolled and bombs fell, millions on both sides of the Atlantic, even those most critical of the Western heritage, instinctively were moved by the Ukrainians’ fate. So let us summarize what some of the best minds in our civilization say about it.

Here are their conclusions. The West is a product of the combined influence of the Greeks who gave us philosophy and the Hebrews who gave us the Bible. Despite the differences, we have combined learning and piety. Christianity universalized in meaning and dissemination the God of the Old Testament, even if its full social consequences took centuries to take hold. The age-old preference for tyranny and conquest was tamed into liberal democracy, fragile in modern times no less than in ancient, as the managerial state squeezes liberty.

In my opinion, the most consequential Western development was the concept of individual rights, based on the remarkable philosophical and Biblical agreement that human beings have the ability to reason and think, an idea transitioning through both Renaissance and Reformation, to liberal democracy. And however much commerce is belittled as selfish, the modern West’s explosion of free trade based on property rights has raised most of the world’s standard of living, putting the lie to the leftist claim that all wealth is based on slavery or theft. The trade in customs and ideas has, no less than commerce, enhanced our world as the much-derided “cultural appropriation” is the acceptance of worthy contributions outside our civilization, correcting the current rage against what has gone on for centuries.

From our earliest schooling, we learned of the incredible Western dedication to exploring all the regions of the world which, if it had brutal aspects, has heightened human aspirations not only on earth but on other worlds. Within the West and beyond, great works of literature, philosophy, art and music have beautified the world as a whole, otherwise known as the Great Canon. If suffices to mention Michelangelo and DaVinci, who showed us that humans have the power to imitate the beauty of nature as well as to construct objects that ease our way in nature. Bach, Beethoven and many that followed revealed the imitation of what can be heard as well as seen.

The current effort in our colleges, far advanced, to replace courses in Western Civilization with “World History” to the denigration of all civilizations, threatens to obliterate from our memory the very real advantages of good government and human achievement. Our civilization needs both Reason and Revelation because human beings need them. We all know we are better off in Western or Western influenced countries than in all the others.

If Putin does not know or care about such things, those of us who appreciate our heritage know what our duty is: to preserve Western civilization by protecting all of it.