It’s now apparent that unless strong actions are taken to deter him, Vladimir Putin intends to proceed with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Yet no such deterrent is being offered. The Biden administration has agreed to ship $200 million worth of military equipment to Ukraine, which is certainly welcome. But that figure is about what it costs to build a nice shopping mall. It’s not remotely sufficient to equip a country to defend itself against an invasion by the Russian army.
It is simply a repetition of comparable levels of support the US has sent Ukraine annually since 2014. Not to be outdone, Germany is sending 5,000 helmets and a field hospital!
The possibility of any effective economic deterrent has also been ruled out. The German government appears to be saying that Putin needs to be given a free hand to slaughter and subjugate Ukrainians, because otherwise he might cut off Germany’s natural gas supplies. Some other NATO leaders have accepted this position. Accordingly, Ukraine is in danger of being sacrificed.
The last time that Western leaders engaged in comparable folly was the sellout of Czechoslovakia by the British and French leaders at Munich in 1938. Apologists for British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who spearheaded the betrayal, claim that it “bought peace in our time” for Britain to rearm to face the Nazis.
This is false. Britain’s defense budget remained at peacetime levels in 1939, and only began to rise substantially after Winston Churchill took over amid the fall of France in May 1940. War spending peaked at 50% of Britain’s GDP in 1944 and 1945.
In contrast, the Nazis took advantage of the extra time to continue their furious rearmament program. By surrendering Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain delisted 35 well-equipped Czech army divisions from the allied order of battle, augmented Hitler’s industrial capacity with that of Czechoslovakia (which notably included the Skoda works, manufacturer of the famous “German” 88 mm multi-use artillery, tank, and anti-aircraft guns), and undermined the defense of Poland by opening its southern flank to German invasion.
So when the Nazis attacked Poland, Britain and France declared war but sat on their hands and did nothing to help the Poles while they were being overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg.
This point requires emphasis. The Polish military position was only hopeless because the Western allies left the Poles to fight the Nazis alone. Had the British and French moved immediately to bomb and invade Germany in September 1939, the Nazis would have had to divert most of their military forces against them, leaving the Poles with a fight they might have been able to handle.
But no, the Western allies just sat tight, and allowed the Poles to be crushed. As a result, in addition to the 35 Czech divisions that were discarded by the deal, a further 39 Polish divisions, 16 brigades, 4,300 guns, 880 tanks and tankettes, and 800 aircraft were delisted from the allied order of battle.
These abandoned forces were roughly equal in size to the entire French army, which had 94 divisions in 1940. Had the British and French kept these forces in their order of battle, Germany’s military position would have been hopeless.
As Chamberlain capitulated at Munich by conceding areas of Czechoslovakia, Hitler was seen as a great statesman in Germany, which meant a planned coup by General Staff to overthrow him had little chance of succeeding. It meant the British and French did abandon those who would have fought by their side.
Effectively, in the face of aggression, they pursued a policy of unliteral disarmament. So they were left alone, sitting quietly, to wait for the Nazis to come and crush them too.
This brings us back to the present. Putin, like Hitler, has clearly stated his goal. In Hitler’s case, it was to conquer Europe and the Soviet Union, and then dominate the world. Recall the Nazi slogan: “Today we rule Germany, tomorrow the world.” They were quite clear about their objectives, just like Putin.
He intends to restore the Soviet empire. That means recapturing all the escaped captive nations, and reestablishing Kremlin domination over the eastern half of Europe. Like Hitler, he will not stop until he hits a wall.
So where is the wall? Who is really willing to fight Putin? Well, the Ukrainians are, and they have an army of 450,000 men, plus 250,000 reservists. This is triple Germany’s force of 180,000 active duty personnel and 80,000 reserves.
If the Ukrainian army were properly and fully equipped with modern weapons, including with anti-aircraft missiles to neutralize Russian air superiority, they could repel – and therefore possibly deter in advance – the Russian invasion.
If not, they may well be crushed, and a force larger than all NATO troops east of the Rhine combined will be delisted from the West’s order of battle. Like the Anglo-French fools of 1938-1940, the Western alliance will have disarmed itself.
In that event, the Baltic States will clearly be next. While they are members of NATO, you can’t stop Russian armies by hurling NATO membership cards at them. The Baltic States would be very difficult to defend, and the same argument for deserting Ukraine – the all-important imperative to protect German consumers from utility rate hikes – applies equally well to them.
Germany’s dependence on Russia for its natural gas is an entirely self-inflicted weakness, resulting from its decisions to shut down nuclear power plants and its choice, urged on with vocal Russian backing – not to frack its abundant shale gas resources.
This artificial dependence is not only driving Germany to sabotage any effort to deter Russian military expansionism, it is also funding the Russian war effort.
Russia’s foreign gas sales totaled $54 billion in 2021, while its defense budget was $62 billion. Through their gas purchases, the Germans are literally financing Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Again, there is no limiting principle to this dependency. While Ukraine is not a member of NATO, the German argument for passivity in the face of Russian aggression would hold if Russia attacked the Baltic States or Poland as well: ‘Sorry we can’t help you, dear Poles. Germany needs Russian gas.’
But all this begs a moral question. How can any nation place more importance on its electricity bills than on the lives of millions of people? Why are the Germans just fine with the massacre, devastation, and subjugation of countless Ukrainians as long as they’re not inconvenienced?
This is not the first time that such a question has been asked about them. How could such an apparently civilized people commit the many hideous mega crimes of the Third Reich? And then, having murdered millions, how could they then go so far as to shamelessly seek utilitarian uses for their body parts?
These questions have boggled the minds of historians for decades. I don’t propose to answer them here. But one contributing factor was the way in which the Nazis enthusiastically embraced the amoral views elaborated by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Hitler admiring a bust of Nietzsche
In the post-war era, the Germans went to great lengths to try to de-Nazify their society. So I doubt many of them still study Nietzsche as a fount of wisdom. Yet their current stance of placing their desire for low gas prices over the lives and freedom of 44 million Ukrainians is positively Nietzschean.
So much for the Germans. But what about my country? America is supposed to be a moral nation, founded on the proposition that “all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Well, according to some strategists in the Biden camp, America has a plan. The idea is to let the Russians conquer Ukraine, and then send in plentiful arms to fuel guerilla warfare against the Russian occupiers, using Ukrainian resistance fighters to bleed them, much as the Afghan Mujahedeen were used by the Reagan administration to bleed the Soviets.
Putting aside the fact that fomenting Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan did not turn out all that well, the kindest thing that can be said is that this plan is completely nuts. Ukrainians are not Afghan tribesmen, happy to seek entry to paradise through death in a holy war against infidels. They are European people, who love life, and no such civilians have ever managed to expel a modern occupation force willing to make brutal use of the full power of their weaponry.
France would never have been liberated by the French Resistance. It was liberated by the Allied armies. Even the courageous Polish Home Army, rising up in Warsaw in August 1944 while the Germans were being routed on the Western and Eastern fronts, never stood a chance against the Wehrmacht unless the Red Army were to come directly to its aid. Stalin chose not to, and the result was that the Poles were slaughtered and Warsaw devastated.
“The Little Insurgent” stands as a monument to the heroes of the doomed Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Note the age of the Polish freedom fighter.
This betrayal by Stalin is still engrained in Polish memory. Yet it is precisely the way in which Biden’s strategists would sacrifice the Ukrainians. It may seem outrageous to compare the moral outlook of the polished ladies and gentlemen of the American National Security establishment with the evil inhabitants of Stalin’s Kremlin, but in this instance, Biden’s geostrategic masterminds arguably manage to come off even worse.
After all, while the Red Army refused to come to the aid of the Warsaw Uprising, it was pummeling the Germans everywhere else. In contrast, Biden’s armchair guerilla war advocates would do practically nothing to help, while they urge Ukrainians to fight on after a preventable defeat, to endure endless devastating retaliatory massacres from occupiers in a repetition of a bloody history that the Ukrainian people know all too well.
Both from a moral and practical standpoint, the plan to let Ukraine simply fall so as to trap Russia in a guerilla war is insane. The invasion needs to be deterred by properly arming Ukraine, or if not deterred, then defeated at the border by well-equipped regular armed forces. If Ukraine is allowed to fall, the much weaker Baltic States will also fall, and the only credible force between Russia and the Rhine will be the Polish Army, which is not enough.
Will Putin then push on, aiming for final victory? That’s hard to say, but if he thinks he can, he will. What happens then? The Poles, being brave romantics, will fight, regardless of the odds. The Germans will not.
But what will America do? Will we stand by the Poles, at great cost in blood and treasure to ourselves, or will we let them lose, and hand most of Europe to Putin? If it comes down to war, would we not be infinitively better off with 700,000 Ukrainian troops fighting on our side instead of them serving as enslaved labor battalion auxiliaries to Putin’s legions?
Forewarned is forearmed. Putin believes the United States is not about to go to nuclear war to save Eastern Europe, and he may well be right. So, the only way to deter him is to be strong enough to fight and win a conventional war. And that requires troops. The United States and Britain might be willing to supply the arms and air power necessary to tip the scales of victory, but there is no way we’d be willing to supply the troops and take the losses required to halt Russian expansion on the ground. Ukraine is.
That’s why sacrificing Ukraine to appease Russia is sheer insanity.
Dr. Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer. His latest book The Case for Space, was recently published by Prometheus books.
