Let us emphatically state that not one American should die fighting Russia in the Ukraine or anywhere else in Eastern Europe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday did what everyone predicted he would do: He sent his nation’s armed forces into neighboring Ukraine. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people have already been killed in the fighting.
Putin is the latest in a centuries-long line of dictators to turn Europe into a battleground. He will eventually die or be deposed and a new bloodthirsty European leader will take his place.
Americans living in Ukraine, humanitarian workers and journalists, were warned by the U.S. State Department to leave that country. They remain in Ukraine under their own volition. But no American military service member should die in another European war.
President Biden has said he is intent on keeping Americans from harm’s way, preferring economic sanctions as the U.S. contribution to tempering Putin.
With hostilities under way, it is time for Biden to reassess the U.S. approach to the Ukraine conflict and ensure it is in line with Congress’ wishes for U.S.- Russia relations.
The United States has inserted itself in European conflicts six times, including World War I; Russia in 1918-20; the Spanish Civil War when individual Americans volunteered to fight; World War II followed by our Cold War military presence; Bosnia, and Kosovo.
For the most part, those American sacrifices came too late to end slaughters mimicking European wars across the centuries.
Ancestry ties us inextricably to Europe. By historic definition, all American involvements in European affairs should be weighed against our uneasy history with Europe. Aided by the French, we broke away from Great Britain, appropriated land lived on for millenia by Indigenous people, and eventually wrested our nation’s western half away from Spain.
But the past should not continue to be a prelude for America in regard to Europe and its problems. We can send humanitarian aid to Ukraine and focus our foreign-policy attention on the country playing a proverbial long-game in its quest for global domination: the People’s Republic of China.
