President Volodymyr Zelensky is playing the role of a Ukrainian Churchill, minus some of the fantastical notions and with an infinitely better workout regimen. Like Churchill in 1940, he has been the indispensable man in a mortal crisis, without whom his country might well have been lost, and whose eloquence has rallied not only his fellow citizens but a larger democratic world.
I never attended Ranger School, the U.S. Army’s nine weeks of unadulterated misery in woodland, mountain, and swamp. But I know plenty of those who have, and they have all reported the same thing: The instruction they received in patrolling and minor tactics was insignificant compared with the lesson they learned in perseverance, to “complete the mission though I be the lone survivor,” in the words of the Ranger Creed.
The relatively brief but bloody war in Ukraine is entering its fourth phase.
Russia appears to be revising its strategy in Ukraine. In place of the go-for-broke attempt to swallow the country in a hundred-hour war, to be completed with a tank parade in the Kyiv Maidan and a semi-annexation, some Russian leaders now talk more modestly of operations in the Donbas. Movements on the ground would seem, for the moment, to confirm this shift.
When I visited Iraq during the 2007 surge, I discovered that the conventional wisdom in Washington usually lagged the view from the field by two to four weeks. Something similar applies today. Analysts and commentators have grudgingly declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been blocked, and that the war is stalemated. The more likely truth is that the Ukrainians are winning.
First came the shock: the sight of missiles and artillery shells slamming into apartment buildings, helicopters pirouetting in flames, refugees streaming across the border, an embattled and unshaven president pleading with anguished political leaders abroad for help, burly uniformed men posing by burned-out tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, Russian police spot-checking cellphones on Moscow streets for dissident conversations. Distress and anger and resolution were natural reactions.
A terrible thing may be impending in Ukraine. Undoubtedly, subversion, sabotage, and murder await, although such miseries have been going on for some time without the West paying much attention. But a Russian onslaught, to include air and missile strikes followed by an invasion, would be a lot worse. Thousands of people may die, and the foundations of European security would be rocked as they have not been since the early days of the Cold War.
Sitting on a shelf in my sunlit study are two massive works of history by the late, great scholar Zara Steiner, each dealing with the international politics of the 1920s and ’30s. The first volume is The Lights That Failed; the second is The Triumph of the Dark.
In important aspects of foreign and national-security policy, the Biden administration is really the Trump administration but with civilized manners. In no respect is that more true than in the president’s announcement of a complete military withdrawal from Afghanistan by September 11 of this year, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that brought the United States to that country’s stark mountains, fruitful valleys, and dusty towns.