Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Ukraine #2

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

March 4, 2015

Back in the old days, when Americanism was more robust than it is now, it used to be said that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” What this was supposed to mean is that our domestic disagreements paled in comparison to whatever it was the Nazis were doing. Now there was a time when this was at least plausible, whether or not it was correct. When there was, or seemed to be, a more cohesive cultural unity tying us all together domestically, it was easier to present a united front to the world, and it was easier to get Americans to all pull together in order to do so.

But at home that cohesive cultural unity is now long gone, and it is taking conservative Christians some time to recognize that it is long gone overseas as well. In short, if Obama is creating so much wreckage here at home, as we all recognize, then why should we believe that he is somehow spreading sweetness and light abroad? If Hillary is as corrupt elsewhere as she is here, then we have every reason to believe her flights around the world were simply an International Shakedown Tour. Why should I unite behind that?

We need to get loose of the simple binary formula that has America in the automatic white hat, with the baddies being anyone we identify as such. However, some critics of American foreign policy don’t want to let go of the standard binary system — they have kept the system but simply switched their default sympathies. But America shouldn’t get the automatic black hat either. It ain’t that simple.


This is because, in the globalized West, there are freedom factions in every nation, and there are soft despotism factions in every nation. For the most part, the soft despotism factions currently have the upper hand in the West, and are in conflict with the hard despotism factions in the East. When sympathies simply drift from our despots to theirs, I am afraid that what is happening is nothing more than the strong horse phenomenon. As Osama bin Laden put it, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” This doesn’t explain everything, but it does explain why silly girls head off to join ISIS.

So when it is said that the US engineered a coup in Ukraine, the Russians pushed back, our support for the coupsters vanished as the mist, and thus it was that Ukraine lost the Crimea and other related points east, I do remain dubious. I am told this can be easily verified if you read the following 17 articles, believe them all, and let your loyalties run down the appointed nation/state grooves. Now such fecklessness on our part is certainly a possibility, and I do not reject it a priori, but why does it not seem initially likely to me?

When we are doing the (necessary) deep research, we also have to remember to read what is right on the surface. I have a hard time believing that Obama engineered a coup in Ukraine in order to abandon support for it immediately, when maintaining such support would have been relatively painless for him. Without sending troops, or anything like that, Obama could have supplied weapons and rhetorical support to the Ukrainians, and he could have done so to general acclaim. But he has stubbornly resisted doing anything of the kind, acting in various ways that showed that his sympathies were not at all with the new government, and didn’t look as though they ever had been.

This doesn’t smell like a botched coup to me — but if you ask me what it does smell like, I would say that it smells like some lower-level American assurances to some Ukrainians, which somebody then ran with, and which subsequently suffered from an Obama pocket veto. I don’t think this was a master plan that fell apart;  I think it was geopolitical incompetence.

So when if I say that Putin is a thug, which he manifestly is, it does not follow from this that I believe everybody in Hillary’s State Department went to work each day energized by their granola bars and pure thoughts. That would follow not. My sympathies are not with Putin, not with Obama, not with Hillary, and not with any petit-thug to be named later who might make it to the top of the current Ukrainian government.

My sympathies are first and foremost with the evangelical church in Ukraine, and second with anyone who loves market freedom there. Suppose I were talking to two teams of people, each containing a church planter and an entrepreneur, and one team was going to plant in Sevastopol and the other was going to plant in Kiev, and both had the same zeal to expand the kingdom. Which team is going to experience the most persecution, official opposition, bureaucratic hassling, and heartache? Right — to ask the question is to answer it. And because Paul teaches us how to pray, this means that we should want — in our prayers — for the street level realities for believing Christians to shake out more like Kiev than Sebastopol.

“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:1–2).

Note that I am not saying we should “send troops” to make it more like one than the other. The apostle doesn’t command us to send troops. He does require us, I believe, to send our sympathetic prayers, prayers that know what direction to push.

But there is, of course, more to say.