In Defense of the Ukraine Skeptics: What Ukraine Aid Supporters Don't Appreciate About Their Foes
The ahistoric smearing of Charles Lindbergh continues apace but with Senator J.D. Vance taking his place
I read with some interest Senator J.D. Vance’s op-ed in the Financial Times asking if our European allies—or clients. To which I find myself asking, “Why not both?”
For what it’s worth I support Ukraine in its efforts to defeat Russia on the battlefield and shore up NATO and her allies.
Every day we delay Ukraine funding we also force the Europeans to make decisions about their own future. Is there even such a thing as a European anyway?
And so far they’ve been working to help the Ukrainian war effort.
Let’s take Denmark as an example:
Denmark has decided to send all its artillery to Ukraine. Here’s Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark.
"Ukraine is asking us for ammunition and artillery now. We, Denmark, have decided to transfer all our artillery to Ukraine. So, sorry, friends, there is military equipment in Europe, it is not only a matter of production. We have weapons, ammunition, air defense systems, which we do not use yet. They must be handed over to Ukraine."
Add to this a Turko-Ukraine pact which enables Turkish firms to help in the reconstruction of Ukraine.
And Sweden sent $683 million in armaments to the Ukrainians.
And Prime Minister Kaja Kallas of Estonia’s call to seize Russia’s foreign assets before the U.S. elections lest Donald Trump be reelected.
The Russians are so threatened by it that they named Prime Minister Kallas a “wanted” person.
My friend Charles Lichfield of the Atlantic Council lays out where all this money is.
Japan, too, has announced over $12.1B in total aid for Ukraine.
And that’s before we talk about all the German firms which are relocating to the United States lest they, too, get blown up like Nordstream 1 and 2.
Here’s the way I imagine this playing out.
Were I in the House GOP what I would do is tie Ukraine aid to some explicit guarantee that the Europeans also chip in by seizing Russian assets. I’d have Europe go first—and compliment them accordingly.
To be sure America can move but we shouldn’t be first.
Once Europe has depleted its arsenal it’ll likely rearm and buy essential equipment from the United States and Turkiye, the first and second largest armies in NATO. They’ll pay for those weapons by buying U.S. dollars and using them on U.S. military wares.
Such people might frame this as “America Last” but America can’t want Europe’s freedom more than Europe.
Comparisons to World War II are inapt. The pro-Zelensky Israelis (and their allies in the Ukrainian mob) are keen to make these analogies anyway.
Law & Justice fan boy Matthew Tyrmand, who is likely an Israeli spy who ran Project Veritas and James O’Keefe before a falling out, has smeared Charles Lindbergh, the backer of “America First.” Here’s what Tyrmand says:
Charles Lindbergh was one of the most traitorous treasonous Hitler and Nazi sympathizing anti semites and bigots in American history and did more to whitewash the rise of Naziism in the American public sphere than anyone with comparable social visibility.…
Putting aside the very real likelihood that Tyrmand will be extradited for intervening in Brazil’s election he doesn’t get our history remotely right.
In fact Lindbergh was an American patriot whose politics was heavily influenced by his father, the Swedish-born congressman Charles August Lindbergh.
Eric Weinstein, the Jewish fraud who always toed the Likud line and who palled around with Peter Thiel before I helped get him unceremoniously fired, said that we couldn’t have living national heroes after Lindbergh was unmasked as a Nazi.
My friend Gavin Wax and I don’t agree on many things but Wax, president of the New York Young Republicans and proud American Jew, correctly understands that Lindbergh was an American hero. Lindbergh’s unique insights into the German war machine proved invaluable while his repeated combat sorties during the Pacific theatre proved essential. Lindbergh covertly collected intelligence during his pre-war tour of Germany and enabled the American air attache in Berlin to access restricted Luftwaffe bases and factories.
Senator J. D. Vance is no Charles Lindbergh. His closeness with traitors like David Sacks, Elon Musk and Rebekah Mercer — the Mercers are the new Sacklers — are a discredit to him and his investments in the under SEC investigation Rumble look at best foolish. He had his chance to back some really interesting companies which would have strengthened American defense — and he demurred.
Still, Vance wore the uniform as a young Marine. Having served Vance is well entitled to say that war is hell — it is — and to remind us of it whenever and wherever he can as he did most recently in — where else? — Munich. Vance is no Chamberlain. Chamberlain was much more subtle. Vance suggests a realpolitik with a Russian state which has been utterly allergic. Chamberlain, quite quietly, was rearming even as he pantomimed peace in our time with Hitler.
Nor is Vance a Lindbergh. Richard Drake in The American Conservative gets this history correct in a 2020 review of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
Missing in Roth’s portrait of Lindbergh as the anti-Semitic Nazi in the White House is the real story of his political education. Nazism had nothing to do with it. As Gore Vidal observes in “Lindbergh: The Eagle Is Grounded,” one of his Last Empire essays, “To understand the son’s politics…one must understand C.A. and his world.” His father, Charles August Lindbergh, Sr., served from 1907 to 1917 as a congressman from Minnesota. A friend and ally of Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, the elder Lindbergh belonged to the progressive wing of the Republican Party. La Follette led the movement in the Senate to oppose American intervention in the First World War. In Why Is Your Country at War (1917), Congressman Lindbergh described his own view of the conflict and the lessons we needed to learn from it.
The war came primarily because of “the failure in some respects of the existing civilization.” Lindbergh Sr., thought that intrinsic defects in the corporate capitalist system made war inevitable. For his interpretation of history, he did not go to the school of Karl Marx. His frequently cited and quoted teacher in Why Is Your Country at War was John Ruskin, who from the conservative premises of his Christian faith outlined in Unto This Last (1862) thought that modern capitalist society constituted the greatest threat to mankind in the history of the world. As with many of Ruskin’s disciples, he adhered to fundamental aspects of this anti-capitalist critique without retaining its Christian vocabulary. In his secular fashion, he updated Ruskin for 1917. The real cause of the war lay in “the economic systems practiced.” American intervention in the conflict had occurred for the same reason.
Young Charles, aged fifteen when his father wrote Why Is Your Country at War, witnessed in admiration fiery speeches that the Congressman made on the campaign trail. An attempted lynching of the candidate in May 1918 by an armed mob gave the younger Lindbergh an approximate idea of the limits of free speech in the country then allegedly in the process of making the world safe for democracy. Indeed, the speeches that Lindbergh gave for the America First movement, fancifully reduced by Roth and the filmmakers to a Nazi fellowship, bore a striking resemblance to his father’s declamations during the previous world war. Lindbergh’s political ideas stemmed from the conviction that the tragedy of the First World War did not warrant repetition. One did not have to be a Nazi for wanting to stave off the catastrophe that from 1939 to 1945 would claim fifty million lives and lead to the enslavement of Eastern Europe under a Stalinist tyranny.
You really do have to read Gore Vidal’s excellent essay on Lindbergh in his The Last Empire essay collection, titled merely, “Lindbergh: The Eagle is Grounded.”
Vidal rightly places Lindbergh as a “classic Midwestern isolationist” — something which could just as readily be claimed of Vance, born in Ohio, or of his ally, Matt Gaetz, born of North Dakota roots. Then as now this impulse “reflective of a majority of the country.” Midwesterner and military man President Dwight D. Eisenhower of Kansas warned of a “military industrial complex” and both Vance and Gaetz would agree.
And yet, neither young man quite gets that its the WASPish Eastern establishment which has the final say on matters of foreign policy now that the neoconservatives have been cast out once again. If they are to take a higher position they’ll have learn that America’s a missionary place.
John Quincy Adams had it right. We’re the friends of liberty everywhere and custodian only of our own — even in Ukraine.
If Senator Vance had some time — and could stomach the optics — I’d recommend Munich’s Hitler tour which I did a few years back.
Hitler’s old stomping grounds now stand as a testament to American power and the dollar’s supremacy. It is fittingly an Apple Store.