The anniversary of the so-called D-Day was celebrated in Normandy on Thursday, known as the daring and costly landing operation that marked the beginning of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. The images of the meeting of the last surviving US veterans and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were touching – and at the same time shameful.
Because they demonstrated the enormous difference in determination and courage between the America that entered a war on the other side of the Atlantic in the early 1940s to defend freedom and democracy in Europe, and today’s Europe, which is not making even a fraction of the effort it made back then to once again defend freedom, democracy and the European peace order on its own continent.
There are indeed many parallels between Germany in the late 1930s and Russia today. Like Germany once was, Russia today is a dictatorship permeated by a fascist-militaristic leader cult that pursues an aggressive, revanchist foreign policy.
Like Nazi Germany (and like the Soviet Union, which was initially allied with Berlin), Moscow is pursuing a policy of military expansion and is trying to subjugate other peoples in order to expand its own empire. And as at the end of the 1930s, the question is once again being asked today as to what the free world is prepared to do to stop an aggressive dictatorship.
Fortunately, we are not yet at a point where we have to decide, as the USA once did, whether to send our own soldiers into a costly battle to defend freedom. We are currently still in the relatively comfortable position of only having to support Ukraine with weapons and money, and that it is the Ukrainians who are taking the risk of dying for freedom – and also for our interest in maintaining the European peace order.
Yet one cannot help but notice that we are once again at a turning point in history. Either we succeed in helping Ukraine more effectively to defeat Russia, or we may have to prepare for decades of crises as Moscow, emboldened by its aggression against Ukraine, attempts to subjugate more and more parts of Europe, piece by piece.
But instead of resolutely facing this challenge, we are suffocating in bureaucratic sluggishness and hesitation – and in more than two years of war we have not even managed to get the European arms industry up to speed to supply Ukraine with sufficient weapons and ammunition. In contrast to America’s “Greatest Generation,” it does not currently look as if our generation will pass the test that the renewed rendezvous with history imposes on us.