My friend and colleague Carl Trueman recently observed that “the West is no longer a consortium of serious cultures.” To which I am sorely tempted to add, “or serious polities.” The two are connected, the cultural decay of the West being a not insignificant factor in our descent into political infantilism. The exploration of that connection can be left for a later date. Here, let me simply assert that the political mindlessness currently on display in the West is threatening to unravel the victory of freedom in the Cold War: the victory of what were admittedly imperfect democracies over what were indisputably pluperfect tyrannies.
Who with a sense of history can deny that the current, gelatinous policy of the great Western powers toward Ukraine is ominously reminiscent of the errors the democracies made in the mid-1930s? Western dithering in providing the willing, courageous Ukrainians the wherewithal to defeat a Russia bent on destroying the Ukrainian nation inevitably recalls the fecklessness that led Great Britain and France to acquiesce to the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, to the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, and to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938–39. (And please do not talk to me about “tattered, old analogies to the 1930s”; they’re only tattered and old if they’re wrong, which they’re not.)
