Every Saturday, I walk past Nassau Hall on my way toward Witherspoon Street, drawn by the diversion of a hot cup of coffee and a quick lunch before returning to my classwork. Passing FitzRandolph Gate onto the sidewalk beside Nassau Street, I always encounter a small group of pro-Ukrainian protesters soliciting donations for the embattled country. Hoisting handwritten poster boards — some denouncing Putin as a war criminal and others accusing President Trump of being a Russian lackey — they rattle loose pennies in small plastic containers, softened only by the occasional addition of a crumpled dollar bill. Others wave hybrid banners: half American flag, half Ukrainian. They stand outside for hours, never dwindling in number until they finally disband for the day.
One particular Saturday, amidst the sea of blue and yellow streaks, written slogans, and vocal exhortations, two small children caught my eye. They stood there, draped in Ukrainian flags, their parents looking on admirably as they smiled at the busy passersby. For a moment, I felt the childlike innocence of believing in ideal causes, viewing the world as a grand moral arena in which the forces of good must triumph over those of evil. Yet a single, troubling question crossed my mind: when these children reach military age, would their parents be willing to send them off to die in a foreign land? Would they still wear the same smiles and shout with such fervor? What cause would compel them, ultimately, to leave all they know, give all they have, and risk all they are?
To many, the answer to this question is “democracy.” Yet, a slogan does not a coherent foreign policy make. In the absence of new and convincing arguments for support, European and American politicos have fallen back on the defense of democracy as a strategic imperative. While many say it is the main reason to support Ukraine, few explain what it really means. When in doubt, say “Democracy!” goes the rule.
The Ukraine War’s Rhetorical Problem
The extent to which democracy — as a theory of government — can inspire geopolitical concern is limited by its abstraction. This fact is magnified exponentially when American political support is demanded in a conflict in which we are not directly involved. When provoked, the American rattlesnake bites fiercely, but it takes an extraordinary disturbance to expose its fangs. Americans are perhaps the most empathetic people in the world. When Russia first invaded Ukraine, financial and rhetorical support flowed freely from our people, and many committed themselves to promoting the country’s cause against its invader. Others volunteered in Ukrainian regiments. Leaders from across the aisle condemned the invasion, and many pledged their unwavering political commitment to helping Ukraine.
These reactions weren’t at all surprising. Americans tend to map their own values and history onto international conflicts. During the Spanish Civil War, for example, thousands of Americans flocked to the hills of Iberia to fight alongside Republican forces in the conflict against Francisco Franco’s Nationalist army. One such group, the Lincoln Battalion, explicitly evoked the American Civil War as an analog to the brutal conflict in Spain. Ernest Hemingway, who famously followed the conflict as a war correspondent, said of the volunteers, “As long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain.” American expats rushed to defend what they perceived to be universal democratic values, and many paid the ultimate price for their convictions.
This distinctly American impulse to fight and die for principle has made us the greatest nation in the world. It led us to independence, it saved us from irreparable divide, and it brought us to triumph over the wickedest ideologies ever conceived by mankind. However, when left untempered by realistic appraisals of the global scene, the instinct can devolve into naive, moralistic crusading. When conflicts reach this stage, public opinion inevitably begins to sour. As conflicts drag on, the temperance of reality begins to spread. As is typical with democratic societies — especially America — idealistic fervor is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain.
Two examples from our recent history are illustrative. Between August 1965 and January 1973, public support for the Vietnam War had been cut in half, dropping from 60% to 29% in the span of eight years. The numbers were even worse for those who affirmatively said the war was a mistake. In 1965, 24% of Americans thought military support for South Vietnam was wrong. In 1973, that number had jumped to 60%. Likewise, for America’s intervention in Iraq, nearly 75% of Americans thought the Bush Administration was making the right decision in 2003. By December of 2008, only 43% felt the same. In the absence of concrete victories or clearly stated goals, conflicts lose their initial popular support.
The war in Ukraine is no exception. With no clearly articulated strategic goals and tax dollars shipped off in the billions to provide munitions to the Ukrainian military, American skepticism has grown by the month. At the beginning of the war, 42% of Americans (and 49% of Republicans, surprisingly more than the 38% of Democrats) thought that the United States wasn’t providing enough support to the Ukrainian war effort. Combined with respondents who thought the United States was giving enough, nearly 75% of those surveyed were supportive of American military aid to Ukraine. By February of 2025, only 22% of Americans thought the United States wasn’t providing enough support, with 35% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans wanting more aid. More critically, 30% of Americans now think the federal government is providing too much aid, whereas only 7% thought so at the beginning of the war.
Even the initial amount of support for the Ukrainian war effort should be surprising. Unlike Vietnam and Iraq, American troops have not been directly involved in the Eastern European theater, and the American people have had no direct stake in the outcome of the conflict. In the balance hang international stakes, implicating America’s position as the global hegemon, but these are not the same risks of blood and treasure that beset a country in active armed conflict. The global war on terror was as much a war of revenge on the perpetrators — and ideological allies of those perpetrators — of 9/11 as it was a police action to stabilize the Middle East. The Vietnam War was America’s attempt to prevent a communist advance into Southeast Asia and tip the balance of power in favor of the Soviet Union. While couched in ideological terms, the conflict was shaped by American anxiety over spreading Soviet influence, given sanction by Eisenhower’s “domino theory.” Regardless, they both involved American boots on the ground.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has seen no officially sanctioned American military involvement. While politicians and media figures continue their rhetorical support for Ukrainian democracy, the war has lost popularity with the voting public. In many ways, the 2024 election was a referendum on blind idealism. In rejecting the Biden-Harris status quo, the American people rebuked the foreign policy of the last four — and really twenty — years. With a second Trump term now underway, the country’s grand strategy is bearing the fruits of hardened realism. It remains to be seen how successful the new approach will be.
Democracy and Its Demons
Democracy is a form of government in which the power of political decision-making lies with the people. Most modern “democracies” are a mixture of democratic and republican principles. The people make decisions through elections, but their desires are represented by elected officials, not by direct citizen involvement. Most modern democracies are some form of liberal democracy, combining popular government with protections for individual liberties and minority rights.
Ultimately, a form of government, no matter how beneficent, is a means to another end. Government is not the end of political organization; it is the means to the end of the common good, common weal, or – as the American founders put it – the “general welfare”. A nation’s government may contain qualities essential to national self-understanding and political organization — America’s tripartite government in many ways epitomizes and energizes quintessential American values of productive ambition and individual liberty — but it cannot itself be reducible to the nation as a whole.
Even in the most enlightened and advanced of the world’s nations, democratic values are set upon rocky ground. Sadly, a blind faith in the universal promise of democratic government is misplaced – the flower of democracy cannot grow in every soil. Thomas Jefferson’s self-evident truths about natural human equality and self-governance ring true, but they must be mediated by historical and regional particulars. The Chinese, whose communist regime is but the punctuation mark to a history of imperial splendor, will likely never embrace liberal democratic governance. Islamist nations in the Middle East will also likely never embrace Western-style democracy, though the Pahlavi regime in Iran and the modern UAE demonstrate that some could be amenable to Western culture. Since the end of the Novgorod Republic in the 15th century, the Russian people have not maintained a workable democracy. The Czarist impulse — whether felt by communist premiers or contemporary presidents — is in the Muscovite DNA.
Some flowers, though, are indeed more beautiful than others. Churchill famously quipped that “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Though couched in typical Churchillian humor, the comment remains true. Democratic self-rule is the best form of government that the Western world has yet produced, but it is far from perfect. In his pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine remarked that “[s]ociety in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” Republicanism is the necessary evil we have chosen, and it has so far proven the greatest form yet devised. One would be naive, however, to think it could work as well in another historical and national context. Tocqueville distinguished between patriotism of instinct and patriotism of reflection, and the golden mean of both must be taken in order to safeguard one’s national inheritance.
Yet it isn’t just zealous democrats who substitute the means of good governance for the ends they ought to serve and the values they ought to uphold. National Conservatives (NatCons) can make the same mistake about nationalism that neocons and democrats can make about democracy. As soon as a country is seen as led by nationalist (or even simply “anti-woke”) impulses — i.e. Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, or Meloni’s Italy — it deserves ideological sympathy, if not full political support. After all, if the enemy is liberal bureaucratism, the thinking goes, then the solution is nationalism, regardless of who does it, or regardless of how it is done.
While nationalism is a necessary counterbalance to ideological abstraction, it must avoid the temptation to become the nebulous force it critiques. Not all nationalisms are created equal. Some, as the one seen in Russia, inspire expansionist tendencies which undermine regional and global stability. Inevitably caught up with national differences are historical alliances and ancestral antagonisms, and the Russo-Ukrainian war is the explosion of such antagonism on a global scale. Just because Russia has bolstered its war effort with nationalist justifications doesn’t legitimize its actions. Neither, however, does Ukraine’s form of government alone justify global support. Such conflicts must be understood in the balance between political ideals and historical practice. When reduced to abstraction, these ideas lose their necessary mooring.
The Will to Win
Because democratic sovereignty rests with a nation’s people, their support is necessary for geopolitical action. How, then, given the difficulties of public opinion in democratic warfare, is a democratic statesman to wage and win a war?
At the beginning of every armed conflict, there is a finite amount of political capital that can be spent perpetuating it. A cause or goal is fixed, and the amount of capital is commensurate with the height of that cause, the likelihood of victory, and the existential nature of the threat. The statesman’s job, rhetorically, is threefold: firmly establish the war as a threat to national existence, tie the conflict to a higher animating cause, and assure the public that victory is possible. He must then marshal that capital to victory.
Winston Churchill is the 20th century’s greatest exemplar of such a statesman. In June of 1940, Britain’s hand was depressingly weak; it had lost all of its European allies to Nazi conquest, it had yet to convince its American cousin to join the fray, and it faced unprecedented aerial bombardment from the Luftwaffe. In his famously defiant speeches, Churchill assured the British people that victory would be certain, as victory was necessary for survival.
Proper grand strategy, especially in a republic, requires the balancing of the romantic and the realistic. People don’t go to war for dry notions of national self-interest. In their ears ring poetry, hymns, speeches, and scripture. A higher purpose must be fixed in order to motivate the undertaking of total war. As much as the modern world tries to purge human life of transcendence, there are some realms of human endeavor in which it is inescapable. War is perhaps the chiefest example. Yet, anchorless democratic ideals fail to meet the burden of greatness in purpose that is necessary for true motivation.
During World War I, this purpose was chiefly national pride and personal glory. Soldiers marched off to fight and die for the fatherland, accepting the risk of death in exchange for honor. They captured it with the words of Horace: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But the ensuing slaughter disabused the romance. Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name, now famous the world over, is a solemn testament to the loss of innocence experienced by the West.
There are limits to how far the romantic sheen can last. Ultimately, there comes a time when zeal turns into apathy. For the war in Ukraine, this point passed long ago. Americans themselves have no physical stake in the war. If they did — as was the case in December of 1941 — it would take much longer for national fervor to subside. However, support for another country in its fight against an aggressive neighbor, combined with its contentious relationship with the United States leading up to the war, is virtually impossible to sustain, especially when the only justifications to be given are empty abstractions.
Europe has also long passed the point of meaningful engagement. No matter their rhetorical defenses of Ukraine’s war effort, and despite their condescension toward American realists’ perspective on the war, European leaders do not, in fact, believe that it is sweet and proper to die for democracy. If they did, they would dismantle their vast bureaucracies, liquidate their entitlement programs, and funnel cash into rearmament.
The sad reality is that Europe doesn’t believe enough in itself or its civilizational heritage to wage a war for its own preservation. Appeals to “democratic” values cannot supersede the loyalties of blood, soil, and history. They may enhance them, as they do in the United States, but they cannot stand alone as soaring justifications for military engagement. As the latter bonds are dissolved in the acids of cultural apathy, it remains to be seen what, if anything, can possibly reinvigorate the European spirit.
In the United States, ideals hold a special place in our political tradition. We are, as many say, a “propositional” nation, following Abraham Lincoln’s exhortation in the Gettysburg Address. While many figures on the right have attempted, sometimes necessarily, to recover a richer conception of American identity undiluted by over-abstraction, one cannot escape the country’s unique attachment to ideas. We are a people defined primarily by our commitment to documents and the institutions and ideals they support.
Yet, we cannot lose a necessary spirit of possessiveness over our ideals. As the key Burkean insight holds, universal principles can only be experienced and defended in their national particulars. Our institutions and values are good because they are ours. When we involve ourselves in international conflicts, we must first ascertain whether an intervention serves our self-interest. Then, and only then, can we talk confidently about our commitment to ideological causes. We must defend our own inheritance before defending that of others.
***
One of those Saturdays, as I was walking back across Nassau Street toward Firestone Library, I happened to follow behind the family leaving the protest. The two little kids hopped along the paths toward Nassau Hall, blissfully unaware of the building they were passing by. I looked up at the American flag high atop the colonial edifice. Just under 250 years ago, the calm winter air had thundered with the crack of artillery fire and burned with the caustic stench of gunpowder smoke. The college had been a battlefield, and the lessons in liberty its students had learned were put to the ordeal of war.
For a moment, I doubted my judgment. Those young men had certainly died for the right to govern themselves. Surely they knew that they fought not only for the ground beneath their feet but the God, and ideals, above their heads. Yes, I thought, but they were fighting for their right to govern themselves, not the right of another. They could only understand the need for self-government with reference to the men fighting beside them and the children who would one day enjoy the fruits of their sacrifice.
Ultimately, it is American democracy that is worth dying for. Our rights as citizens are worth dying for. Our families, homes, and towns are worth dying for. Our freedoms, while rooted in universal principles, are ultimately as good as our will to defend them as a national inheritance.
Image Credit: John Singer Sargent, “Gassed” (1919)
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