Ukraine

Right now, that's all that's need to be said, when it comes to describing the political agenda.

Nothing else has changed.  All of the other problems we face, and I've discussed, are still with us.  I would still describe some of them, like voting rights, as existential in nature, because they are to at least some degree.  But now there is one that, in its immediacy and lethality, and its impact not just on the U.S. but the world, pushes everything on our agency to the side.  Not forever, but for now and probably for the near future.

Why?

To begin with, Ukraine is about American security in the truest sense

Despite efforts to portray the Ukraine crisis as a territorial dispute between two countries, and nothing more, it is much more than that.  Vladimir Putin's long-term goal has been to reconstruct the Soviet Union, functionally if not formally, by taking control of all the former Soviet republics through either direct annexation of territory, or the establishment of "friendly" (translation:  puppet) governments in them.  It's not particularly far-fetched to think that he wants to revive the Soviet era of glory to an even greater extent, by invading the former Warsaw Pact nations and installing puppet governments in each of them.  It may not even be very far-fetched to think that his ultimate goal is to shatter NATO, leave Western Europe under the shadow of his revived Iron Curtain, and extend that shadow all of the way to the shores of the U.S., forcing us to ramp up our military at the expense of our nation's domestic needs.

If this sounds like Cold War "domino-theory" thinking to you, I can't say I blame you.  Putin's militarism and appetite for yesterday's Soviet glory, combined with his unprovoked and reckless attack on Ukraine has put Europe and NATO (and, therefore, us) back on a Cold War tactical footing.  Only now, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, it has the potential to become a hot one.  

Even worse, Putin is now not only an active external threat to us, but an internal one as well, thanks to his alliance with Donald Trump.  Trump has been able to convince his followers that, despite ample evidence that he was Putin's puppet as President, Putin is somehow on our side, which means that Putin's opponents are inevitably "our" opponents.  This is why, even as Europe and the rest of the world have come together in opposition to Putin, Americans are bitterly divided over whether to support Russia or Ukraine.

This internal division plays right into the hands of both men.  As Rachel Maddow has pointed out, Putin's standing among the Russian people has depended in no small part on having the surrounding nations look even more dysfunctional than Russia, thereby discouraging Russians from thinking they can improve their lives by rising up against his dystopian regime.  It is precisely because of the progress Ukraine has made toward becoming a functional democracy that Putin needed to invade it once he lost Trump as an ally in the White House.

Just as Putin needed chaos among Russia's neighbors to look strong at home, he also needed chaos in the one county with the greatest ability to stand up to him--ours.  This is why he wanted Trump as president from the very beginning, and why he would be happy to see Trump win a second term:  so that Trump could continue and expand upon his previous work to divide Americans to the point of total dysfunctionality.  In Putin's decrepit mind, so long as the nations opposing him are flailing, they can do nothing against him.  And, more so than with regard to any other nation, Putin fears what a strong, united America can do, and his only hope to prevent us from shutting him down is to turn us against each other.  

So successful has he been in doing so that he's even got Rupert Murdoch talking out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to Putin:  having Tucker Carlson worship him while the New York Post blasts him.  And so ludicrous has this two-faced, treasonous approach to Putin become that at least one other conservative news outlet has noticed and condemned it.  That doesn't matter to Murdoch, and other well-heeled right-wingnuts:  the only unifying organizational principal among American conservatives is hating people who disagree with them.  

This is a perfect recipe for political chaos, and Putin, with the help of Trump, has made and continues to make the most of it.  That's why it's past time for us to ask, and act upon the answers to, two questions:

1.  Does the behavior of Murdoch's News Corporation sink to the level of treason enough that action could be taken against its broadcast licenses?

2.  To what extent did Trump, during his time in office (and perhaps since then, given his theft of classified documents) actively aid and abet Putin's planning for his invasion of Ukraine (and who knows what else)?

We need answers to these questions, and fast.  But the need for the answers is all the more reason that we absolutely need to give the Ukrainians all of the humanitarian and military help we can.  They've proven that they are willing to fight to win, if they have the tools to do it.  We have those tools; in fact, we have a surplus of them.  Here's an opportunity to make the most of sunk tax dollars while giving Ukraine the firepower needed to knock Putin back off his feet.  In the short run, it appears that, whatever we have in firepower to help Ukraine, it looks like sharing it is going to happen.

Like Kuwait, Putin's invasion of Ukraine this is a clear violation of international law that demands U.S. leadership of the UN and our allies; for that matter, the leadership that the larger international community can provide.  And, like the end of the Cold War, this is a defense of the liberation of Europe, an achievement wrought at no small cost, and one that has yielded enormous political and economic gains.  Those gains have been threatened by authoritarian backsliding in India, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, and, sadly, here at home.  This could be a moment to turn that tide back in the right direction.

And we cannot possibly afford to fail.