J. Daryl Charles

The West is therefore morally and politically obligated to the defense of Ukraine, assisting her with any and all means necessary for her protection and survival.

Patriotism is part of our repertoire of civic ideals and identities, as Jean Bethke Elshtain reminded us. While its excesses and perversions are to be lamented, Patriotism rightly perceived yields a concern for the moral tenor of one’s culture.

Biden fears escalation; this plays into the hands of Putin, the former KGB operative, who exploits the West’s moral weakness with both cunning and barbarism.

In our day it is difficult for some, perhaps many, to recall that the West’s Cold War policy of nuclear deterrence—anchored in traditional just war moral principles of just cause, right intention, proportionality, and discrimination—helped avert war rather than increase the prospects of nuclear conflagration.

Either we deter Russian aggression, which means that we convince Putin that we will not tolerate his first-strike nuclear threats and be intimidated, or we passively acquiesce to nuclear blackmail and Russian butchery of a nation that was promised its integrity and sovereignty five years after the Cold War ended.

The war in Ukraine, with its indiscriminate slaughter and mass murder of thousands, forces us to admit the reality of evil.

Mass moral atrocities and genocidal tendencies have not lessened with the supposed end of the Cold War. If anything, they have increased.

Shame on us if we do not act to deter what amount to escalating war crimes by Russia in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement to place his nation’s nuclear deterrent forces on a state of heightened alert invites those of us in the free world—and surely the United States—to revisit the just war assumptions that served as a deterrence during the Cold War.

The present need is to deter China and Russia. This is why a “cold war” and a “just war” response is necessary.