By Charles C. W.
Cooke
Tuesday, March
08, 2022
As part of a recent survey of
attitudes toward Russia’s execrable invasion
of Ukraine, the polling firm Quinnipiac asked Americans whether they would stay
and fight if the United States were invaded by Russia. The results make
sobering — and often disgraceful — reading. Sixty-eight percent of
Republicans said that they would “stay and fight,” with 25 percent indicating
that they’d run away. Among independents, those numbers are 57–36. Among
Democrats, they’re in negative territory, at 40–52. Among 50- to 64-year-old
men and women, the stay/leave numbers are 66/28. Among 18 to 34-year-olds, they
are 45/48. Or, to put it another way: A majority of the prime-aged Americans whom
the United States would need were such a crisis to arise imagine that they
would flee if that crisis ever came.
For shame.
Lest the excuse-makers try to find nuance
where none exists, let us note for the record that this is the most elemental
question that a free man can ever be asked. There are no caveats or
complexities here, and there is barely any politics, either. If the United
States were to be invaded by Russia, America’s defense of itself could
not plausibly be construed as “imperialism” or as “interventionism”
or as a “foreign war” or “conflict of choice.” Nor could skeptics, à
la Rupert Brooke, meaningfully complain that they were being asked to
fight and die in a “corner of a foreign field.” In such a circumstance, we’d be
protecting home, and all who cherish it. To demur when called upon
to defend that home from conquest is to willingly turn oneself into an exile.
The seas, oceans, beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets, hills, and air of
which Winston Churchill spoke in 1940 were not random pictures on a map; they were the living quarters
of millions. Flee?
Never.
I do not write this out of gung-ho
jingoism or self-aggrandizement. If the United States were to be invaded, it
would, without a shadow of doubt, be the worst thing that had happened to the
world in my lifetime, as well as the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
I have never wanted to be involved in a war of any kind, and I am under no
illusions as to the likely limits of my own martial ability. But if an invading
force came to our shores, that choice would be taken away from me. When I
became an American citizen in 2018, I took an oath to “support and defend the
Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies,
foreign and domestic,” as well as to “bear arms on behalf of the United States
when required by the law.” And I meant it. But I didn’t need this promise to
know what would be expected of me. America is where my life is, where my wife
and children are, where my friends are. My kids go to school here, to church
here, to the diner here, to tee-ball practice here. America is where I vote and
complain and celebrate. America is where I help and am helped. America, per
Fitzgerald, is a “willingness of the heart.”
I can conceive of only two reasons that an
able-bodied man might tell a pollster that he would run away in the face of a
foreign invasion. The first is that he believes America is not worth fighting
for, because it is less worthwhile than dictatorial rule under the invader. The
second is that he believes that, if he flees, someone else will do the fighting
on his behalf. Neither is acceptable. To fail to grasp one’s extraordinary
fortune as an American is to be guilty of historical ignorance and chronic
ingratitude, while to believe that America is worth defending while you remain
unwilling to pitch in is to be guilty of cowardice as most perfectly defined.
As a matter of basic civic hygiene, the
number of young American men declaring their readiness to resist in case of an
attack on their country ought to be approaching 100 percent, for, without them,
our abstract commitments to ideals such as liberty, democracy, and equality
mean nothing. Matters of state are almost never clear-cut or simple, but this
one truly is. The question asked by Quinnipiac was, “If you were in the same
position as Ukrainians are now, do you think that you would stay and fight or leave
the country?” There is no wiggle-room here. The “position” that “Ukrainians”
are in — the one that the United States would be in in Quinnipiac’s
hypothetical — is stark: At the behest of a dictator who wishes to install a
puppet government, their country has been invaded by a foreign army that has
proven willing to kill at will. If an eventuality such as that can’t get all
American men to say “hell yes, I’d pitch in,” then . . . well, America has a
profound problem with its heart.
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