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The poet Robert Frost once said a liberal is someone too broad-minded to take his own side in a fight.
What would he say about those on the right who seem confused about the same question?
Over the last few days, Donald Trump told a rally he’d supposedly warned the leader of a NATO nation that he’d encourage the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” against countries that weren’t spending enough on defense, while the former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson broadcast videos from Moscow praising its grocery stores and subways as superior to those in the United States.
For its part, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is refusing to approve another tranche of aid to Ukraine as it runs short of artillery shells in a defensive war against Russia.
What’s notable about all this is people who, in other contexts, are fierce about the need to defend Western civilization are unenthusiastic about a core institution of the modern West — namely NATO — and feel little urgency about checking the aggression of a country that is an avowed and longtime civilizational adversary of the West.
There are legitimate policy disagreements about NATO and the Ukraine war, but there shouldn’t be any doubt about the larger significance of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s challenge to the West’s interests, values and resolve.
In his classic book “The Clash of Civilizations,” the late social scientist Samuel Huntington wrote of an “Orthodox civilization, centered in Russia and separate from Western Christendom as a result of its Byzantine parentage, distinct religion, 200 years of Tatar rule, bureaucratic despotism, and limited exposure to the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and other central Western experiences.”
Source : https://nypost.com/2024/02/16/opinion/putin-has-made-clear-russia-is-our-civilizational-enemy/