Ukraine Alone

One of my favorite Christmas movies, Home Alone has a scene where Kevin’s mom, Kate, erupts at a ticket taker as she tries to get home somehow to rescue her son. The outburst isn’t proper, but it’s fitting and what any real parent in the same situation could easily imagine doing.

We all know it intrinsically in our gut. If a family member were in trouble, we would not spend our time debating social niceties, leaving them to a horrible fate.

The people who have spent the last few days handwringing about President Zelenskyy’s approach to the now infamous February 28 Oval Office confrontation are ignoring the stakes of that meeting. Zelenskyy wasn’t there to sign a vanilla trade deal or other nice diplomatic arrangement.

Zelenskyy was channeling his soldiers on the front line and focusing three years of his people being slaughtered by a man seeking to compete with Hitler for most-evil-man-of-the-last-century. Should he have let himself respond the way he did? Perhaps not, but it was a Kate McCallister moment.

Imagine yourself in Zelenskyy’s shoes. You want to get along with the American President because the lives of your people depend on the American flow of aid.

You arrive to sign a deal that isn’t explicitly guaranteeing the things you need, but you hope will grease the skids for aid and ultimately peace. You ignore the initial sarcasm towards your clothing, attire you wear in solidarity with your troops, akin to Winston Churchill’s “siren suit”. You overlook your alleged ally’s attempts to equate your invader’s situation with your own as the invaded victim. You even bite your tongue when the President claims America has provided more aid than it has and says it has given more than Europe, both points demonstrably false (Europe has surpassed us in aid).

Then you hit the moment at the airline counter that sets Mrs. McCallister off. As your “friends” use your time with them as a TV bully pulpit to tell everyone their “diplomacy” will “stop the killing,” you realize you are adding legitimacy to a trap: a “peace” that ultimately allows Russia to regroup and kill more of your people.

This is not debating a quibble over tax law or whether to sponsor some ill-advised USAID play. This is whether the public will become convinced they’ve done all they need to do for peace, leaving the people you represent to either die or be oppressed under a murderous dictator who hates both you and your ally.

Do you take it and seemingly authenticate their words? You hope “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Americans might hear a plea from you instead and realize a “peace” that brings subjugation and death is not peace.

Zelenskyy did not erupt like Kevin’s mom, but he did reach that same enough-with-etiquette point. Manners won’t rescue your son at that moment; they won’t save your compatriots from the darkness of Putin’s New Iron Curtain.

At first, as he spoke, it wasn’t even particularly aggressive. Not, perhaps, diplomatic norms in public, but hardly necessary of significant offense. But Vice President Vance, well-known opponent of Ukraine as he is, interjected with a patronizing lecture on gratefulness that was inaccurate (Zelenskyy has repeatedly expressed thankfulness), but ego-building for his boss.

Everything thereafter was an emotional chain reaction. Zelenskyy’s statement about America’s protective ocean was not a threat and almost certainly would not have angered Trump in a calmer moment, but the temperature was already far too hot and the President took an observation any reasonable person can understand (if Russia gets its way, the effects will spread and eventually reach us) and took it instead as a threat (that somehow Zelenskyy will make us suffer).

America’s and the world’s situation in the decades ahead may very well hinge on what happens next. Sen. Thom Tillis is precisely right that “[f]riends can and will have disagreements, and sometimes they can be heated.” Given the stakes, we ought not stay obsessed with Friday. As he goes on:

The fact is that Putin started the war and he’s a murderer who wants to see the decline of the United States. This war can only end in two ways: either Russia takes all of Ukraine or we broker a peace settlement.

Just so. That’s why it’s important to remember that the United States and Ukraine are, indeed, friends. The Ukrainian people have one of the highest views of Americans of any nation in the world and the possibilities of meaningful, fruitful friendship are icing on the cake of standing up against the monstrous Putin.

Yes, Zelenskyy had a Kate McCallister moment. But what makes it such is that it wasn’t some base cash grab; it was a plea for the life and freedom of his people.

Good parents will breach etiquette to save their children. Good leaders will do no less for their people.

In Home Alone, a kind stranger hears Kate’s imperfect plea and helps her get home to Kevin. We are witness to another airport plea, will Ukraine’s American friends help them get home?