For the last two years, the American public has been fed a steady diet of fear and moral guilt: If we don’t “stand with Ukraine,” Putin will steamroll Europe just like Hitler did in 1939. It’s an emotionally charged slogan, but it falls apart under even basic historical scrutiny.
Let’s start with what Ukraine is — and what it is not. Ukraine is a buffer state on Russia’s doorstep that has changed hands, borders, and loyalties for centuries (Sakwa, 2015). It is not a NATO member, not a U.S. territory, and never was a vital interest to America. To argue that its fate is the same as Europe’s in 1939 is historically and strategically dishonest.
In 1939, Nazi Germany under Hitler was openly pursuing total European domination. Poland was one of many stepping stones to a larger plan of conquest and genocide (Roberts, 2009). There was no NATO, no nuclear deterrent, and appeasement failed because it fed an unstoppable expansionist regime that had to be destroyed by force.
By contrast, Russia under Putin — for all its corruption, brutality, and repression — is not Nazi Germany. Its military has shown it can’t even subdue a single neighboring state. And unlike Hitler’s Third Reich, Russia has nukes — which makes reckless escalation infinitely more dangerous, not less (Mearsheimer, 2014).
Western leaders knew for decades that NATO expansion into Ukraine would be seen as an existential threat by Moscow. George Kennan, the father of America’s Cold War containment policy, called NATO expansion “a fateful error” (Kennan, 1997). Henry Kissinger later warned that turning Ukraine into a Western outpost would force Russia to act (Kissinger, 2014). They weren’t defending Putin — they were pointing out geopolitical reality.
This is exactly where the
Monroe Doctrine comes in. Since 1823, the United States has asserted the right to keep hostile powers out of the Western Hemisphere (Herring, 2008). It’s a blunt doctrine, but it works because it reflects the fact that great powers defend their own sphere of influence. When the Soviets put missiles in Cuba, we didn’t send billions to a “brave Cuban resistance” — we nearly went to nuclear war to get those missiles out. We drew a hard line: Stay out of our backyard.
If you flip the map, you see why Russia’s reaction is predictable. NATO is a military alliance that has marched steadily eastward for 30 years. Suddenly Ukraine — a huge borderland with deep Russian historical ties — was supposed to be pulled into that alliance. It’s a direct challenge to what Moscow sees as its buffer zone, just as Mexico or Canada aligning with China would be intolerable to us. Yet our leaders ignore our own Monroe Doctrine logic when it’s inconvenient.
Of course, none of this justifies Russia’s invasion or its atrocities. But smart strategy is about interests, not moral lectures that cost us trillions and risk a world war. The cold truth is that this is a regional war about local power — not a global struggle for civilization’s survival.
Meanwhile, our own country is on fire in slow motion: an unsecured border, an exploding national debt, and an emboldened China working to outpace us economically and militarily. Yet we shovel blank checks to Ukraine while our veterans sleep on the street and cities crumble. If the situation were reversed, you can bet Europe wouldn’t spend its treasure defending Texas.
Equally absurd is pretending the billions we send to Ukraine are “defending democracy.” Ukraine is corrupt, with a long track record of oligarchs and political repression. Before the war, the same pundits praising Zelensky today openly criticized Ukraine for cronyism and free-speech crackdowns. Nothing magically changed overnight.
When Washington elites say, “This is 1939 all over again,” they ignore the most important difference: mutually assured destruction. Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons. Putin does. And when you push a cornered nuclear power into a fight over a region that doesn’t actually matter to your national survival, you play with fire.
The real lesson from history is that no great power survives by fighting endless proxy wars in other people’s backyards. The Monroe Doctrine worked because it recognized that hard fact: mind your hemisphere, defend your own sphere, and don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong unless you’re truly prepared to fight — and win — a global war.
It’s long past time to admit the obvious: Ukraine is not our hill to die on. We should stop pretending it’s 1939 when it’s really just 2025 — and get back to the business of protecting our own nation, our own border, and our own people first.
References
Herring, G. C. (2008). From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776. Oxford University Press.
Kennan, G. (1997, February 5). A fateful error. The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html
Kissinger, H. (2014, March 5). How the Ukraine crisis ends. The Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/henry-kissinger-how-the-ukraine-crisis-ends/2014/03/05/7d8f1f02-a496-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html
Mearsheimer, J. J. (2014). Why the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault. Foreign Affairs, 93(5), 77–89.
Roberts, A. (2009). The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. HarperCollins.
Sakwa, R. (2015). Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. I.B. Tauris.
