Turning points in history that don't turn

The outcome of Russia's attack on Ukraine will not change the world

President Joe Biden, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and prominent members of the chattering class have insisted that Russia’s attack on Ukraine is an Armageddon-like fight between freedom and tyranny around the world. The Chicken Little-like alarmism betrays an ignorance of history and human nature.

Professed turning points that don’t turn earmark history. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn maintained the American Minutemen fired a shot heard round the world at North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775. But if the shot was heard, it was quickly forgotten. The American Revolution did not shake the grip of monarchy or tyranny on the earth. No Empire fell. The French Revolution featured a more absolutist counter-revolution culminating in the self-coronation of Napoleon than King Louis XVI’s despotism. Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America did not revolt under democratic banners.

The 1848 revolutions in Europe were a historical turning point that didn’t turn. The fate of Fiume at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was said to be the cornerstone of post-World War I peace. Who ever remembers Fiume?

The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union signaled the end of history according to self-proclaimed wizard Francis Fukuyama. But more of the same followed. Putin is far worse than Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Arab Spring metamorphosed quickly into Arab winter with bad tyrants succeeded by worse.

As Ecclesiastes teaches, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” History is an illusion. The human narrative at all times in all places can be captured in one sentence: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. The species is hormonal. The apex hormone is the craving for power as a substitute for moral suasion by example. Conflict is as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.

Alarmists shouted that if Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin reneged on the Yalta promise of free elections in Poland all of Europe would succumb to Communist dictatorships. Stalin reneged. Poland proved a chronic headache to the Soviet Union, and Lech Walesa’s Solidarity marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire.

Ukraine is just one among infinite examples of humans fighting for the sake of fighting and amour propre without philosophical guard rails. Ukraine has never been a democracy or exhibited democratic DNA. Magnificent fighters do not necessarily make enlightened statesmen. The Soviet Union performed heroically at Stalingrad to defeat Hitler’s Nazis. But the heroism did not turn Russians into democrats.

The United States should follow the advice of Voltaire’s Candide and cultivate our own garden as an example for others to follow if they choose. Cultivating our own garden will not cure the world’s multiple ills, but it is the optimal approach to advancing freedom. As Saint Francis prayed, “Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”