Donald Trump’s attack on Ukraine will ‘live in infamy’ like Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor

That, three years on, we must still reiterate it was Russia which invaded Ukraine, not the other way round, speaks volumes for the lies and misinformation that have infected public discourse.

In 2022, the world watched in horror as Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine towards Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson whilst missiles indiscriminately smashed into military and civilian targets. The Ukrainians fought back valiantly.

Their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, rejected an offer of evacuation, choosing to stay and fight. His decision was as courageous as it was vital in sending out a message to the world. Ukraine knew what Russian occupation meant.

Deliberate killing of children

All too soon those fears were realised when information emerged from occupied areas. Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol are now seared on the international imagination, scenes of the most appalling war crimes that should have horrified the world into action long ago. The killing of prisoners, massacres of civilians and deliberate targeting of children. All well-documented staples of the Russian war machine that was now primed by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to wipe Ukraine off the map.

There are few international issues that are simply black and white, this one is as close as it is possible to be. Not only that but, over the past three years, Putin’s war should have been a source of embarrassment to his apologists elsewhere.

The targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, the kidnapping of children and the complicity of other authoritarian regimes, such as Iran and North Korea, in attacking a European democracy should have told reasonable people what cosying up to Putin means.

A fight for survival

Yet this week, Russia’s apologist-in-chief, the newly (and democratically) re-elected president of the USA accused Ukraine of starting the war. It is difficult to be shocked in international affairs these days, and we always knew Trump’s view of the war, but that brazen attack on a democracy fighting for its survival against a bloody dictator still had the capacity to shock.

Some asked whatever would be next – demands that Poland apologise to Germany and the Soviet Union for their invasions of it in 1939 or claims that the USA somehow provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?

The current administration in the USA and its cheerleaders have little interest in defending democracy. Vice-President JD Vance turned up at the Munich Security conference – the irony of the venue was not lost on attendees – to tell delegates that the biggest threat to Western democracy was their attitude to free speech.

This came from a White House that had just barred a journalist for a failure to recognise Trump’s unilateralist renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.

US quiet on free speech in Russia

The USA’s vocal attacks on its supposed allies, were worrying enough, but worse than that has been the silence on the egregious failures of others. Vance is unlikely to take his free speech campaign beyond Munich, say, to Tehran, Moscow or Beijing. In those places, there is no such right with those who exercise their right to free speech often coming to a sticky end, be it in jail or worse, as the grieving family of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will testify.

There was also the matter of Trump’s attack on democracy in Ukraine and on Zelensky, the democratically elected president of Ukraine. It has had five presidents since 2000, with regular elections and wide-ranging freedoms including of speech.

I have visited the country several times for work before entering politics, and afterwards, and found a country that has a vibrant democracy and civil society. It isn’t perfect, no democracy is, but it is a democracy. To falsely attack a democracy is one thing, to attack it whilst giving credibility to dictators, as Marco Rubio did this week in Riyadh, is another.

A lot has been written this week about the Pax Americana, that started with the Japanese attack on the USA in 1941 (note – not the other way round), having come to an end. That is almost a given.

However, what we have seen is a U-turn by the White House so that, instead of championing fellow democracies and the rule of law, it now backs those who are the enemies of democracy and the rule of law.

Let down, betrayed

I have written regularly about the need for European leadership, and I won’t revisit those arguments today. Suffice to say that the events of the past few days were as foreseeable as Russia’s brutality and eagerness for war.

The USA is no longer the partner it once was. This was a week in US diplomacy that will live on in infamy and will long be remembered by European allies who feel let down and even betrayed by their Nato ally in Washington.

That infamy reference is, of course, paraphrasing remarks by Trump’s predecessor, President Franklin Roosevelt, in response to Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He had also set the tone for the post-war era in an earlier speech describing the USA as the “arsenal of democracy”. It is worth a read and many of the lessons apply today.

The speech was aimed squarely at those in his own country seeking to do a deal with the enemies of democracy and was also designed to provide reassurance to those doing the fighting in Europe.

For those in the USA who thought it was too late for democracy in Europe, Roosevelt said, as he might have of Ukraine today: “Let not the defeatists tell us that it is too late. It will never be earlier. Tomorrow will be later than today.”

Stephen Gethins is MP for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry and a professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews