79 years ago, Allied paratroopers began landing behind the beaches of Normandy.
World War II was a long time ago, but it lives on in America's memory.
And the anniversary of D-Day, on Tuesday, seems especially evocative this year, as we await the moral equivalent of D-Day, which will come any day when Ukraine begins its long-awaited counterattack against the Russian invaders (which may have already begun).
I use the term "moral equivalent" deliberately.
A general view of a flooded area, following the bursting of the Nova Kakhovka dam, in the Kherson region, Ukraine, in this image obtained from social media on June 6, 2023. Courtesy of Oleksandr Vlasov/via REUTERS
World War II was one of the few wars that was clearly a struggle of good against evil.
Now, the good ones were not all good.
Americans continued to be denied basic rights and were sometimes massacred because of the color of their skin.
Britain continued to rule, sometimes brutally, a vast colonial empire.
But, although the great democracies too often failed to fulfill their ideals, they had the right ideals; They defended, however imperfectly, freedom from the forces of tyranny, racial supremacy, and mass murder.
If Ukraine wins this war, some of its supporters abroad will no doubt be disappointed to discover the darker side of the nation.
Before the war, Ukraine ranked high on measures of perceived corruption, better than Russia, but that's not saying much.
Victory will not make corruption disappear.
And Ukraine has a far-right movement, including paramilitary groups that have played a role in its war.
The country suffered terribly under Stalin, with millions killed in a deliberately provoked famine; as a result, some Ukrainians initially welcomed Germans during World War II (until they realized that they, too, were considered subhuman), and Nazi iconography remains disturbingly widespread.
However, like the shortcomings of the Allies in World War II, these shadows do not create any equivalence between the two sides in this war.
Ukraine is an imperfect but real democracy, hoping to join the wider democratic community.
Vladimir Putin's Russia is a malevolent actor, and friends of freedom around the world have to hope that it will be completely defeated.
I wish I could say that the citizens of Western democracies, the United States in particular, are fully committed to the Ukrainian victory and the Russian defeat.
In reality, while most Americans support aid to Ukraine, only a minority are willing to keep that aid as long as it takes.
For what it's worth, American public opinion on aid to Ukraine right now looks remarkably like polls from early 1941 (i.e., long before Pearl Harbor) on the lend-lease program of military aid to Britain.
What about those who oppose helping Ukraine?
Some of those who oppose Western aid simply do not see the moral equivalence with World War II.
On the left, in particular, there are some people for whom it is always 2003.
They remember how the United States was brought to war under false pretenses - which, for the record, I knew was happening and strongly opposed at the time - and they cannot see this situation being any different.
On the right, by contrast, many of those who oppose helping Ukraine — call it Tucker Carlson's faction — do understand what this war is about.
And they are on the side of the bad guys.
The "Putin wing" of the Republican Party has long admired Russia's authoritarian regime and intolerance.
Before the war, Republicans like Texas Senator Ted Cruz contrasted what they perceived as Russian toughness with the "awake and emasculated" U.S. military; Russia's military failures threaten the whole worldview of these people, who would be humiliated by a Ukrainian victory.
The point is that right now there is a lot at stake in Ukraine.
If the Ukrainian counteroffensive succeeds, the forces of democracy will be strengthened around the world, especially in the United States.
If it fails, it will be a disaster not only for Ukraine, but for the whole world.
Western aid to Ukraine might dry up, Putin might finally achieve the victory most people expected him to win in the early days of the war, and democracy would be weakened everywhere.
What is going to happen?
Not even military experts know this, and I have no illusions that they are.
For what it's worth, Western officials are increasingly optimistic about Ukraine's chances.
And military affairs are not like economics, where, for example, the Federal Reserve works with basically the same information available to anyone who knows the Federal Reserve's St. Louis Federal Reserve economic research website.
Defense officials have access to information the public doesn't have, and they don't want to look silly, so their optimism probably isn't empty bravado.
Still, you don't have to be a military expert to know that attacking fortified defenses – which is what Ukraine must do – is very difficult.
On the eve of D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower told the expeditionary force:
"The eyes of the world are upon you."
Now the eyes of the world are on Ukraine's armed forces.
Let's hope they succeed.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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