The Ukraine Blind Spot: How Tribal Politics Obscures a Civilizational Inflection Point
Our conversation about Ukraine has become a mirror for our own culture war, where serving our tribe matters more than understanding what's happening on the ground.
Thanks to Vitalik Buterin, Austin Vernon, and George L for their edits.
The conversation about Ukraine has become less about Ukraine itself than about American anxieties, grievances, and divisions. Harris voters see the 2022 invasion as validating their fears about the 2016 election, while MAGA voters see a corrupt money pit channeling U.S. tax dollars to the Biden family. Some pundits strain to construct grand theoretical frameworks around these positions, imagining elaborate geopolitical calculations about spheres of influence and civilizational retreat. But the simpler truth is that our foreign policy has become an extension of our culture wars, with each side viewing Ukraine through the lens of domestic grievance.
Lost in these projections is the actual story of modern Ukraine — a story that begins not with American politics, but with the complex aftermath of Soviet collapse. When the USSR fell, Ukraine gained sovereignty not through revolution but through paperwork, including the 1994 Budapest Memorandum where it surrendered the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees. This birth by bureaucracy left a question mark hanging over its sovereignty that Russia has waited decades to exploit — a pattern they would repeat across the post-Soviet space. For Chechnya, they orchestrated apartment bombings to create a pretext for invasion. In Georgia, they followed the same playbook of provocation and "intervention." And in 2014, the first test came to Ukraine in the form of "little green men" appearing in Crimea — Russian soldiers without insignia whom Putin explicitly denied were his own troops, even as they seized Ukrainian territory. This wasn't just tactical deception; it was maskirovka — the Russian military doctrine of deception that has shaped their statecraft since the tsars. When Catherine the Great annexed Crimea in 1783, she first sent agents to foment unrest among the Tatars, creating a pretext for "intervention" to protect Russian interests — a playbook of strategic misdirection that endures to this day.
Today's Russia has informationalized their medieval tradition of deception. They operate in the digital sphere where complexity itself becomes a weapon, where the transmission of ideas across networks can be manipulated to create uncertainty. During the recent Los Angeles Palisades fires, Russian operatives flooded social media with fabricated stories about Ukrainian generals losing mansions in the blaze. The story spread because it confirmed what many Americans already suspected: that Ukrainian officials were corrupt, living luxuriously off Western aid. This is how Russia operates — not through grand deceptions, but by finding the smallest cracks in our societal certainties and methodically transforming them into chasms of doubt. Their most effective operations often begin with kernels of uncomfortable truth — genuine institutional failures that Western establishments reflexively deny. Take Zelensky's declining popularity: Russia amplifies real criticisms from Ukrainians who want stronger military leadership, then distorts this domestic debate into evidence that Ukrainians secretly desire surrender to Moscow. When those initial truths are confirmed, Russia positions itself as an ally in truth-seeking, earning credibility they then exploit to seed broader deceptions. They do this with every headline, every controversy, every domestic tension point, creating such a deluge of competing narratives that exhausted minds simply give up trying to distinguish truth from fiction.
The disconnect becomes clear when you consider how we would view similar arguments about our own history. Imagine foreign observers dismissing the American Revolution as "merely a proxy war between British and French empires," condemning French military aid as needlessly prolonging the conflict, or criticizing Washington for not holding elections during the war. We would instantly recognize such arguments as missing the essential nature of the conflict. Yet when we debate Ukraine, we often lose sight of the local realities and centuries-old struggles that drive events on the ground.
Our skepticism of institutions, once a healthy democratic instinct, has metastasized into reflexive contrarianism. We've grown intellectually lazy, automatically equating every foreign engagement with Iraq and Afghanistan, as if every international crisis must inevitably become a forever war. This blinds us to the reality of our current support: much of U.S. aid to Ukraine involves transferring existing stockpiles of aging munitions, while creating demand signals that modernize our defense industrial base. We're essentially paying ourselves to upgrade our military capacity, using Ukraine as a testing ground against Russian hardware. The aid figures that provoke such outrage represent a fraction of our defense budget, much of it flowing back into American factories and communities. One can believe all this while still arguing, as many Ukrainians do, that NATO's support has been too hesitant, too reactive, when a more decisive approach might have shortened the war.
For Putin, this moment offers more than territorial gain — it's a chance to prove to wavering nations that Western democracy's apparent strengths mask fatal weaknesses. For Ukrainians, Putin's Russia embodies everything that MAGA voters claim to despise: a sclerotic bureaucracy run by aging apparatchiks who maintain power through surveillance, censorship, and state control. While one of Europe's youngest leaders fights for democratic sovereignty, Europe's oldest sits in Moscow, commanding a gerontocracy that demands deference to its authority. Every time we filter international crises through our domestic political lens, every time we surrender strategic thinking to partisan advantage, we validate his core belief that Western democracies will eventually crumble under their own internal divisions.
The stakes become clear when you walk through Kyiv today. Young Ukrainians wear NASA shirts and pack restaurants playing American music not out of mere imitation, but as a declaration of the future they want to build. This is a nation that transformed itself into one of Europe's most effective fighting forces, that held out for three years when the world expected three days. Their neighbor Poland stands as living proof of what's possible — emerging from the Soviet collapse as Ukraine's twin, Poland anchored itself to the West and built an economy three times larger than Ukraine's. Russia views Ukraine as a wayward child led astray by Western influence, a narrative that shapes their psychological warfare. When they paint Zelensky as a murderer for defending his country, the subtext is always the same: 'You would have to be mad to reject Mother Russia's embrace.' What infuriates them most is that Ukrainians do reject it, having seen in Poland's prosperity the path not taken. This isn't abstract policy — it's the measurable difference between freedom and servitude.
This decision to pursue freedom is written in individual lives, in countless personal stories of resistance and determination. Recently in Kyiv, I found myself in a cramped apartment with a Ukrainian Colonel who's been fighting since 2014. Before Russia came, he monitored his country's forests for pollution. Now he defends them. His eye, damaged by tear gas at Maidan, marks him as one of countless Ukrainians who chose this path long before the West took notice. As he played his guitar that night, mixing Ukrainian liberation songs with Hebrew melodies, the weight of history filled that small room. Here was a Ukrainian Jew fighting for his homeland, his very existence defying centuries of Russian propaganda about Ukrainian nationalism. His family's story, like so many in Ukraine — including my own ancestors who fled these same lands — is written in generations of resistance: against the tsars who banned their language, against the Soviets who engineered their famines, against every empire that tried to erase their identity.
The tragedy of America's Ukraine debate isn't just our failure to think clearly about power and interest — it's our failure to recognize our own founding story playing out before our eyes. In that Kyiv apartment, watching a people hardened by centuries of resistance yet still dreaming of something better, I saw what we have come to understand about our own revolution: that helping a people fight for freedom isn't charity — it's recognition of our shared principles.
Jefferson understood this most deeply. When France's own revolution came, he supported their struggle not because the French monarchy had aided us for idealistic reasons — they hadn't — but because he recognized the universal principles at stake. Even John Quincy Adams, warning that America should not go abroad "seeking monsters to destroy," understood we must remain "the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all." They knew this because they remembered their own revolution — how without French aid, how without the support of a great power, the American experiment would have failed against the British Empire.
That French support, though motivated by realpolitik, created bonds between peoples that would transcend mere strategic alliance. As we enter a new multipolar era, with challenges to American power mounting on multiple fronts, we would do well to remember this lesson. The alliances we forge today — or fail to forge through neglect — may determine our fate in the precarious decades ahead. We might well find ourselves grateful for a battle-hardened ally in Eastern Europe, one that intimately understands the nature of our adversaries.
Today, we face the same choice the French once did: Will we recognize our own ideals in Ukraine’s fight and give them the means to prevail? Will we defend the system we've built—a system so compelling that others risk everything to join it? Or will we let our own divisions blind us to the truth: that abandoning Ukraine isn’t just a strategic mistake—it’s a failure to remember who we are. The price of missing this moment won’t just be measured in lost territory or abandoned allies—it will be measured in our failure to rise above our own division and uphold the values that define us.
Very well reasoned. Thanks.