Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground. Mother Earth will swallow you. Lay your body down.

Stephen Stills

When Canadian Stephen Stills wrote those words (above), it was after the deaths of King, Kennedy, and four Kent State students. Back then, those deaths excepted, the “cost of freedom” in the west was primarily marching and screaming in protest. Sadly, freedom in the west costs a lot more now, because Russia’s invaded Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s threatened nuclear war. It’s a wake-up call for the USA.

America (South excepted) hasn’t hosted an existential war, so Kyiv manicurist Yana Kamun exemplifies the key cost of freedom; the willingness “to go shoot them (Russians) up and defend my home.” Ukraine is the land of the free because it outlasted Bolsheviks and Nazis. It is the home of the brave because of resolute citizens like Ms. Kamun: “We will fight to the last one, and we have faith that Ukraine will win.”

Another cost of freedom is to never forget. Ukraine at once evokes London during the Blitz and America during the Cuban Missile Crisis; tipping points for the free world. Putin’s not playing mumbley-peg, so it’s critical that western democracies re-shuffle liberal priorities. Joe Biden once called climate change the “number one issue facing humanity.” Maybe, but not when a single Russian one-megaton bomb can flatten Warsaw and Putin has readied his ICBMs.

Thus, the paramount cost of freedom is for advanced nations to do whatever’s necessary to check a throw-back aggressor with nuclear arms. This includes President Biden not going John Wayne on Russia, which could frighten Putin into nuclear war, and the current asymmetrical response: G20 economic sanctions on Russia and EU supplying weapons to Ukraine.

A conservative can rightly blame Biden’s national security team for Putin’s military bravado, but the GOP has been mostly supportive of the President since the invasion, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) offering “an unusual level of bipartisan agreement with Biden” (source: The Hill). In fact, conservative carping is mostly limited to a few Trump “America First” supporters.

What is at once unbecoming and eye-opening is the reactionary mumbo-jumbo coming from the President’s own constituents, beginning with Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor, Matt Suss, who blames the invasion on US presidents, from Clinton to Biden. ”Concerns about NATO expansion are not something that Vladimir Putin just made up recently. There’s 30 years of evidence that this is something that is very concerning to a lot of Russian officials.”

Not to be outdone, Stacy Abrams (D-GA) used Putin’s attacks to stoke fears of GOP election-integrity laws. “The war that Putin is waging isn’t a war on Ukraine, this is a war on democracy in Ukraine [and no different than when] we allow democracy to be overtaken by those who want to choose who can be heard.”

1619 Project originator Nicole Hannah-Jones claims US interest in Ukraine is evidence of pan-European racism. She theorizes Europe is not a true continent but a “geopolitical fiction” to distinguish Caucasians from Asians. She feels no “alarm about a European, or First World, nation being invaded” because the news is “a dog whistle” that we (Americans) ”should care because they are like us (white).”

War usually shakes liberals to their senses, except when they don’t feel threatened. In light of Putin’s history, how is such blindness even possible? He sits on a massive stockpile of nuclear arms, disappears political rivals, invades neighboring nations, kills non-combatants, and should be feared. To link Putin’s war to Clinton-Bush-Obama mistakes, GOP voter suppression, and white supremacy is the moral equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

The down payment for freedom is intellectual honesty, sorely lacking in Suss, Abrams, and Hannah-Jones.

It is ludicrous for an advisor to president-wannabe Sanders to throw stones at actual commanders in chief. Does anybody believe the Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) could field a candidate whom China, Iran or Russia would fear? No, which is why the DSA has fewer than 100,000 members. Until Biden rings the all-clear bell, Sanders and Suss should be seen (maybe) and not heard.

The race-based spin of Abrams and Hannah-Jones won’t age well. It’s absurd to equate the right to vote in Georgia to the right to life in Ukraine. As missiles continue to rain down on apartment buildings, hospitals and schools in Kiev, independent voters will run away from Abrams (and other Democrats on Georgia’s ballot, including candidates for Congress Biden wants elected).

For whom does Hannah-Jones speak? Surely not 2,150,000 black veterans who know Russian nukes are NOT “geopolitical fiction” and DO threaten black lives. Surely not 280,000 Blacks in the US military, or 115,000 Blacks in US defense agencies, who know Europe is a continent that NATO requires them to defend.

Before the cost of freedom is millions of lost American lives, hard-right Republicans need to support the President’s emotional patience that aims to prevent a possible nuclear war, and hard-left Democrats need to support red-state election integrity laws that aim to prevent any doubt over the 2022 mid-term results. The free world is at a tipping point, and the USA must rise to the occasion – smart and strong!

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By Spencer Morten

The writer is a retired CEO of a US corporation, whose views were informed by studies and work in the US and abroad. An economist by education, and pragmatist by experience, he believes the greatest threat to peace and prosperity are the loudest voices with the least experience and expertise.