www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/vibe-shift-war-in-ukraine
What You’re Feeling Isn’t A Vibe Shift. It’s Permanent Change.
Then Ukrainians started pushing back. In a deeply rousing display of resistance, Ukrainians — led by a charismatic and direct president — made the case that they want to join the global liberal dream they’d heard so much about. Far from folding in front of Russian military might, Ukraine’s people used social media to tell a coherent and deeply moving story of national identity. In essence, ordinary Ukrainians used the argument of Westernization as a weapon: Here we are, displaying the very values you preach and claim to defend — freedom, openness, transparency, and national pride — so will you come to defend us?
But in making the plea, Ukraine exposed a problem with the West. In the 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union — nearly my entire lifetime — liberalism has come to be taken for granted, the will to defend it withered. Three decades of not articulating what you stand for will do that.
Meanwhile, Russia has spent years pointing out that the neat story America tells has actually been a lie. The West, so secure in its superior narrative and assuredness that history has ended, has regularly defied some of its own fundamental tenets. It has repeatedly violated state sovereignty (see: the Iraq War). It has overlooked certain crises (see: Palestine) in favor of strategic interests. And it has preached the transformative power of free trade while simultaneously cooking up extraordinary sanctions (see: Venezuela, Iran). All in all, the US may have claimed moral superiority, but Russia needn’t reach far to poke holes in it.
So now the rules-based order stands blemished, facing accusations of hypocrisy from its foes and disappointment from those who saw it as a beacon of hope. If liberalism stands for defending freedom everywhere, it sure isn’t eager to show it.
If you don't stand up for what you say you believe in, you stand for nothing.
This will haunt us, long after whats happening in Ukraine is settled.
Post war liberal democracy meant something. Then we forgot what that was.
And here we are. I do think if we don't stand for Ukraine now, there is nothing thats off limits. And that will catch up with eventually, one way or another.
I do not say that lightly. I am not a hawk by any stretch of the imagination.