Fred Hiatt makes a strange comment:
The tide of history often needs help [bold mine-DL]. Pretending otherwise offers an excuse for inaction — for refusing to help Ukraine obtain arms in its own defense, for example.
History doesn’t have right or wrong sides, and it doesn’t have tides, either. If there were such a tide, it would be an inexorable natural force that couldn’t be “helped” along whether we wanted to “help” it or not. Oddly enough, the people that are most eager to “help” the “tide of history” are the ones that believe that such a thing is real and can be recognized. They refute themselves with their own desire for taking a certain kind of action.
I also call this a strange comment because there is no reason to think that sending Ukraine weapons would help anyone. The reason the U.S. shouldn’t send Ukraine weapons is that it would do no good for the U.S. or Ukraine. Indeed, it would more likely trigger the larger Russian invasion that everyone claims not to want. Even if the worst-case scenario didn’t happen, sending Ukraine weapons wouldn’t undo anything that had happened over the last nine months, and it would probably make it that much harder to find a resolution to the conflict. Throwing weapons at the conflict in Ukraine is exactly the sort of short-sighted reaction that makes “inaction” seem preferable. Sending more weapons to Ukraine is the most aggressive policy that hawks can get away with demanding without appearing to have lost their minds, and so that is what they demand, but it is folly to think that this is going to “help” anyone, least of all the Ukrainians that it is intended to bolster.