A US national security advisor has told the Express that Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is part of a wider plan to destroy the West and that appeasing the Kremlin is not an option.
David Stuckenberg is a former US air force pilot who has flown more than 150 combat missions since September 11, 2001.
The 42-year-old has been a national security expert for more than a decade and harbours political ambitions.
He made a last minute decision to take part in the Republican presidential primaries and although Donald Trump comfortably sealed his party’s nomination he has not been deterred from a possible future bid.
When it comes to foreign policy, Mr Stuckenberg flatly rejects the isolationism of Trump and the Maga wing of the Republican party.
He argues the US cannot afford to turn its back on the world at a moment when the very existence of the Western order is under threat from powerful enemies.
“We’re looking at the imminent demise of the Western order if we do not step up to the plate and that’s the truth,” he told Express.co.uk
“We are facing something that we’ve probably never experienced before, you know, certainly in our lifetime, and that is the ability to be overcome by forces far greater than than we imagined.”
One of those malign forces is Putin’s Russia, which sees its war in Ukraine as a broader ideological and existential conflict with the West.
Aleksander Dugin, an ultranationalist Russian philosopher, has characterised Putin’s invasion of its neighbour as a holy war against “absolute Evil, embodied in Western civilisation, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony and in Ukrainian Nazism”.
This idea was reinforced recently by Moscow’s ambassador to the UK Andrey Kelin, who described the West’s military aid to Ukraine as a continuation of its “civilisational confrontation with Russia, in which the end justifies the means”.
Mr Stuckenberg is convinced that if Putin prevails in Ukraine, then there will be no stopping him in the future and no limits to his ambitions.
“Tyrants become titans, they don’t stop expanding,” he said. “You know, their ambition never stops. The only thing that can check it is equal determination.”
“Ukraine ultimately is the front line of what is a revisionist power driving essentially to end the Western order, which is sovereign territories, international boundaries, respect for diplomats,” he added. “They’ve broken all the rules. And if there’s no penalty for breaking the rules except victory, then what deterrent remains, I would ask? And the answer is none.”
Trump has claimed he would bring the war in Ukraine to an end within 24 hours, while Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban said the Republican presidential nominee will not “give a penny” to Kyiv if he is voted into the White House.
Maga republicans also argue that the US can ill afford to fund a faraway war that has little relevance for America and that the money would be better spent on funding domestic policies.
Yet the US spending on Ukraine is a fraction of what it was on other conflicts, such as Vietnam and Iraq.
During Vietnam, the average annual cost of the war was around one percent of GDP, while in Iraq it was roughly 0.7 percent. Current US spending on Ukraine comes in at 0.2 percent of GDP.
Without US military support, Ukraine will almost certainly face a crushing defeat that will only usher in further instability.
Mr Stuckenberg believes history is repeating itself and that US isolationists are in danger of failing to learn the lessons of the past.
“It’s as if humanity is experiencing deja vu, different actors, certainly different dynamics, but we’re living through almost the run up to World War II, where we see efforts of appeasement, trying to keep stability and keep calm, but all it is doing is serving to embolden (dictators) and to make things more unstable,” he said.
“So that’s the reality of it. The reality of international politics is that power is what speaks and so I think that we have to get back to that truth.”
He added: “There may have to be a new status quo, but abandoning Ukraine and allowing them to collapse under tyranny, in my book, that’s not an option.”
