Ukraine is not 1938

I keep a tote bag from a 2017 Brussels conference that I should have thrown away, and I use it for groceries at the Harris Teeter on Glebe, which feels like the correct demotion. I spent eight years as a civilian in a building full of flags, writing language that had to survive translation into 24 official moods. Then I left, because I had a child, and because I was starting to hear myself say "the Alliance" the way priests say "the Church," and I did not like that sound in my kitchen.

Ukraine did not make me a hawk. I was already the kind of person who thinks Article 5 is a real sentence. Ukraine made me a person who flinches when a senator says "endless" the way a teenager says "whatever." Wars end. They end when one side is exhausted or destroyed or both. "Endless" is a complaint about the news cycle.

I am also so tired of 1938. Munich is a real lesson. It is not a sticker you put on every map. 2003 is a real lesson too. If your foreign policy is only one year, you are not a strategist, you are a collector. I have sat in rooms where people did the 1938 version with a straight face while the logistics officer tried to tell them about 155mm production. The shells do not care about your seminar.

The exhaustion on the American right is not fake. I have family in Lyon who think Americans are children, and then I come home and I listen to a man in Ohio who lost a plant and does not want his taxes to be a blank check for a war he cannot find on a globe he doesn't own. That man is not a Kremlin asset. He is a man who was lied to about Iraq and can smell a sermon. If you want his vote for aid, do not sermon him. Show him the production line in Pennsylvania and the reason the line matters. He might still say no. At least you will have been an adult.

The exhaustion on the left is different and I like it less, because it often arrives dressed as compassion for "both peoples" in a way that flattens a tank column into a misunderstanding. I have translated enough statements from the other side of this war to know a colonial project when it is spoken in the old imperial key. You can want negotiations and still admit one party invaded. That should not be a spicy take. It is spicy now, which is how I know the culture has gotten stupid.

NATO is a bureaucracy. I say that with affection and spite. It is slow. It is vain. It is also the reason I could take a train as a kid from France to Germany without the story my grandmother told about a border that meant graves. Americans who want to leave NATO because the Europeans are cheap are not entirely wrong about the cheapness. Germany's timeline on this has been a master class in delay as identity. The answer to cheap allies is not to hand Moscow a discount. The answer is to be rude in meetings. I have been rude in meetings. It works more than a press release.

Could Ukraine have been less corrupt. Yes. Could Zelensky's government be less fond of a poster. Yes. Could the U.S. have been clearer about ends — borders, NATO, frozen assets — instead of sliding adjectives. Yes. I will not pretend a blank check is a strategy. Strategy is a paragraph with a verb. We have had moods.

I live in Arlington, which means I live among people who think a clearance is a personality. It is not. After work, the same people argue at soccer about whether we are "doing enough." Enough for whom. My next-door neighbor lost a nephew in a training accident, not even in theater, and she still thinks the aid is right. The guy two doors down thinks we should have cut a deal in 2022 and saved the architecture. I like both of them. I trust the neighbor more on the question of whether Ukraine is allowed to exist. Existence is the floor. Everything else is furniture.

Europe will not replace the United States this year. Anyone selling that is selling a brochure. Europe might replace a fraction if it is scared enough. Fear is a teacher. Bucha was a teacher. Some students still talk during the lesson.

What I want, and this is the unfashionable middle that gets you uninvited from panels, is a policy that funds the war Ukraine is actually fighting, not the war Twitter is fighting, and that sets a production floor at home so we are not emptying magazines we might need in a worse Pacific week. That is not "pro-war." That is inventory. I have seen empty. Empty is a feeling in a warehouse that becomes a feeling in a trench.

If you are done, be done in a way that does not pretend you were never in. Don't rewrite February 2022 as a CIA cartoon. Don't rewrite Ukrainians as American puppets. They asked for weapons. We argued about our souls. Our souls are not the customer.

I still have nightmares about a particular briefing slide, which is pathetic, a slide, but the slide had a number of civilians and a photograph I shouldn't describe. 1938 does not help me with that slide. 2003 does not either. What helps is a boring bill that ships the thing, and a Europe that pays, and an American public that is told the truth about duration instead of being fed a victory weekend.

I am not exhilarated. I am not a resistance profile. I am a woman who used to write the nouns and now writes grocery lists, and I can still tell when a country is trying to leave a room without being seen. You will be seen. Moscow will see you. Taipei will see you. The kid in my daughter's class whose dad is Polish will see you. Then you can explain 1938 to him, or 2003, whichever sticker is on your bottle that week.

I put the tote bag under the sink last Sunday. It still exists. So does the Alliance. Existence is not the same as a pulse. For the pulse, you have to mean the nouns you used to make me draft.