Christian Murdock / The Gazette via AP, File
A soldier walks past a line of M1 Abrams tanks, Nov. 29, 2016, at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colo. In what would be a reversal, the Biden administration is poised to approve sending M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, U.S. officials said Tuesday, as international reluctance toward sending tanks to the battlefront against the Russians begins to erode. The decision could be announced as soon as Wednesday though it could take months or years for the tanks to be delivered.
Sunday, Jan. 29, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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The tanks are coming, the tanks are coming.
With apologies to those brave men and women of the United States’ armed forces during World War II — and, of course, the songwriters who wrote a similarly sounding patriotic song for a movie of the same name — it should not be lost on anybody that history has been in danger of repeating itself.
But, this time, we seem to have learned from our mistakes. Which is exactly the way George Santyana envisioned the proper use of history. (With a carve out for Florida)!
The announcement by President Joe Biden this past week that both the United States and Germany and other NATO allies would be sending tanks and related heavy fighting equipment to Ukraine over the next few months had to come as welcome news to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Invoking the same kind of elation that permeated the movie that celebrated America’s entry into World War II.
The history lesson to be learned, of course, is that timing is almost everything. Eighty some years ago, America dilly-dallied around, unable or refusing to make the hard-yet-correct decision to join the Allies in what became a successful effort to stop Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to force President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s hand, which — as much as he may have wanted to help out earlier — couldn’t pull the trigger, if you will.
It is difficult to determine with precision how many murders at the hands of the Nazis could have been avoided had the U.S. made the decision to go to war a year or two earlier. That is the history lesson.
It has taken what seems like forever for the United States to finally make this decision in concert with our allies, even though Ukraine has begged from the beginning for the capability it needs to fight back against Vladimir Putin’s Russian army.
But, learn from the past we did. So President Biden’s diplomatic achievement in getting Germany to lead with its Leopard 2 main battle tanks well ahead of our own delivery of Abrams tanks later this summer was an acknowledgement that he was doing the right thing in the right way.
Just like all of Europe was celebrating the Yanks coming to their defense 80 years ago, this most recent decision to arm-up Ukraine with the capability to not only defend itself but to repel the invader is a reason to celebrate the fact that our country, the United States of America, still stands for something.
And also, that NATO, which is composed of the United States and those European countries devastated during World War II and determined to never again fail to fight those who would oppress them, has learned its own lessons from that dark period of history.
I don’t know if the tanks are sufficient — my own training as a tank commander didn’t include the threats of today’s modern warfare — but I suspect that the message they will bring with them to the battlefield will be decisively clear: Both Europe and the United States stand together, committed to help a country beleaguered by the Russian Bear and determined to help in its fight for survival.
What remains to be seen is how much of history’s lessons will be absorbed by other countries now doing their best to stay out of the fray, immaculately uncontaminated by the hard decisions required of civilized nations.
History has proven that conflagrations on a world scale usually leave no one unattended.
In the meantime, the tanks are going to Ukraine. And I hope they get there with the thanks of every freedom-loving person on the planet.
The Ukrainians are fighting for their own survival against a larger backdrop that could portend the planet’s next big war.
We should be grateful that America has leaders today who remain steady and informed because none of us should want the history of Europe to repeat itself.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.
