Ukraine aid deadlock could threaten peace in Europe. Does Congress care?

These are desperate, potentially decisive, days in Ukraine’s battle against Vladimir Putin’s invasion forces.

Decisive days on Capitol Hill, too, where House Speaker Mike Johnson this week has been deciding how – and whether – to finesse opposition from hard-line Republican colleagues and enable a floor vote to unblock $60 billion in U.S. military aid for Kyiv.

Urgent though the aid package is – a top U.S. general told Congress Wednesday that Russian forces now had nearly 10 times as many artillery shells as the Ukrainians – Ukraine’s fate will ultimately rest on more than the House vote.

Kyiv must win a more fundamental argument: that Ukraine’s fate matters, that allowing Mr. Putin to subjugate the neighboring state he attacked 26 months ago would entail even graver implications; that it would threaten security across Europe, and America’s interests as well.

This is a message being delivered with increasing urgency by Ukraine’s European allies, most recently during a U.S. visit this week by British Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

Their main audience is not President Joe Biden. He shares their conviction that allowing Mr. Putin to prevail would embolden him to threaten other European states, and risk Washington’s credibility with both allies and rivals, including China.

Their hope is to sway Representative Johnson, prominent House acolytes of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and Mr. Trump himself.

They are striving to decouple the issue of Ukraine aid from America’s bitter election-year political battles.

Susan Walsh/AP

House Speaker Mike Johnson must decide whether to bring to the floor of the House a stalled vote on $60 billion of critically needed aid for Ukraine.

And their core message is the need to learn from Europe’s own recent history: above all, from the two world wars that engulfed the Continent in the last century.

European leaders see unsettling historical parallels with the Ukraine war.

With Russian forces reinforced and rearmed, Ukraine’s are now locked into a punishing, World War I-style standoff, as opposing armies engage in trench warfare – the front lines barely moving – and suffer attritional carnage.

While Ukraine rebuffed Mr. Putin’s initial attack in February 2022, and made major advances a few months later, a counteroffensive last year failed to make major gains.

With U.S. aid stalled in Congress, Kyiv’s troops are increasingly outnumbered, and outgunned. As General Christopher Cavoli told the House Armed Services Committee, “the side that can’t shoot back, loses.”

Still, the most haunting historical echo, for the Europeans, is the Second World War, and the consequences of not acting against a dictator’s military threat before it proved too late.

That is a message conveyed with particular passion in recent weeks by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. It was Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland that began the Second World War.

A year earlier, Adolf Hitler had threatened to invade Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German population – making an argument much like the one Mr. Putin has advanced for occupying largely Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine.

Britain and France chose to give Hitler a diplomatic green light, hoping that he would sate his territorial ambitions in Czechoslovakia and that a wider war could be avoided.

Annegret Hilse/Reuters

Some world leaders, including (from left) French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, fear a Russian victory in Ukraine would endanger European security.

Visiting Washington last month, Mr. Tusk said he hoped House Speaker Johnson would understand the wider implications of abandoning Ukraine. That issue, he said, was more than just “some political skirmish that matters on the American political scene.”

On returning home, he made a similar historical argument to European reporters. “If we cannot support Ukraine with enough equipment and ammunition, if Ukraine loses, no one in Europe will be able to feel safe,” he warned.

Britain’s Mr. Cameron reinforced that message bluntly in Washington this week. “Future generations,” he predicted “may look back at us and say, ‘Did we do enough when this country was invaded by a dictator trying to redraw boundaries by force? Did we learn the lessons from history?’”

And before his talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he traveled to Florida to meet Mr. Trump and make the argument for a sustained Western commitment to Ukraine.

There is little sign, so far, that his or other European politicians’ efforts have yielded results.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump ally leading the opposition to Ukraine funding, responded to a similar Cameron warning a few weeks ago with an invective-filled social media post and a vow not to be “bullied” into supporting Kyiv.

And the British foreign secretary was unsuccessful in efforts to arrange a meeting with Mr. Johnson during this week’s visit.

The Europeans’ immediate hope is that he will unblock the current funding package.

Still, they know that Ukraine is going to need longer-term support to hold off Russian forces.

And Mr. Cameron may be especially haunted by another World War II parallel – between the arguments advanced today by Trump allies such as Representative Greene, and the policy of appeasement that Britain followed until war broke out.

Days before the then-British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, met Hitler and acquiesced to his territorial claims in Sudetenland, he went on national radio to calm growing concerns of a war that might draw in Britain.

He dismissed Hitler’s invasion of Sudetenland as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

It soon became very much more than that.