Volodymyr Zelensky and George Washington: The Unkillable American Fantasia
President Zelensky’s powerful leadership of Ukraine’s courageous resistance to Russia’s invasion has sparked intense admiration for Zelensky, both as a somewhat unlikely warrior, now stepping up, and as a national, even global hero of democracy. The admiration is worldwide and, it seems obvious to me, well-deserved.
But because I try to stick with making my (self-) appointed rounds, I’ve been struck, and not in a good way, by the barrage of favorable comparisons, made by people in the U.S., of Zelensky’s leadership in Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression with George Washington’s leadership in the War of Independence. It’s as if Americans can imagine no higher compliment than to call some action or person or event we admire a new manifestation of something we admire about ourselves, especially something involved in the nation’s founding.
No, it’s not “as if”—that’s just what we do. And maybe everybody else does something like it.
When Americans do it, though, the cultural reflex or learned response or whatever it is reveals something about us, and what it reveals might be worth considering during this crisis. “You remind me of a young me” would be unbearably patronizing coming from any country, even worth a laugh, but the U.S. isn’t just any country. It’s the leading nation that Zelensky must appeal to, with everything he’s got, for as much help as he can possibly get—that’s his job—and as he made clear today, in his address from Kyiv to Congress, one thing he’s asking for is a “no-fly zone,” enforced ultimately by the U.S., in which NATO forces would directly engage any Russian planes over Ukraine.
“Is that too much to ask?” he said.
Knowing that the answer, at least for now, is “Yes,” he then offered us an alternative, as he put it, whereby the U.S. supplies various weapons systems.
I don’t know to what extent U.S. policy is likely to be guided by popular ideas about the supposedly essential nature of the U.S., as supposedly revealed by its supposed history. But I’m getting the feeling Zelensky thinks such ideas might have some impact, and if so, he’s yet again no fool.
In the famous phone call with President Trump, in which he was desperately trying to get Trump to lift a hold on all-important defense funds—the hold was a protection-racket move, using presidential power over foreign power to get Zelensky to aid Trump in the lowest of personal errands—Zelensky showed himself well up on the potential benefits of flattering a too-powerful narcissist.
Today, in his address to Congress, he invoked Martin Luther King and mentioned Pearl Harbor.
Also, with reference to greatness in U.S. presidents:
I remember the national memorial Mount Rushmore, the faces of your prominent presidents, those who laid the foundation of the United States of America. Democracy, independence, freedom.
Just in case the current president might want to envision his face, too, carved gigantically on a mountain, even if not literally. And one of the great stone faces on that truly bizarre idea of a monument is of course that of our first president.