David French’s Zelensky Hero Worship Distorts Reality

Since the start of NATO’s proxy war against Russia, a fierce determination has animated the political and opinion elites in both Europe and the United States to elevate public perceptions of Ukraine’s strategic importance and moral standing. That attempted elevation sometimes has reached extreme, even laughable, levels. Until last month, pundits Marc Thiessen and Bernard-Henri Lévy deserved the joint prize for producing the most fawning, unrealistic pro-Ukraine analyses that ignored even the most basic realities about European or global geopolitics. 

In a Washington Post op-ed from April 2022, Thiessen, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and later a senior fellow at the ultra-hawkish American Enterprise Institute, flatly asserted, “Not only should Russia be kicked off the [United Nations] Security Council, its seat should be given to Ukraine.” Lévy’s compelling entry in the sycophantic Ukraine-fan-club sweepstakes was a March 2023 article in the Wall Street Journal that made the exact same proposal.

Granted, they were not the only Western analysts to argue that Russia should not have automatically inherited the Soviet Union’s permanent seat on the Security Council upon the USSR’s demise. However, their assertion that Ukraine, a chronically corrupt, poverty-stricken midsize country, should possess such a geostrategic prize was novel and downright bizarre.

Leaving aside the obvious negative ramifications of ousting from the UN organ the country possessing the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, there were several dozen countries that had a more credible claim than Ukraine does for a permanent Security Council seat with its crucial veto power. India, Japan, Brazil, Germany, and Pakistan were obvious names on any list based on either economic or military considerations.

Incredibly, a new piece by New York Times columnist David French has now eclipsed Thiessen’s and Lévy’s hoary contributions in terms of overstating both Ukraine’s capabilities and its overall strategic relevance. Moreover, French truly distinguishes himself even among pro-Ukraine commentators by wildly exaggerating Kiev’s consistency in the arena of moral standards.

The New York Times columnist depicts Ukraine as belonging in the ranks of the world’s great powers on pragmatic as well as ethical considerations. That is true militarily, in French’s view, not only because of Ukraine’s surprising tenacity in the face of Moscow’s brutal aggression, but because of the country’s tangible achievements in drone warfare and because it might possess “the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the Western world.”

According to French, Kiev’s surprising battlefield resilience against Russia and its overall military innovation merely scratches the surface of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky’s achievements. Zelensky also “is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.” Indeed, the headline of French’s piece asserts that Zelensky is now “the New Leader of the Free World.”

The type of hero worship of Ukraine and its leader that French, Thiessen, Lévy, and others have expressed deserves disdain from any analyst displaying even a scintilla of realism. Kiev’s military achievements have been overwhelmingly the result of extensive outside assistance. The United States and its European allies have poured several hundred billion dollars into Ukraine—despite ample evidence of the regime’s authoritarianism and corruption. The $105 billion “loan” that the European Union approved in April is merely the latest installment of the West’s largesse. NATO also has given the Ukrainian military ever more sophisticated and deadly armaments and assisted Kiev’s forces with crucial, operational intelligence data.

Ukraine’s Western cheerleaders habitually ignore such troublesome details. They also conveniently ignore the many abuses that Zelensky’s regime has committed over the years. French exceeds even Lévy and Thiessen in that respect. He wistfully muses that for the first time in his adult life, “the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either. It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.” Such language conveys juvenile adoration, not sophisticated, nuanced, professional policy analysis.

It is a defensible position to argue that the Kremlin was the aggressor in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine—even though such a stance greatly oversimplifies a complex set of issues. It is certainly a defensible position to argue that Zelensky is not as odious a political actor as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. It may even be a defensible position to argue that failing to thwart Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine would set a dangerous regional and global precedent.

However, it is not a defensible position to contend that Ukraine is important, much less vital, to America’s security and well-being—the main question on which U.S. leaders should reflect. And it is utterly indefensible to argue that Volodymyr Zelensky is rightfully the moral leader of the “free world” or that the “moral and strategic heart of liberal democracy” beats in Kiev. Indeed, that argument is an obscene distortion of reality.