Ron DeSantis’s statement on assistance to Ukraine is very disappointing, and likely to stop any momentum that his campaign had achieved up to now.

In a technical sense, it was correct for him to say that the war in Ukraine is not one of our country’s “vital national interests.” If it were, we would be sending troops instead of just weapons. But the most serious mistake in his statement was to belittle the events now ongoing in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” It is not, and the Governor’s failure to grasp this fundamental point is a major error.

What is going on in Ukraine today is a not a “territorial dispute.” It is a Russian invasion of another sovereign nation, which—if not opposed by the United States and other countries—will enable Vladimir Putin to continue his effort to re-assemble the Soviet Union, the loss of which he has cast as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.

If we won’t help Ukraine now, is there anyone we will plausibly help in the future? Poland? Finland? Slovakia? And if we show ourselves now as unwilling to aid these countries in Russia’s path, what lesson will China learn as it considers the invasion of Taiwan? There is certainly no action the United States could take today which would further endanger Taiwan than to show Xi Jinping that we don’t care enough about Europe even to send the necessary arms to a country fighting for its survival.

After everything Ronald Reagan did—successfully—to break down the Soviet Union through unrelenting economic and military pressure, are we really going to watch helplessly as Mr. Putin tries, with China’s support, to reassemble the same threat in Europe?

Worse still, is Governor DeSantis’s failure to grasp the moral issues involved in the Ukraine war—the atrocities committed by Russian forces against civilians in Ukraine; the wanton destruction of Ukrainian cities with no military purpose except to beat down Ukrainian morale; and the stealing of Ukrainian children and handing them over to Russians parents. These are war crimes that the United States should not forget, just as it did not forget—through the trials in Nuremburg—the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. If we condone these things by belittling them as part of a “territorial dispute,” we will be disgraced as a nation.

None of these things require us to enter the war with troops, but if the United States fails to uphold values that define us, we will have lost the moral right to lead the rest of the world in the future.

Peter J. Wallison is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. He was the General Counsel of the Treasury and White House Counsel in the Reagan administration

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