Much like FDR, Biden faces a tough choice — do more to stop a vicious

On Dec. 29, 1940, nearly a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would bring the United States into World War II, millions of Americans turned on their radios to hear President Franklin D. Roosevelt explain why the U.S. should support Europe’s forces of freedom against Adolf Hitler’s fascist advance.

Americans at the time were deeply uncertain about whether they should be involved at all in the distant European war, though they were aghast at the reports of its horrors. Roosevelt used one of his famous fireside chats to convince them that the U.S. should rapidly and decisively deploy its vast industrial capacity on freedom’s behalf.

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” he said in the firm, familiar voice that Americans had let into their living rooms for most of that decade. “We have furnished the British great material support and we will furnish far more in the future. There will be no ‘bottlenecks’ in our determination to aid Great Britain. No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination by threats of how they will construe that determination.”

Eighty years later, President Joe Biden must decide just how far he is willing to go in deploying an updated “great arsenal of democracy” to empower Ukraine to defeat today’s European tyrant, Russian President Vladimir Putin. What Biden’s administration and its partners have done thus far through sanctions and military support has been remarkable, but it remains insufficient as Putin escalates his offensive on Ukraine’s east and south.

As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visit Kyiv today, it is no longer enough for President Biden to argue that the U.S. will defend every inch of NATO territory, as required by all 29 alliance members under Article 5 of its founding treaty. Though that commitment is commendable and crucial for alliance members bordering Russia and Ukraine, it has been construed by Putin as open game on Ukraine itself, which is not a NATO member.

It’s now time for President Biden to commit Americans and, to the extent possible, the democratic world more largely to defending Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, and freedom. That means not only political support and rhetorical common cause but sufficient intelligence and military assistance not just to stalemate Putin but to defeat his ongoing advance. Anything less would be contrary to President Biden’s own stated convictions. 

As President Biden himself said at his State of the Union address this year, “Throughout our history, we’ve learned this lesson – when dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more…