US Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised Ukrainian soldiers for their brave resistance to the enemy but emphasized that without US assistance, including the Trump administration, Ukraine wouldn’t exist. (“If it were not for the assistance of the United States, including under the Trump administration, there would be no Ukraine right now…”).
This statement is a classic example of a counterfactual conditional judgment (or counterfactual) in linguistics, logic, and the philosophy of history. In political science, such statements are classified as “alternative history” or “virtual history.”
But then let’s be honest and follow this logic to the end – Ukraine would have remained, and if it had capitulated, it would have existed for some historical time with a puppet Russian government, with millions of Ukrainians migrating to Europe, Canada, and the USA, and continued war in Europe and occupation of Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, attacks on Poland, Romania, and Finland (I think Slovakia and Hungary would not have been left out)…
Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would have been forced into the occupiers’ army (as is currently happening in occupied territories) — and this whole armada could have gone even further…
And where is the guarantee that then the Russians would not have returned strategic nuclear weapons to Ukraine’s territory and, with their current approaches to using threats of weapons of mass destruction and relative economic and management weakness, would not have made some terrible mistake and tried to test Washington’s response capability.
And then not only would Ukraine have ceased to exist, but so would the USA, as well as Russia itself…
Therefore, it’s better not to use any conditional forms of judgment but rather to bravely make history on its right side, as Ukrainians are doing now.
