When national leaders run into trouble at home they sometimes look abroad. They look beyond their own border for an opportunity to restore their tattered reputation.
This is not to say they necessarily fabricate these opportunities. Not at all. Winston Churchill did it and with, to understate it, good reason. He was a marginalized member of parliament in the mid-1930s when he started regularly to call out Adolf Hitler. To warn his British brethren that Hitler was going to pose an unparalleled threat not just to Great Britain but to all Europe.
For his troubles Churchill continued to be marginalized – and his warnings ignored – until he wasn’t. Until 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and Churchill was seen, almost overnight, as the only leader who might save Britain from defeat at the hands of the Nazis.
To compare Winston Churchill taking a stand against Adolf Hitler to Boris Johnson taking a stand against Vladimir Putin might seem silly. But not so fast. Depends on how you look at it.
Johnson has had a hard time of it almost since he became prime minister. He was forced by circumstance to deal with Brexit and Covid, and with a sharply shrinking economy, and with the first major war on European soil since the end of World War II.
He also ran into trouble of his own making – the scandal known to all in the know as “Partygate.” This was of course a self-inflicted wound. Johnson bringing on himself the wrath of his constituents for permitting and, sometimes, participating in, partying at 10 Downing Street while the rest of the United Kingdom was banned (during the pandemic) even from seeing family and friends.
So, what might a leader in Johnson’s position do? Of course, look abroad. Which is precisely what Prime Minister Boris Johnson is doing and has done for months. He has been at the forefront of European leaders supporting – by word and deed – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Johnson has visited Kyiv twice. Johnson has provided Ukraine with extensive military support and is promising more. Johnson has promised other kinds of help such as training tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. Johnson has explored with Zelensky how to end or circumvent Russia’s Black Sea naval blockade, which is precluding the export of massive amounts of grain to places that desperately need it. And Johnson has promised to do everything in his power to “expel the aggressor from Ukraine.”
Given his unpopularity at home, even among members of his own party, small wonder that Johnson has looked elsewhere for love. And small wonder that he found it in Ukraine where Zelensky is obviously grateful for all his attention and support, and where the people regard him, according to the New York Times, as “something of a folk hero.”
Still, the fact that Johnson is a leader in search of a cause and a constituency, does not mean he necessarily is misguided. It’s possible if not probable that on this issue – defending Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked, criminal aggression – he, more than any other single Western leader, is on the right side of history.