“Franklin” and Ukraine
What the recent limited series teaches us about the nature of the fight for freedom around the world.
Watching the limited series Franklin as it streamed weekly on Apple TV+ in April 2024, it proved impossible to ignore the uncanny parallels between the story playing out on our television screens and events playing out in the real world. As founding father Benjamin Franklin—played with curmudgeonly charm by Michael Douglas—cadges and cajoles his way through the French court, he and his supporters encounter arguments against material help for the fledgling United States that almost exactly echoed contemporary claims made by skeptics and opponents of continued American military aid to Ukraine. It’s an eerie synchronicity that’s threaded throughout the series—one that shows just how much the cause of freedom in any one nation depends on help from others.
The correspondence between dramatized history and present-day geopolitics leaps out from the very beginning of the series. Laying out the background for the title character’s diplomatic mission to France, Franklin’s title cards mince no words: “the American rebellion against Great Britain is close to collapse” and “defeat seems certain” without outside help. Much the same could have been said about Ukraine’s military position at the time the first three episodes of Franklin streamed on April 12. Bludgeoned by Russian artillery and starved of basic military supplies, Ukrainian troops retreated from towns and villages all along the front as Congress dithered and delayed over an aid package requested by President Biden nearly six months earlier.
As Franklin and his French allies—most notably the Comte de Vergennes, foreign and later chief minister to King Louis XVI—makes his case for an alliance and material assistance to the United States, skeptical court officials recite a litany of reasons not to help America win its independence. Wish as they might to give their bitter rival a bloody nose, many French officials believe the United States has no chance for victory over Great Britain; the Americans can’t possibly win and are in any event unworthy of French support. Franklin correctly notes the catch-22: the United States can’t win without French help, but France won’t help the United States because, in the estimation of French officials, the Americans can’t win.
With the unofficial help of Vergennes and other sympathetic French mandarins, Franklin manages to scrounge up an initial tranche of military aid for the Continental Army. But the fortunes of war weigh more heavily on the deliberations of the French court: when Philadelphia falls to British troops, Franklin endures merciless ridicule as the representative of an almost certainly doomed enterprise. But a witty riposte to the news at a high society dinner keeps both his own mission and America’s cause alive in elite French circles. A major American victory at Saratoga changes the equation dramatically, proving that the United States can indeed win—or at least that Britain can lose.
Nearly identical arguments have been made about Ukraine’s war effort, by both respectable analysts and cranks alike. Even before the war, sober voices cautioned (incorrectly, it turned out) that American and European weapons wouldn’t help Ukraine deter or fight off a Russian invasion; these voices have since continued to assert that Ukraine can’t win, often citing Ukrainian battlefield setbacks. These analyses apparently have purchase with at least some Biden administration officials, who have expressed skepticismabout Ukraine’s prospects—all off the record, of course. Outright opponents of American assistance like Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) go only a little further when they claim “basic mathematical realities” rule out a Ukrainian victory.
In Franklin, likewise, French officials repeatedly cite exorbitant financial costs as reason not to support America’s fight for independence. Still in arrears from its last war against Britain, these officials (among them finance minister Jacques Necker) argued that funding the American war effort would only bankrupt the French court. They weren’t exactly wrong, at least in Franklin’s telling: in a neat little synecdoche at the end of the series, we see that Franklin’s stay effectively wiped out the aristocratic French family that hosted him during his nearly decade-long diplomatic mission. Still, these concerns obviously didn’t keep Franklin from successfully persuading French officials to provide America with financial support.
Today, those opposed to aid to Ukraine also like to cite the allegedly high cost to American taxpayers of such assistance; this money would be better spent at home, they say, or not at all. Others complain that the United States should be hoarding resources for a potential war with China over Taiwan, not sending weapons to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression. In reality, though, American aid to Ukraine has amounted to one-fourth of one percent of the nation’s annual economic output, or one-fortieth of the amount of aid the United States provided its World War II allies through the Lend-Lease program.
As Franklin draws to a close, American and French diplomats separately plot to renege on their mutual commitment not to negotiate a separate peace with Britain. Joined by an irascible, hostile, and perpetually exasperated John Adams (portrayed with irritating appeal by Eddie Marsan) and the aristocratic slaveholder John Jay, Franklin reluctantly helps hammer out a deal with London that secures American independence but leaves his French interlocutors in the lurch. The war aims of the two allies weren’t incompatible, but neither were they identical: France wanted to bleed Britain and avenge the losses it suffered in the French and Indian War, while America sought both recognition of its own independence and with territorial concessions from the British crown.
Something similar has become apparent in the war in Ukraine, where Kyiv seeks to expel Russian troops from all of its territory—especially Crimea—while the United States does not seem to know exactly what it wants to achieve in Ukraine. President Biden and other high-level American officials constantly pledge to support Ukraine “as long as it takes” as they apparently seek to avoid escalation with Moscow above all else. American officials objecting to Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian oil refineries and until recently refused to allow Ukraine use American-supplied arms to carry out strikes across the border. These unproductive tensions between Kyiv and Washington will persist so long as the United States fails to articulate positive American war aims or even a rudimentary theory of victory.
The strange correlation between the history dramatized in Franklin and current events also illuminates a larger and more important truth: the quest for freedom in one nation has always depended on the assistance and sympathies of others. Without powerful and wealthy benefactors overseas willing to risk money and materiel on its behalf, the cause of freedom will tend to falter if not outright fail in one country after another—snuffed out by either a domestic tyrant or a foreign aggressor. It’s a thread woven across and throughout American history, from French assistance to America’s own revolution to American aid for the allies in both world wars and now our ongoing help for Ukraine’s fight for independence from the Kremlin.
There are, of course, ironies here of which Franklin remains well aware: an absolutist monarchy backing the cause of an embryonic American republic, as well as the fact that this republic that loudly proclaims its affinity for liberty retains the vile institution of slavery. (Franklin himself acknowledges the problem, while Adams displays palpable disgust and discomfort when discussing the issue with the oblivious and cavalier slaveholder Jay—whose own enslaved manservant escapes while in France.) But these sorts of ironies are laced through history and intrinsic to it; America’s arsenal of democracy provided war-winning aid to Stalin’s Soviet Union during World War II, for instance. The defense of liberty often makes for awkward bedfellows.
Franklin also shows why Ukraine matters so much to the United States and its fellow democracies around the world—not just in Europe but Asia as well. The war in Ukraine doesn’t simply involve repelling unprovoked aggression by one nation against another, nor is it just a chance to give the Kremlin a bloody nose at a relatively low cost. It raises the more fundamental question of whether or not freedom remains an ideal worth defending, not just in one nation but in any nation. It’s a question that can’t be answered by cynical calculations of self-proclaimed realists or the isolationist impulse to retreat from the world, one that calls on Americans and citizens of other democracies to take a more expansive view of their own national interests.
There’s much else to commend Franklin besides. It’s a well-crafted, well-cast, and well-acted period piece, with Douglas and Marsan giving delightful turns as the title character and Adams. The machinations at the French court—diplomatic, political, and romantic alike—are entertaining enough, even if they ultimately don’t prove quite as compelling as the characters involved. Franklin also explores or touches on a number of other themes and notions, ranging from the incipient cult of celebrity that surrounded Franklin to the meaning and purpose of American democracy.
Above all, Franklin shows just how fragile the cause of freedom has always been—and still remains. As Douglas put it in promotional material for the show, “You become very patriotic when you do a show like this. Hopefully it’ll remind us how proud we are to be a democracy… It’s an ideal that we have to support and desperately protect.”
Franklin couldn’t have said it better itself.