The $40 billion bill to aid Ukraine, now headed to President Biden for his signature, has become a populist piñata. It allegedly is keeping us from solving the baby-formula shortage, enforcing the southern border, and confronting China, and is fiscally ruinous on top of it all.
There is no doubt that the bill is hugely expensive. Together with the $13 billion in aid that Congress passed in March, the assistance to Ukraine approved by Congress this year nearly equals the budget of the U.S. State Department. And that’s just this fiscal year, with more likely to come if the war continues.
It’d obviously be better if this package were paid for, and all the unspent Covid aid to public schools — more than $100 billion — would be an obvious place to get the funding. Of course, that is not going to happen so long as Democrats control Congress and the White House. So the question is whether this particular tranche of deficit spending is in the national interest, and the answer is unquestionably “yes.” (Most of the populists now complaining about the Ukraine spending, by the way, didn’t make a peep when the U.S. government ran a nearly $1 trillion deficit at a time of peace and prosperity under President Trump.)
Vladimir Putin is waging a war of aggression that we should want to fail. If he were to succeed, he’d be in a better position to threaten NATO countries. That would necessitate an even larger NATO military build-up in response. In the worst case, Putin could precipitate a wider war, and, in that scenario, the gargantuan fiscal cost would be the least of our problems. More broadly, Putin is in a de facto alliance with China and Iran to end the global preeminence of the U.S.-led Western world.
It’d be nice if Ukraine had, on its own, the materiel to beat back its much larger invader, but it doesn’t. That said, it is completely committed to the fight and is waging it without any soldiers from the West having to put themselves directly in harm’s way. Supplying Ukraine with the Javelins and other arms and support it needs to prevail is a bargain given the strategic defeat it may inflict on an adversary of the United States.
A significant portion of the aid package shouldn’t be controversial. Nearly a third of it goes to replenishing the U.S. stock of weapons we’ve already given to Ukraine on an emergency basis and funding U.S. troop deployments to NATO countries. Both of these initiatives were a matter of widespread consensus when they were undertaken — and we should be willing to pay for them.
There have been complaints about the Europeans not doing more. But there are certain high-tech weapons that only we can supply, and we should want Ukraine and other NATO countries to buy U.S. equipment (there is financing both for Ukraine and neighboring countries that have been funneling it weapons to buy more from us). It brings those countries closer to the U.S. military, and makes NATO more militarily efficient and capable.
We should be calling on the Europeans, though, to do more to directly support the Ukrainian government, which they can do as easily as we can. There’s about $9 billion for this in the bill. Russia may be flailing militarily, but it still has been able to exact a catastrophic economic price on Ukraine. We understand the impulse to only supply Ukraine with weapons, but there will be no one to direct the fight if the Ukrainian government collapses under the weight of Russia’s campaign of economic devastation.
Food aid to Ukraine and other countries affected by war-related shortages, another $5 billion in the bill, is also an area where we should be lobbying our allies around the world to pony up.
As for the Ukraine bill distracting us from dealing with other problems, this is a preposterous argument. We could have provided zero aid to Ukraine and watched Russia roll over it, and the baby-formula shortage and the border crisis would still be with us — Biden is failing in these areas because of his incompetence or misbegotten ideological preferences, not because we are sending too many Javelins to Kyiv.
China, too, is a canard in this debate. Surely, it is calculating its next move with regard to Taiwan based in part on what happens in Ukraine. To the extent that Ukraine can defend itself and the West can demonstrate unity and resolve, it sends a very important cautionary message to Beijing.
Our hope should be that Ukraine can, with our help, push back the Russian offensive in the east and south and, if not prevail completely, at least force Putin into a diplomatic deal far short of anything he had hoped for. That’s a matter for another day, though. For now, Ukraine deserves all the assistance we can reasonably supply it, and we shouldn’t let flak thrown up by a small number of Republicans — only eleven voted against the bill in the Senate — distract us from our clear strategic interest.