Putin has made his government, and therefore the Russian state, an implacable adversary of the United States and its allies.
Both necessity and opportunity fully justify assisting Ukraine with sanctions, arms, and money.
A healthy debate is beginning, both in and out of Congress, about America’s support for Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion. It forces us to ask, and answer, fundamental questions that the Biden administration has yet to address in any serious way.
Why are we helping the Ukrainians? Why should we care who wins this war?
Here’s my response: Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian state has a history of aggression against the homeland, allies, and vital interests of the United States. America should therefore assist Ukraine: first, to prevent Russia from expanding its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and second, to impose costs on the Russian state that will weaken both the will and the capacity of its leaders to commit further aggression in the future.
Readers who want a thorough review of the threat from Russia can see this report from the Heritage Foundation or this analysis from the director of national intelligence during the Trump administration. The broad takeaway is that the Putin regime has defined and pursued Russian national objectives in ways that have made that country an adversary of the United States.
For two decades Russia has engaged in massive and continuous cyber incursions on government agencies, private companies, universities, and other important organizations in the United States. The biggest source internationally of cybercrime is also Russia, where cyber gangs are semiofficial arms of the state, working with the government to sabotage and blackmail key nodes in the American economy — most recently the meat-processing industry and the Colonial pipeline.
Russia continues to threaten its Baltic neighbors — members of NATO — with overflights in their airspace, snap military exercises on their borders, cyberattacks on their infrastructure, provocations on the high seas, and an extensive and constant array of hybrid-warfare tactics designed to undermine their social and political institutions.
Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015 propped up Bashir al-Assad, thereby empowering Iran to resupply Hezbollah and create an active and dangerous northern front against Israel from which attacks are regularly launched against the Jewish state. It also prolonged the Syrian civil war, which, together with Putin’s and Assad’s utter disregard for the lives of innocent civilians, has made Syria the scene of the worst refugee crisis since World War II. European countries absorbed millions of refugees in 2016–17; Russia under Putin steadfastly refused to help with the crisis that it had greatly magnified.
So the Russian intervention in Syria destabilized both Europe and the Middle East — areas of vital importance to the United States — while empowering Iran, assisting terrorist groups, and forcing Israel to accept substantial additional risk on its northern border. Since then, Russian ties with both Iran and Hezbollah have continued to expand.
Finally, even though Russia and China have historically viewed each other with suspicion, Putin has positioned Russia more and more as Beijing’s faithful junior partner, conducting joint exercises with the Chinese navy, supporting the Chinese narrative, and providing diplomatic cover for Beijing — culminating earlier this year with the joint declaration that there was “no limit” to the friendship between the two countries — or at least the two regimes.
No serious policy to deal with China can ignore the implications of the Russian–Chinese partnership. For one thing, in the event Beijing makes a coercive move against Taiwan, it is quite possible that Putin would, to the extent his resources permit, attempt to distract the United States with provocations in Europe or the Middle East, or on the high seas.
That’s the kind of thing “unlimited friends” do for each other.
The last three American presidents have, each in his own way, attempted to persuade the Putin regime to moderate its policies. President Obama positively appeased Putin, especially in the administration’s first term. He made a show of “resetting” the relationship with Russia — unilaterally terminating the Bush-era plan to put missile-defense interceptors and radars in Eastern Europe, negotiating a nuclear-arms treaty that was favorable to Russia, and declining to provide lethal arms to the Ukrainians when Putin seized the Crimea in 2014 and destabilized eastern Ukraine in 2015.
President Trump’s policy toward Russia was much stronger; he imposed sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and provided robust arms shipments to Ukraine, but he too made clear that he was willing to make a deal with Putin.
Last year President Biden waived additional sanctions on the Nord Stream 2, rolled over the nuclear-arms treaty without conditions, and gave Putin a summit on favorable terms — all blunders in my view, but nevertheless unmistakably gestures of good will designed to induce Putin to resolve differences between his regime and the United States.
It all fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin.
No one knows exactly why Putin has pursued such a consistently provocative course over the past 15 years. Perhaps he is paranoid about the security of his regime; perhaps he is personally bitter over the fall of the Soviet Union; perhaps he imagines himself a 21st-century version of Peter the Great. At this point his motives don’t really matter. What matters is that Putin has made his government, and therefore the Russian state, an implacable adversary of the United States and its allies.
There are instances where the interests of the United States collide with its values, but that is not the case here. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is naked aggression by one sovereign state against another, condemned by the United Nations, without any justification under international law, and conducted with no regard for the rules of war and no pity whatsoever for the innocent.
In short, the Ukrainians want to continue fighting and have asked for our help. They have the right to defend themselves; we have the means to help them; and it is in America’s interest to empower them to resist the common adversary, deny him a greater sphere of influence in Europe, and weaken his ability to engage in further aggression against our homeland and our allies.
Moreover, by helping Ukraine when it so obviously advances our security, we can show that, notwithstanding the inexcusable Afghanistan fiasco and the many and manifest failures of our foreign-policy establishment since the Cold War, the United States is at least fitfully capable of acting decisively to impose costs and consequences on those who do us harm.
That is a good message to send to Beijing — not to mention Iran, North Korea, and Putin himself.
If this war were the result of a local dispute between Russia and Ukraine — if it had no broader implications for American security — a strong case could be made for condemning the invasion but otherwise remaining neutral. That is what India has done, and no one should begrudge the Indians their policy, given that their interests are altogether different from ours.
As it is, however, both necessity and opportunity fully justify assisting Ukraine with sanctions, arms, and money. Necessity, because an easy Russian win in Ukraine would have greatly raised the threat level to NATO and in particular the Baltic countries. Opportunity, because when your adversary sticks his foot in a trap, it is at least presumptively correct to make it as difficult as possible for him to escape unscathed.