Why We Should Heed the Growing Republican Skepticism of Ukraine Aid

H ouse minority leader Kevin McCarthy made headlines in October when he indicated that the “blank check to Ukraine” might not continue if Republicans assumed control of the House of Representatives. McCarthy’s implication — recently shared by other conservatives and Republicans — has drawn sharp criticism from much of the foreign-policy intelligentsia. But these conservatives are right to sour on an almost unchecked provision of arms to Ukraine.

Washington faces a choice: It can continue arming Ukraine at the present rate, or it can forestall the manifest danger of Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. We cannot do both because resources are limited. Politically and strategically, conservatives are right to prioritize China over Russia.

Most Americans morally support Ukraine in its righteous struggle against the Russian invaders. You see evidence of this in everything from highway overpasses to Twitter bios to the lapel pins of American political leaders, including many Republicans. But foreign policy is not solely a question of sentiment. It is also a question of prudence and possibility and therefore of prioritization. Yet after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, few warned that the war could become a distraction from vital strategic issues.

Early in the conflict, American voters — including most conservatives — largely supported military aid to Ukraine. As the invasion evolved into a protracted war of attrition, and as the Biden administration and Congress signed check after check, support among Americans for continued aid eroded, particularly among Republicans. An October Wall Street Journal poll found that 48 percent of Republicans said the United States is doing too much to support Ukraine, up from a mere 6 percent in March. Conversely, the proportion of Republican respondents who said Washington is not doing enough fell precipitously from 61 percent in March to 17 percent in October.

Apart from its increasing unpopularity among Republican voters, continuing military aid to Ukraine at anything close to the current level is exceedingly inadvisable. While the U.S. certainly maintains some enduring interests in Europe — including maintenance of a credible NATO defense posture, denial of any hostile aspirant to regional hegemony, and the degradation of Russia’s military-economic power — the extent of support to Ukraine is producing serious opportunity costs. Washington’s cardinal national-security interest must be maintaining the capability, credibility, and capacity to deter or militarily deny Chinese aggression in Asia, the most likely target of which is Taiwan.

Administration officials and senior military leaders are increasingly sounding the alarm on the Chinese invasion threat to Taiwan. The heads of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the intelligence community, U.S. Navy, and all military forces in the Indo-Pacific have characterized the threat as “manifest,” “acute,” on a “much faster timeline” than previously thought, and that an invasion cannot be ruled out even in 2023.

Washington is making trade-offs between its interests in the Indo-Pacific and Europe — but making them in the wrong direction. The nature and volume of military matériel the U.S. continues to supply to Ukraine, as well as the illogical expansion of U.S. military presence in Europe to over 100,000 troops, are further eroding the deteriorating military balance in Asia.

The Pentagon cannot prosecute two major wars simultaneously. Under the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, the U.S. military shifted from a two-regional-war force to a one-major-war force. This was necessary to shift the military’s focus from rogue states and terrorists to great-power adversaries such as China. The Biden Pentagon has wisely maintained this force-planning construct, but insists on claiming that it can “walk and chew gum at the same time” — to resist against China in Asia and Russia in Europe — without a defense budget to match. But military forces are scarce and zero-sum, and the United States is simply incapable of committing equal resources to both fronts. Additionally, decades of economic globalization, deindustrialization, and the anemic capacity of the defense industrial base have rendered America unable to execute a military buildup to fight a two-front war, as it did in the late 1930s and early 1940s. We must choose. China is a far greater threat to America than Russia is (and much larger than any of our past rivals), Asia is a more important theater than Europe, and Taiwan is a more important quasi-ally than Ukraine.

PHOTOS: Russian-Ukraine War

Moreover, the matériel Washington is providing Kyiv could be used in a U.S.-China conflict, or is generating opportunity costs that will have second- and third-order effects on U.S. defense strategy. Long-range precision-fires systems like rocket artillery and missiles are highly valuable, especially for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps as they race to optimize their forces for a potential conflict with China. Anti-air and anti-ship missiles, and even shorter-range anti-tank missiles like the renowned Javelin, are exactly what America ought to be providing to Taiwan. Many of these precision munitions are manufactured by one defense firm at a single Arkansas location. Production delays from replacing the platforms and munitions that have been sent to Ukraine, in addition to production for its ongoing force-development initiatives, will degrade deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. Given the exigency of official omens about China’s intentions, this is time we can ill afford to waste.

Deterring or militarily denying Russian hegemony is the principal strategic imperative for U.S. military presence in Europe. But especially after the degradation of its military and economic power in the Ukraine conflict thus far, Russia no longer poses this threat. Other NATO members are therefore much better equipped to handle Russia and ought to assume responsibility for their own security, albeit with American assurance and backing. Where the United States is sorely needed is in Asia, where China is an increasingly credible aspirant to regional hegemony, from which position it could exert soft imperial control and assume directorship over roughly half of the global economy.

Scarcity impels choice. Many in the Republican establishment — both elected political leaders and foreign-policy intellectuals — will counter that America must contain China and Russia, just as the United States did in the Second World War when it fought Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan simultaneously. But this is both physically infeasible and strategically unnecessary. American strategy should reflect the will of the American people, not the foreign-policy “blob,” and our foreign policy should exist to support our domestic policy — not the other way around.