We should support Ukraine because Russia is our enemy, but that support can’t be unlimited.
We should support Ukraine because Russia is our enemy, but that support can’t be unlimited.
F riday marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. A two-year anniversary is highly likely, and a stalemate much longer than that is entirely foreseeable.
Russia’s way of war is, as ever, barbaric: Its supply of missiles to bombard civilians and civil infrastructure is bottomless, but its third-rate armed forces, which have never traveled well, spend much of their time in retreat, and have — according to U.S. intelligence estimates — sustained a mind-boggling 100,000 casualties (killed and wounded). The Ukrainians have fought with valor befitting people defending their homeland against a ruthless aggressor. It is their misfortune, however, that this aggressor is their covetous neighbor, whom they may be able to frustrate and bleed, but whom they can neither decisively defeat nor dissuade from a revanchist sense of entitlement to territory that is rightfully Ukraine’s.
The war has become as existential for Putin as it is for Ukraine. That complicates ending it.
So here is a question for you: Are you in for somewhere between $100 billion and $200 billion a year, for however long it takes? According to U.S. estimates, the tab for Ukraine aid so far is $113 billion; the Zelensky regime, factoring in assurances it says it have been given, says the total is more like $196 billion. Are we willing to pay that much annually for another two or five or eight years? If so, what are we prepared to cut to persist in that level of aid? If we’re not prepared to cut anything, is the plan to have our children and grandchildren pay the freight?
We’re usually sticklers about this sort of thing at National Review. In fact, we have a National Review Institute project, Capital Matters, that has become daily must reading because of its gimlet-eyed focus on what Washington likes to gloss over: the degree to which rapacious progressive governance is gobbling up the resources and stifling the creativity of the private sector. I was thus dismayed that our editorial marking the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine war omitted the hard numbers in its clarion call for “an end to the war as soon as is practicable so long as it’s on favorable terms to Ukraine” (emphasis added).
What does that mean? My colleagues are not clear. That’s notable given that the editorial is a rebuke of President Biden’s (characteristic) lack of clarity, his obvious reluctance to spell out American strategy and objectives.
In sketching out what a conclusion favorable to Ukraine might look like, the editorial carefully limits its discussion about the disposition of territory to “antebellum” Ukraine. The bellum we’re talking about, of course, is the one that began on February 24, 2022. For all the soaring rhetoric about Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Russia’s lawless belligerence, the editors are not suggesting that Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine must be reversed if the war is to end “on favorable terms to Ukraine.” Moreover, the editors acknowledge that such “favorable terms” must factor in that “most wars end at the negotiating table on terms that do not provide all parties with full satisfaction.” That is, Kyiv has to be realistic and recognize that “favorable” terms may not include Russian “withdrawal from every inch” of territory that Ukraine held in early 2022 (to say nothing of 2014). Bottom line: Ukraine is not going to be made whole; the argument between hawks and skeptics is over what degree of annexation is tolerable.
On the other side of the coin, the editors vacillate between two possible outcomes — “total Russian defeat” and “Russian victory” — as if, in between, there were not an array of results that would be acceptable, if not necessarily desirable.
Acceptable to whom? Well, the editors rightly observe that what “should be most important and most fundamental to any American government [is] the interests of the United States and its people.” And thus the main problem with the editorial, and with most Ukraine-hawk journalism: It is written as if there were little or no daylight between the interests of the United States and an outcome that Ukraine would deem favorable. Yet, there are patent differences between what is vital to us and what Kyiv hopes to achieve. Indeed, our policy implicitly reflects this brutal reality — despite the price tag of well over $100 billion, which the editors tell us should “even [be] increased” if necessary, at least through 2023. (No wonder the hard numbers go unmentioned).
There are no American troops in Ukraine. Even the editors laud Biden for this, and for rebuffing Kyiv’s calls for a U.S.-established “no-fly zone.” No administration of either party would have dared to get the country directly involved in combat in Ukraine. It is not in America’s vital interests to be drawn into a war with Russia over Ukraine, even if that blunt fact will inevitably play in Russia’s favor in any settlement negotiations. Though our editorial slams Biden for the fitfulness of his leadership, it is simply reality that he is groping for policies that inflict meaningful punishment on Moscow but aren’t acts of war so unambiguous that Russia treats us as a combatant, or escalates its pulverization of Ukraine on the rationale that there’s no longer any point in restraint.
Modesty should counsel us to empathize, not censure. As readers know, I am no Biden fan. But if I were to frame a “searing indictment” of his leadership, it would involve his evisceration of our own borders, not his response to Russia’s evisceration of Ukraine’s borders. On the latter, Biden is in the unenviable position of navigating between satisfying a public whose support for Ukraine has already softened markedly in the last nine months, and antagonizing a public whose opposition would be intense if Biden were seen as making Ukraine’s war America’s war.
And by the way, something to think about regarding that already-softening support: Unlike National Review, Democrats do not support Ukraine’s fight because doing so is in our nation’s geopolitical interests. They support it because, despite their decades of Soviet sympathies, followed by years of portraying Putin as a worthy strategic partner, Democrats pivoted in 2015 to the Trump–Russia “collusion” scam. This ploy, manufactured by the Clinton campaign, dictates that Democrats pose as anti-Russia hard-asses. Their ostensibly intense support for Ukraine flows from (a) their transmogrification of Ukraine into an avatar of anti-Trumpism, and (b) the happenstance that the White House has been inhabited since the war began by a Democrat (one who signaled that he’d be fine with a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine).
This is not going to last. If Iraq and Vietnam have taught us anything, it is that if a Republican (who will not be Trump) wins the presidency in 2024, the new administration’s support for Ukraine — in a war then entering year three — would be pilloried by Democrats as an inept enterprise that enriches U.S. defense contractors at the expense of Americans whose social safety net is on the verge of collapse.
I admire the pluck of the Ukrainian people’s fight. I admire the bravery and leadership of Volodymyr Zelensky, and I don’t fault him for trying to make every supporting country conflate its own interests with Ukraine’s. Wartime leaders of imperiled nations must do nothing less. But I can’t pretend to admire Ukraine, a deeply corrupt country. And I can’t pretend to equate American interests with Ukrainian interests. Ukraine borders a thuggish aggressor with which there will be no stable settlement. That is not a problem we can fix.
We should support Ukraine because Russia is our enemy, and because we owe that much to Ukraine, having in 1994 and 2006 persuaded Kyiv to divest itself of its nuclear and conventional weapons on the fantasy that Russia was no longer a threat.
That support, however, is not without limits. As long as Ukrainians are willing to fight, we should provide them with a level of matériel support that enables them to punish and deplete Russia without drawing us into combat. But we ought to stop the hyperbole about “Russian victory” and “letting Putin win.” Putin is not winning, and a Ukraine skeptic does not become a clandestine agent of the Kremlin merely by voicing what should be the incontestable point that Ukraine cannot be given a blank check — because we must reserve such checks for American national security, and nothing else. A disastrously punishing war in which Putin, after trying to take the whole country, is ultimately forced to settle for additional slices of Ukraine — slices where insurgencies will continue to drain him for the foreseeable future — is an acceptable outcome for the United States. And the sooner that happens the better, even if Putin tries to spin a paltry, uncertain annexation as a win.
The suggestion that this would only encourage China to seize Taiwan is mistaken. U.S. and allied support for Ukraine has been surprisingly strong, even if it does not satisfy zealous Ukraine hawks. Beijing can’t be encouraged by that. What it might well find enticing, though, is the alarming depletion of U.S. defense stocks, our reluctance to arm Taiwan to the teeth due to our other priorities, and our armed-forces-recruitment crisis. These are direct results of our unwillingness to make adult fiscal choices between national defense and other spending, and of the perception that progressive governance has turned our military into a woke seminar that many would-be warriors would find unappealing. If Xi Jinping decides the time is ripe to make a move on Taiwan, these will be the reasons — not Ukraine.
In Ukraine, where Kyiv needs our support to continue fighting, our objective should be an end of the war as soon as practicable on terms favorable to the United States. As our editorial concedes, that won’t be total victory for Ukraine. Necessarily, that means total defeat for Russia is not in the cards, either. Let’s not confuse that with “Putin wins.”