America’s geopolitical willpower is not a self-renewing resource that regenerates its strength the more we exercise it.
America’s geopolitical willpower is not a self-renewing resource that regenerates its strength the more we exercise it.
L ast week the Senate passed a foreign-aid bill including over $60 billion in weapons and munitions to be made in the U.S. and donated to Ukraine. There are obvious questions to raise about this. Given that this is less money for fewer weapons than were sent to power last year’s counteroffensive, how does the U.S. expect this to change the situation on the ground in Ukraine? Can anyone really say the bill increases America’s military-industrial readiness if it further commits America to a conflict that is devouring munitions faster than we can produce them?
Instead of answering these questions, Republican senators who supported the appropriation set about characterizing their opponents and anyone who doubts the utility of more aid to Ukraine as ignoramuses or the victims of demagogues, or implying that they were deficient in love of country.
Senator Mitt Romney blamed manipulation: “The shock jocks and online instigators have effectively riled up many in the far reaches of my party.” Far reaches? But polls have shown for a very long time that a majority of Republican voters oppose more aid to Ukraine. Many more Republican voters oppose this than regularly listen to shock jocks.
Senator Thom Tillis blamed the lack of support among some Republican senators on the invincible ignorance of voters themselves. “Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Tillis said, apparently forsaking any possibility that elected leaders like him could, well, lead them to greater understanding. How could Republican voters possibly doubt the briefings of America’s intelligence community who were so reliable on the vast stockpiles of Saddam’s WMDs and on the certainty that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation?
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blames it on the passing political winds. As he explained to our own Noah Rothman, it’s just the influence of Trump. “Whoever the leader of the party is, he’s the president or the candidate for president, is going to have the most influence over the voters attracted to that particular party and that may change.” It hasn’t occurred to McConnell that perhaps the relationship runs the other way and Trump’s intuition of the mood and direction of voter sentiment is why he’s leading the party.
The heavy implication is that there is no argument, and that senators such as J. D. Vance, Ron Johnson, and Mike Lee are just cravenly giving in to irrational opposition to Biden. Or that representing the majority view of Republican voters is some kind of dirty trick.
So let’s lay it out in plain English. The case against appropriating another $60 billion to support Ukraine’s defense against Russia is still largely the same case against America involving itself deeply in Ukraine’s politics at all.
- For reasons of geography, history, and current economic relations, Ukraine is peripheral to America’s interests and dear to Russia’s interests, and Americans sense this real asymmetry.
American security and prosperity have never depended on our political or economic relationship with Ukraine. Although it has resources and produces goods that are important on the global market, there is hardly anything an American consumes that has a “Made in Ukraine” label on it. Ukraine is not like Taiwan, whose dominance in computer-chip making is important to our economy and sustaining our way of life.
Russia’s and Ukraine’s economies are deeply intertwined. Ukraine has depended on Russia for gas. Millions of Russians have family roots in Ukraine and vice versa. Russia historically depends for its security on access to the Black Sea through a port in Sevastopol in Crimea. And Russia has been invaded via Ukraine by Napoleon’s army and Hitler’s. The presence of a hostile army on Russia’s border with Ukraine is seen by Russian leaders — not just Putin — as completely intolerable.
Americans, because of this asymmetry of interests, have already put hard limits on what they are willing to do to assist Ukraine. Early debates about Americans or Europeans leading a no-fly zone were quickly ruled out. President Biden and Republican supporters of Ukraine have to constantly reassure Americans that there are no plans to put American troops in harm’s way to vindicate Ukraine’s territorial and political claims to sovereignty. Russia has no such limits.
These hard limits, the very ones envisaged by our Constitution, should have cautioned American politicians from rhetorically inflating this conflict into one that would determine America’s or NATO’s credibility, or that implicated the future of the entire free world.
- Taking on Ukraine as a Western dependent is difficult, uncertain, and treacherous.
Here it must be said that the aspiration of Ukraine’s westward-tilting nationalists to reorient their economic and political relations is totally understandable. Russian and Ukrainian economic relations can feel predatory to Ukraine. Millions of Ukrainians have worked in Poland and have seen what decades of economic growth within the European Union can do for a post–Eastern Bloc state.
But since 2008, the West and Russia increasingly made Ukraine’s alignment into an all-or-nothing proposition. This exacerbated internal divisions in Ukraine’s politics, leading to the Maidan Revolution and the banning of the Party of the Regions and many of its successor parties.
Even if the Ukrainian military effort from here on out is supremely successful, driving Russia back to its pre–February 2022 positions, Western sponsors would have to consider very weighty propositions: Will they want to continue to fund a military effort that would be driving much of the current population of Crimea out of it? Will they support Ukraine’s ejecting Russians from their long-term naval base at Sevastopol, an asset over which Russians have proved willing to fight major-power wars?
Further, detaching Ukraine politically, economically, and militarily from Russia, and then integrating Ukraine into Western institutions like NATO and the European Union, is an uncertain project, to say the very least.
NATO membership is by definition ruled out for any nation that has a current border dispute, meaning Ukraine’s decision to join would require it to surrender any present territorial claims against Russia. Can any elected government of Ukraine, after the costs of such a war, agree freely to surrender Crimea in a way that would be permanent and credible? Western declamations that Ukraine must join NATO also present the perverse incentive for Russia to maintain Ukraine’s borderlands in a state of perpetual conflict in order to forestall such an outcome.
Consider also that reducing or eliminating Russia’s influence over Ukrainian politics could require rebuilding Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Even in the months leading up to the 2022 invasion, after nearly a decade of serious conflict and Russia’s coercive diplomacy — cutting off energy to manipulate political outcomes in Kyiv — Ukraine relied on Belarus and Russia for nearly 50 percent of its energy. After decades, the EU hasn’t even worked out new energy infrastructure for members like Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia — often leading to political difficulties for the bloc as a whole. Those members are currently scrambling to sign liquefied-natural-gas contracts with Qatar, Turkey, and Poland.
In the furious grain-trade dispute that is ongoing between Poland and Ukraine, we see just a hint of the difficulties of integrating Ukraine into the European Union. Even its most friendly EU cheerleader sees Ukraine as a potentially crushing economic competitor within the union. Ukrainian membership in the EU would present challenges and provocations to nearly all existing agricultural interests in member states.
Ukrainian membership could also exacerbate anti-EU sentiment within the bloc by further driving up internal migration. EU membership would grant all Ukrainian citizens a right to settle and work across the EU. In the past, such an outflow posed serious issues of brain drain for Hungary and Poland, a risk that a rebuilding Ukraine would be ill-prepared to endure.
Finally, and most challenging, there is Ukraine’s political culture. The westernization of Ukraine has depended on illiberal and extreme-nationalist suppression of those elements in Ukrainian society deemed backwards, or Eastern-looking. These efforts include legal and extralegal warfare: the banning of political parties and opposition media. It includes criminalization of monolingual Russian publications or limiting Russian-language imports. It includes a pattern of selective prosecution in anti-corruption efforts. It also includes the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has made big public gestures of breaking with Russia’s political leadership, though not enough to satisfy the government.
- The proposed spending bill does little to change a bad status quo.
While some of the money dedicated to producing submarines for our AUKUS allies is welcome, the new spending bill does not significantly improve a situation in which the U.S. is seriously behind on delivering promised weapons to Taiwan and other allies. While proponents hype the bill as significantly upping our military-industrial capacity, almost all of the increased capacity is being consumed by our further commitment to Ukraine’s war effort. Most of the money stays in the U.S., they proclaim. But the opportunity cost is still borne by the U.S. in further delaying the replenishment of its own weapons stocks.
The most propitious time for negotiation has been missed. The draft deal that had been signed in Turkey but dismissed by former U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson and others as a ruse is gone. General Mark Milley was probably right in November 2022 when he averred that Ukraine might be in its strongest position to negotiate, having just conducted its first — and, as it turned out, its last — successful counteroffensive.
Ultimately, the case against sending more aid to Ukraine is simple: It further commits American resources and credibility to a conflict in which the American people are not willing to effect a positive outcome themselves with their own efforts. It therefore increases the odds that America’s policy class will, once again, have their geostrategic plans blown up in their faces, at an even greater cost. It brings us closer to the risks that “saving credibility” will impose in such adverse circumstances.
America’s geopolitical willpower is not a self-renewing resource that regenerates its strength the more we exercise it. Our mission of regime change in Iraq did not make the U.S. public more anxious to pursue the same policy in Syria.
And this is why opponents of more Ukraine funding should reject and turn around the moralizing accusations of our opponents.
Americans have routinely fallen in love with other people’s nationalisms. The Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth was hailed as an avatar of enlightened modernity across the U.S. Éamon de Valera once packed Fenway Park with supporters for the cause of Irish independence from the United Kingdom. In neither case did the U.S. ever dangle the possibility of support for these causes, because the American people were not in a position to fight a major war to vindicate them. The reticence of President Zachary Taylor was not an endorsement of what the Russian and Austrian armies did to the Hungarians. Nor was Woodrow Wilson’s position meant to encourage the barbarism of the Black and Tans.
America’s low-level and now rapidly diminishing support for the Ukrainian cause was eminently foreseeable. It is profoundly immoral to wave away the responsibility in politics to assess the cost — to measure up the resources of weapons and will — and then go abroad in search of monsters to destroy anyway.
One final note: Opponents of Ukraine funding don’t need moral permission from their critics to dissent from some imagined golden orthodoxy in favor of the Ukrainian cause. Those critics have spent a week nut-picking tweets or sharing little clips of Tucker Carlson to shame opponents of aid into silence and to avoid the obvious and predicted failures of the policy they’ve advocated. It’s a stupid game, if you want to play it. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit for Adam Kinzinger, Tom Nichols, and Rachel Maddow to pick.
No, the proponents of this funding need to be asked hard questions about American power and resources. They need to be asked how they could be so flippant. How was it that they came to throw around such large but empty promises, and billions of dollars, in a war so peripheral to our interest? Moralizing and wish-casting is not to be confused with stewardship of a global order. And how dare they turn the blame back on the American people? They knew full well that Americans never wanted to pursue these lofty and geopolitical goals if doing so entailed serious risks or sacrifice. Now they come around and blame the voters and those representing them for supposed backstabbing? Or for sympathizing with dictators? These politicians are not friends of democracy — as Tillis explained, they believe the voters are too ignorant to believe his intel briefings — but are serious dangers to it.