I don’t think there’s a very compelling case against the $40 billion Ukraine aid package, as I wrote in my Politico column today:
The root cause of the expense is that it costs money to support a country fighting a war in the 21st century against an advanced, if incompetent, military foe. By no reasonable standard did Ukraine provoke the war with Russia. It seeks only to regain its sovereign territory against an enemy that hates the West and wishes to create an international order, along with China, more to its liking.
We would have saved tens of billions of dollars, at least initially, if we had never aided Ukraine and contented ourselves with letting it get overrun. But a victorious Vladimir Putin would have posed a more direct threat to NATO, precipitating and necessitating an even bigger military buildup than we are seeing now, and one that we would have to participate in, unless we were to simply give up on our leadership of the world’s most important alliance.
If Putin were ever tempted into a direct confrontation with NATO, we would be faced with the dissolution of the alliance or the involvement of U.S. troops in an even more costly conflict. The Ukraine war might be expensive, but it is the Ukrainians who are doing the fighting. They are degrading the military of an adversary of the United States and trying to push it away from NATO’s borders without a single U.S. or Western soldier firing a shot or being put directly in harm’s way. All things considered, this is a deal.