Max Boot
The good news is that Congress, at the last minute, averted a government shutdown, at least for now. The bad news is that billions of dollars of funding for Ukraine were stripped from the continuing resolution as a sop to House Republicans who want to cut off the embattled democracy altogether.
Aid to Ukraine still has the support of roughly two-thirds of both houses — something you can’t say about many other issues — but a dangerous milestone was reached last week when more House Republicans voted against Ukraine aid (117) than voted for it (101). That reflects a broader turn in Republican opinion, with only 39 percent of Republicans saying in a recent CBS News-YouGov poll that the United States should send weapons to Ukraine and 61 percent saying it shouldn’t.
To do the right thing for Ukraine, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will now have to go against a growing portion of the Republican base. It is, nevertheless, imperative that he show a modicum of backbone and bring a Ukraine funding bill to the floor immediately. It is not only the right thing to do morally — we have an obligation to support a fellow democracy fending off an unprovoked invasion — but it also is the right thing to do strategically. In fact, it is hard to think of any U.S. foreign policy initiative since the end of the Cold War that has been more successful or more important than U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Yes, in absolute terms, Washington has given a lot of money to Ukraine: $76.8 billion in total assistance, including $46.6 billion in military aid. But that’s a tiny portion — just 0.65 percent — of the total federal spending in the past two years of $11.8 trillion. With U.S. and other Western aid, Ukraine has been able to stop the Russian onslaught and begin to roll it back.
In the process, Russia has lost an estimated 120,000 soldiers and 170,000 to 180,000 have been injured. Russia has also lost an estimated 2,329 tanks, 2,817 infantry fighting vehicles, 2,868 trucks and jeeps, 354 armored personnel carriers, 538 self-propelled artillery vehicles, 310 towed artillery pieces, 92 fixed-wing aircraft and 106 helicopters.
The Russian armed forces have been devastated, thereby reducing the risk to front-line NATO states such as Poland and the Baltic republics that the United States is treaty-bound to protect. And all of that has been accomplished without having to put a single U.S. soldier at risk on the front lines.
That’s an incredible investment, especially compared with U.S. involvement in other recent wars. In Afghanistan and Iraq, both launched under a Republican administration, almost 7,000 U.S. troops were killed and more than 50,000 were wounded while Washington spent more than $8 trillion — only to see Afghanistan fall to the Taliban and Iraq come under Iranian influence.
Republicans who claim to worry so much about corruption in Ukraine, even though there is no evidence that any U.S. aid has been misused, seldom had anything to say about the truly pervasive corruption in Afghanistan and Iraq, which siphoned off billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars. A forensic accountant who audited U.S. spending in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012 found that about 40 percent of $106 billion in Defense Department contracts “ended up in the pockets of insurgents, criminal syndicates or corrupt Afghan officials.” Yet Republicans never proposed to end funding for that war.
The war in Ukraine also stacks up impressively compared with other proxy wars that Republicans, under the Reagan administration, did so much to support — from Afghanistan to Nicaragua to Mozambique. In Ukraine, we don’t have to worry about our weapons going to anti-American religious fundamentalists such as the Haqqani network. We are funding a free people fighting to preserve a liberal democracy that will be a stalwart member of the Western community for years to come.
Republicans often complain that the United States is doing the heavy lifting and our European allies aren’t doing their fair share. That’s not true in the case of Ukraine. This summer, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy reported that “Europe has clearly overtaken the United States in promised aid to Ukraine, with total European commitments now being twice as large.” Yet, despite the growing European assistance, Ukraine still relies on U.S. support; even combined, Europe and the United States can barely keep up with Ukraine’s need for artillery ammunition and other munitions as it wages an industrialized war of attrition.
By funding Ukraine, we are strengthening transatlantic ties and keeping faith with our closest allies. If we were to cut off Ukraine, that would be an unspeakable betrayal not only of the people of Ukraine but also of all of Europe. Stopping Russian aggression is an existential issue for the entire continent. Cutting off Ukraine would mean that the United States is turning its back on its post-1945 security commitment to Europe — a commitment that has underpinned the longest period without a major-power conflict since the emergence of the modern state system in the 17th century.
Supporting Ukraine is also needed to deter Chinese aggression. Some on the right claim that the war in Ukraine is a distraction from the Pacific, but that’s not how the Taiwanese see it. Taiwan’s representative in Washington noted this year that supporting Ukraine — as Taiwan is doing with humanitarian assistance — “will help to deter any consideration or miscalculation that an invasion can be conducted unpunished.”
Many Republicans understand that. “It’s certainly not the time to go wobbly,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said recently. But the MAGA wing of the party, led by former president Donald Trump, has turned against the war because of its isolationism and soft spot for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, a war criminal whom some on the right ludicrously see as a champion of Christian values.
Ironically, many on the right claim to want a negotiated solution to the conflict while doing everything possible to ensure that Putin has no incentive to negotiate seriously. The more Republicans do to endanger aid to Ukraine, the more likely Putin is to assume he can outlast the West and keep fighting.
Once upon a time, Republicans understood the need to resist the “evil empire.” As a former Republican, it sickens me to see so many Republicans so eager to do Moscow’s bidding. But, mercifully, the vast majority of members of Congress — including many Republicans — still staunchly support Ukraine. McCarthy cannot let the MAGA caucus block the best investment the United States can make in its own security.
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