Ukraine’s President Zelensky recently blamed the U.S. for the slow pace of Ukraine’s counter-offensive in its war against the Russian invaders, according to press reports:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russian air superiority was “stopping” Kyiv’s counteroffensive, and he complained of the slow rate of both Western arms deliveries and sanctions on Russia. “If we are not in the sky and Russia is, they stop us from the sky. They stop our counteroffensive,” he said.

As a matter of military strategy, Zelensky is certainly correct: it is difficult to succeed in modern warfare without air superiority. That’s been a prime tenet of U.S. military doctrine for decades. (READ MORE: Did Elon Musk Save the Russian Fleet?)

But there is a deeper lesson from Ukraine’s current plight, and that is not to become too dependent upon “the kindness of strangers,” in the immortal phrase of the fictional Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire. Since World War II, many countries around the world have decided to rely on the U.S. to defend them rather than spending their resources on a credible military deterrent of their own. For example, “while the U.S. represents 54 percent of the alliance’s [NATO’s] economic output, it contributes 70 percent of defense expenditures.” Perhaps Germany, with Europe’s largest economy, is the largest free rider, but many other countries are also guilty of spending less than the agreed 2 percent of GDP on defense. The success of the Finns, the Swedes, and the Poles in deterring Russian military aggression by building strong military forces of their own shows why relying too much on others is a big mistake. Even Japan has recently come around to seeing that it has to shoulder a bigger part of the load in defending itself and has pledged to double its military spending over the next five years.

This is not to denigrate the U.S. strategy of collective defense through mutual defense pacts such as NATO after World War II. Nor is it to justify the delays by the Biden administration in providing F-16s to Ukraine, although one has to concede that avoiding an escalation that might provoke World War III is also an important goal. The point is that even smaller, less powerful countries like Ukraine have to contribute their fair share in order for the collective defense model to be successful. Prior to the Russian invasion, which actually began in 2014, Ukraine’s military spending hovered around only 1.5 percent of GDP.

As president, Donald Trump made the seemingly obvious point that all countries have to contribute their fair share to mutual defense by calling upon our NATO allies to raise their defense budgets to the agreed 2 percent share of GDP. Trump was, of course, pilloried by the establishment press for insulting our “closest friends.” Many of the criticisms of Trump’s policies were childish and jejune, but this one takes the cake for outright stupidity. It is based on a false analogy of the relationships among nations to the relationships among individual human beings. Nations do not have emotions, so they don’t really have “friends”; they have alliances around common interests. (READ MORE: The Idiot Ramaswamy)

The establishment press never admitted it was wrong. Consider how the pundits made fun of President Ronald Reagan for developing anti-missile defenses, which they mocked as “Star Wars.” Today, both sides in Ukraine are routinely shooting down missiles, but has the New York Times ever admitted that it was wrong in mocking Reagan’s far-sighted proposal to develop anti-missile defenses? Of course not. The arrogance of the establishment press is like the (in)famous line from the movie Love Story: “Love means never having to say you are sorry.”  Both are nonsense.

Ukraine is a medium-sized but relatively resource-rich country with a long border with a larger, aggressive neighbor governed by an egomaniacal autocrat who wishes to restore the Soviet empire of which Ukraine was once a part. There is no doubt that Ukraine is in a tough position, and its citizens have fought courageously and cleverly against a bully since the Russian invasion. But does that justify Ukraine for relying on an air force consisting of MIG-29 jets from the 1970s that it inherited upon the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991? Another eastern European country that borders Ukraine, Slovakia, placed its order for F-16s back in 2018. Finland started upgrading its air force from Soviet-era planes to modern F-18s and F-35s back in 1992. As far as I have been able to determine, Ukraine never tried to upgrade its air force with modern planes prior to the Russian invasion. (READ MORE: G20 New Delhi Summit: A Win for the Global South)

Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and who knows whether other countries would have been willing to sell more modern planes to Ukraine if it had tried to upgrade its air force prior to the invasion. However, hindsight is also called “learning from experience,” and one lesson from the war in Ukraine is that countries should not continue to rely on the kindness of strangers. Like predators throughout history, Russia goes after its weaker neighbors and shies away from invading those — such as Finland and Poland —  that have invested in stronger militaries of their own.