Do reasons beyond rooting for a Russian victory exist for skittishness over a $95 billion bill that includes $60 billion for Ukraine?
President Joe Biden said opposing the bill, which passed the Senate, amounted to “playing into Putin’s hands.” Cornell Professor Glenn C. Altschuler, writing in the Hill, accused House Republicans of “putting partisan interests ahead of what’s best for the country and the free world by refusing to get to yes on aid to Ukraine.”
One wonders what it would take for Democrats to get to “no.” Would opposing $600 billion in aid, instead of the $60 billion here, still constitute “playing into Putin’s hands” or “putting partisan interests ahead of what’s best for the country”? In other words, there lacks a delimiting number or even principle here.
The American taxpayer owes $34 trillion. The deficit, exceeding $1 trillion for the last four years, projects to $1.5 trillion this year. For the few on Capitol Hill who prioritize fiscal restraint, spending an additional $60 billion on a war not involving us or a major trading partner would seem a nonstarter.
Others with a patriotic impulse to not get played as the sap might look to the grossly disproportionate support for Ukraine between the U.S., on the one hand, and some European nations, on the other.
When one considers military aid to Ukraine, the United States eclipses the amount provided by the next 10 highest donor nations combined. Although several of the contributors — Norway, Czech Republic, Poland — sacrificed enormous amounts considering their size, the fact that almost all of the nations on the list sit in Ukraine’s general neighborhood and about 5,000 miles separate Kyiv from Washington, D.C., illustrates the degree to which the United States carries the weight more justly borne by European nations.
Rather than the U.S. Congress — which has already appropriated more than the next 10 most generous nations combined — why not ask members of, say, the French Parliament if they play into Putin’s hands through guarding their purse?
Still others express reservations based on Ukraine’s notorious corruption. The concern pertains less to locals pilfering aid funds meant for defense in Ukraine than it does to Ukrainian money winning powerful people in the West to their cause.
Special counsel David Weiss secured an indictment of a source, arrested Thursday in Las Vegas, who the FBI once described as credible and even paid for a period for claiming that Joe Biden and his son took bribes from Ukraine. We do know that Hunter Biden, joining the board of defunct Ukrainian petroleum outfit Burisma in 2014, received, along with associates, $6.5 million from the company for doing exactly what nobody knows.
One clue came from his father when he told the story about using U.S. tax dollars to pressure the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating the company that paid his son millions.
“I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars,’” Joe Biden bragged of his threats to Ukraine’s leaders. “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in’ — I think it was about six hours — I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch — he got fired.’”
Later, Ukraine returned the favor of intrusion into domestic politics through its involvement in the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
Enthusiasts of aid to Ukraine mute very real concerns over corruption, fiscal restraint, proportionality, and even whether the aid just subsidizes more killing.
Opponents of the aid ignore the evil confronting Ukraine clearly displayed in Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin. Therein, the Russian strongman bizarrely spoke of the war as an effort to “denazify Ukraine,” preposterously referred to the Soviet Union’s carving up Poland with Nazi Germany during World War II as a reaction to Polish “betrayal,” essentially indicated his government kidnapped a journalist to force the Germans to release a Russian hitman that he described as a “patriot,” and described Ukraine as an “artificial state.”
It seems a bad idea to cede more territory than necessary to a person who sounds like an unreconstructed Commie. One suspects much of the resistance to the aid bill might evaporate if the parties involved in the war’s funding negotiated, just as the war might similarly cease if the parties fighting it came to the bargaining table. Sometimes aid, like war, incurs too high a cost.
READ MORE: