I dissent from our editorial today. Congress writes some big check for the Biden administration, and meekly puts in the memo, “Could you please provide us with some idea of a strategy for how this money could be used effectively for its purpose?”

These bills are a monument to our decadence and political cynicism. Nobody has put forward a cogent argument for how Ukraine will do better with less aid than we gave it last year in preparation for its major counteroffensive. Look to the press, and it’s a repeat of Mitch McConnell’s disgraceful performance in the Senate a few weeks ago. There is hardly even a pretense that Putin will be defeated, but there’s lots of backslapping that the native populists and other skeptics have been defeated.

While taking on some rhetorical excesses from Mike Lee, Jim Geraghty puts up a defense of the expenditures based on the moral rightness of helping Ukraine.

The only Russian “peaceful solution” that’s ever been on the table was a disarmed Ukraine, where the Russian army could roll in and take over the rest of the country whenever it wanted. We would never take that deal; why would we ever tell the Ukrainians that they should accept vassal status? Ukraine’s hopes of avoiding another invasion would rest entirely on the promises of Vladimir Putin. I know this is going to shock you, but I think the former KGB colonel isn’t always an honest person! . . .

If you want peace, prepare for war. It’s an old, difficult lesson that history keeps teaching democracies and free nations the hard way, over and over again.

We would never take that deal, indeed, because we have two giant oceans and two friendly countries around us. But it’s traditional in European politics for smaller nations next to major military powers to have “neutrality” as the outer limit of their foreign-policy independence. Switzerland’s neutrality was never intended as a statement of confidence in the promises of Hitler. It worked because Switzerland was reliable and the two major military powers next to it could depend on the fact that Switzerland would not be used by a hostile foreign power as a launch pad. Maybe you prefer a world in which Switzerland perpetually risks its existence to be a more morally compelling figure in the geopolitical drama. But the Swiss, looking at the Germans, the French, the Italians, and before them the Austro-Hungarian Empire, thought differently.

Of course, the same moral logic for American subvention would apply to Armenia, which just had its borders transgressed and experienced ethnic cleansing at the hands of Azerbaijan. Armenia even outranks Ukraine on Freedom House’s now-ridiculous list of democracies. (Ridiculous because political correctness forced them to shake it up and put Ukraine way up and Hungary way down.) And yet, we don’t see the same moral fury or demands that the United States jump on in and right this wrong.

I don’t put stock in the idea that Xi is looking at “American resolve” in Ukraine. If he thought that Taiwan depended on Ukraine, he would send his military to intervene alongside the Russians. Instead, he seems content to give the Russians just enough to keep us tied down. I don’t put stock in Taiwan saying that the U.S. should support Ukraine. That’s literally what the entire foreign-policy blob they depend on already believes, and Taiwan can see how much it likes being contradicted.

Geraghty says that if we want peace, we should prepare for war. But that’s the whole problem for his position. The American people do not want to sign up to fight for Ukraine’s sovereignty themselves. They do not see it as in their national interest because our security and prosperity has never depended on Ukraine. We cannot be crippled by someone else controlling some of its resources. We hardly do any trade with Ukraine. And so there are hard democratic limits on America’s power to affect the outcome that Geraghty and National Review at large would like to see. If we can’t sleep at night without actively determining for ourselves who governs Horlivka, then security is a farcical enterprise. And you have tacitly admitted that the whole post-war world order was inadequate for our security until roughly 2013. Polls at the very start of this war showed that a supermajority of Americans did not want the U.S. to play a major role in it. Now, Geraghty admits in his dispatch today that without our lethal military aid, Ukraine would choose a different course. In other words, we do have that major role. Choosing your own course in the face of the constraints real life places on you is the only definition of freedom that we have for most peoples. The job of the American military is to defend and advance American interests, not to make the world fair for Russia’s neighbors or teach Putin a lesson.

Our editorial participates in the congressional and Biden office spin that some portion of the appropriated money will replenish our weapons stocks. What we don’t advertise to our readers is that Congress, in this bill, dramatically expanded the president’s discretionary “drawdown authority” so that the administration could take every single weapon produced by this bill’s expenditures, and many more besides, and hand them to Ukraine. Unless a future president cuts off Ukraine, all Congress has done is guaranteed that our weapons stocks will be depleted for several more years to come as nearly the entirety of our defense-industrial base dedicates itself to producing weapons that Ukraine is using faster than we can produce and provide them.

Geraghty dismisses concerns that Ukraine and Taiwan have overlapping needs because one requires defense from amphibious invasions and the other is facing a land invasion. But the overlaps are real. They include High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rockets, Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), Stingers, Javelins, Harpoons, etc.

Then there is the border betrayal. Going back to J. D. Vance’s senatorial campaign, and the work of some conservative Ukraine skeptics in the Senate, there was an idea that perhaps both sides could compromise. Republican skeptics of Ukraine would vote for aid to Ukraine if Democrats voted to fund real border security. Intentionally or not, the proposed compromise came to the Senate and was full of holes. It failed to oblige the administration to forbid entry to even one illegal alien, and formalized Mayorkas’s discretionary and lawless approach to passing asylum seekers through to their preferred American destination after a non-adversarial interview with an asylum officer, rather than a court date with a judge.

Now, we get a good look at the Ukraine-aid bill and the bill to aid Israel. Combine them both, and you will find $4 billion dispersed between the State Department and the Office of Refugee Settlement to be given to left-wing NGOs who help border crossers evade our immigration laws.

Congratulations Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell! You managed to throw away all leverage Republicans had, pass something that Republican voters don’t want, and that every single Democratic lawmaker did want, and to make the border situation much worse in the meantime, while filling up the treasuries of your ideological enemies. The gift to the NGOs will be used by whatever populist challengers are left in GOP congressional primaries to challenge incumbents, putting more wild-eyed and untested people in winnable races. Biden may be senile, but his administration just played McConnell and Johnson like a Stradivarius.

That we are chowing on this crap sandwich as if it were prepared at Fuku by David Chang himself makes me want to reach for my sick bag.

According to the New York Times, Mike Johnson told Mike McCaul, “I want to be on the right side of history.” To a conservative, this Wilsonian style of phrase and thinking rings in our eyes like, “I love Big Brother.” Sure, you have right-wing ideas about taxation and you pray before votes. But your moral worldview is indistinguishable from the liberal foreign-policy blob.

The Ukraine bill does very little to change the situation for Ukraine, harms America’s security interests, sets us up for an even bigger humiliation in the end, and just guarantees that the mess will be dumped on the next administration. And it worsens the problem at our borders. All in a weekend’s work for Republican leadership!