If you haven’t listened to Charlie Cooke, Rich Lowry, Noah Rothman, and Michael Brendan Dougherty debate the merits of the Ukraine aid package on Tuesday’s episode of The Editors podcast and Charlie, Noah, and MBD’s follow-up debate on this week’s episode of The CCWC podcast, you really should.

These free-ranging and good-faith debates are a shining example of what, in my opinion, makes NR a great institution. MBD and Noah disagree vigorously — they really go at each other — but if you listen to what they’re saying, it’s clear that both men are genuinely approaching the question of Ukraine from a conservative perspective of “What’s best for America and her people?”

I find myself more generally in agreement with Noah — but I wish I could have been there to ask a few questions to both. I’ll direct today’s questions at MBD, and tomorrow I’ll follow up with Noah.

Question 1: I take MBD’s point that the Kremlin views Ukraine as a core piece of its national-security interest in a way that the United States will never approach. Russians will always, always care more about Ukraine than Americans will. MBD concludes from this fact that the U.S. should never have attempted to incorporate Ukraine into the larger Western World and its security alliances. But Russia has previously allowed “core” pieces of its former imperium to be incorporated into the West: the Baltic states and, arguably, Poland. Indeed, in a former time, Americans considered control of the Caribbean basin and specifically Cuba to be a core national-security interest, but we later allowed control of Cuba to fall into the hands of a hostile world-spanning empire — because both sides wanted to avoid the outbreak of nuclear war. So, MBD: I’m not necessarily arguing for the wisdom of this policy, to be clear, but why are you so sure that a confident Western alliance couldn’t have muscled Russia out of Ukraine without firing a shot in 2008 by placing Kyiv under the U.S. nuclear umbrella?

Question 2: When asked, MBD told Charlie and Noah that the U.S. should have done “nothing” (perhaps with the exception of sending humanitarian aid) to assist Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022. However, in other segments of the two conversations, MBD argues that U.S. aid to Ukraine isn’t necessary because Russia’s military has been wrecked by this war and is thus no real threat to our NATO allies in Europe. But, MBD, isn’t it true that Russia’s severely diminished hard-power military strength is a function of a decade’s worth of U.S. military aid to Ukraine? Setting aside any consideration of democracy or human-rights promotion and focusing merely on realpolitik, isn’t the humiliation of the Russian army and the smashing of its power for a small fraction of America’s annual defense expenditures profoundly in the U.S. national interest by taking a major rival’s capacity for land warfare off the board?

Question 3: MBD argues — surprisingly to my mind — that the U.S. should not draw a hard red line on the defense of Taiwan. He says that the real U.S. interest lies in defending Japan, South Korea, and the outer-island chains from Chinese hegemony. I’m unconvinced by this thinking, though I find his argument refreshingly honest and frank as opposed to some of his compatriots’ stances on the more isolationist side of the right. But MBD would surely agree that though he may prefer a U.S. defense posture that is not de facto committed to Taiwan’s defense, what we have today in the world we live in is a U.S. that is preparing and de facto committed to defending Taipei from Beijing’s aggression. My question for MBD is: Why do you think — however we came to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and America’s errors on that road — that a U.S. abandonment of Ukraine now would not profoundly increase the likelihood of a Chinese move on Taiwan? I believe that the best way to avoid a shooting war in the Far East is for the Communists in Beijing to be deterred by the U.S. and its alliance structure and the belief in our commitment to sacrifice blood and treasure in the defense of Taiwan. So, MBD, in the effort to deter Beijing, shouldn’t we make every effort to convince China that we will go very far in our support of Kyiv — especially when the only cost we have borne to date is not blood but merely treasure?