After firing a triple salvo at Michael Brendan Dougherty on Friday afternoon, as promised, I have three questions for Noah Rothman on Ukraine and his vision for U.S. foreign policy during our present troubles.

Question 1: I consider it a misinformed calumny when the charge is leveled at those who support American military aid to Ukraine that we are “willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.” Ukrainians have willingly taken up arms, fought hard, and suffered gravely to repel the Kremlin’s invasion of their country. If anything, the war has united the Ukrainian people and heightened their sense of nationhood and nationalism — and this of course includes many who are ethnic Russians and hail from Ukraine’s east. But of course as the brutal struggle rages on into its third year, weariness has naturally set in in some quarters. The debate over a new draft bill introduced by President Zelensky’s government that made its way through the Ukrainian parliament was extremely contentious, and many thousands of young Ukrainian men have fled the country in order to not be subjected to conscription. My question for Noah is: What would you need to see to decide that Ukrainian popular support for the war had diminished to the point where it no longer made sense for the United States to support the war effort?

Question 2: Wars do not always end in victory for the aggrieved party. Unfortunately for the Ukrainians, that is all the more true for wars of attrition between a weaker power that has been invaded by a larger, stronger bully. The recent debate over the new tranche of military aid to Ukraine was very different from that which took place before the Ukrainian offensive in the spring of 2023. At that time, there was real hope that the Ukrainians might win the war outright by collapsing the Russian lines, reaching the Sea of Azov, and — perhaps — forcing the Russians to withdraw from the bulk of sovereign Ukrainian territory. Now, most military analysts see renewed American aid as giving the Ukrainians the ability to not lose the war in what is sure to be a very difficult 2024. So, Noah, should the United States be content, on a strategic level, with ensuring a stalemate in Ukraine’s east? Should the U.S. in public or private push the Ukrainian government to seek a peace that allows the integration of the territory it currently controls into the West and its security alliances if the price is the annexation of the Donbas and Crimea into the Russian Federation?

Question 3: War is always a contingent endeavor. There are always hard choices to be made. Indeed, even in an existential total war such as the Second World War that mobilized U.S. industrial resources on an immense scale, we still agreed with our British allies to fight a “Germany first” strategy that gave secondary priority to our fight against Imperial Japan. Today, many critics of U.S. aid to Kyiv argue that — whatever the justice of Ukraine’s cause — the United States simply cannot afford to expend resources in a secondary theater such as Eastern Europe when the real crisis is in the Pacific. So, Noah, what factors or crises abroad would cause you to embrace a “Pacific first” strategy that would place the vast majority of our focus on China while leaving the defense of Eastern Europe and any continued aid to Ukraine on the shoulders of our European allies?