In a letter to President Joe Biden reminding him that the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee long ago approved an amendment authorizing the provision of long-range missiles to Ukraine, Senators Tom Cotton, Roger Wicker, Susan Collins, and Lindsey Graham wonder what’s taking the White House so long. “Delay will cost more lives and prolong the conflict,” they write. The provision of Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) “would maximize the likelihood of success” in Ukraine’s counteroffensive and, most crucially, allow Kyiv to “achieve vital objectives before winter and deny Russia the ability to fortify its positions.”
The senators are correct. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the U.S. for the United Nations General Assembly and to meet with American lawmakers in Washington presents the Biden administration with the perfect opportunity to make the most of what’s left of the fighting season in Eastern Europe.
“Over and over, the administration has dithered in response to repeated Ukrainian requests for equipment, including Western tanks, [High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems] HIMARs, advanced conventional munitions, and air defenses,” Senator Jim Risch observed in January. Biden’s indecision deprived Ukraine of the tools necessary to maintain the tempo of counteroffensive operations it kept up throughout 2022, allowing Moscow’s forces to dig into fortified defensive positions that have proven difficult to break.
Ukraine embarked on its latest counteroffensive in June at three points along the over 600-mile-long frontline Russia carved out last year. The respite Russia enjoyed through the winter and early spring allowed it to erect the most elaborate, layered defensive structures Europe has seen since World War II, but Ukraine has broken through Russian defenses to the north of the Azov Sea and made incremental progress elsewhere.
Ukraine’s goal remains an unambiguous breakthrough of Russia’s lines. Even in the absence of such a success, Ukraine’s small-scale advances allow it to move artillery forward, pin down Russian forces, and perhaps make Russia’s occupation of the Crimean Peninsula a more tenuous prospect.
There is no doubt about Ukraine’s fighting spirit, but its ability to defend itself as adeptly as it has would be unlikely in the absence of Western support. Few anticipated that Ukraine could resist the Russian onslaught at the outset of Moscow’s war of territorial expansion in February 2022. Fewer might have expected that Ukraine would retake more than 50 percent of the territory Russian forces initially occupied shortly after the outbreak of hostilities.
And yet, the arguments against the continued provision of Western — specifically, American — aid to Ukraine persist, and they are encountering a more receptive audience as the war drags on into its second winter, especially in the House Republican caucus.
The claim that generates the most purchase among the more sober skeptics of Ukraine’s cause is that supporting Kyiv’s efforts to degrade Russia’s capacity to project power across its borders comes at the unacceptable cost of deterring Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. That’s an argument that has not convinced those who are most invested in preserving deterrence in the Pacific: the Taiwanese.
“Ukraine’s survival is Taiwan’s survival. Ukraine’s success is Taiwan’s success,” said Taiwan’s representative in Washington, Bi-khim Hsiao, in May. “Our futures are closely linked.” Taiwan doesn’t just talk the talk. The leadership in Taipei lobbies on Ukraine’s behalf and has provided Kyiv with hundreds of tons of humanitarian goods and millions of dollars in aid. Not only could a successful Ukrainian self-defense perhaps help dissuade China from moving on Taiwan, but the U.S. commitment to Ukraine has also not precluded the sale of U.S. weapons systems and platforms to Taiwan.
Still, Russia’s war has put a worrying strain on America’s stores of defensive and offensive munitions, though few of the assets necessary to support a land war in Europe would be useful in deterring aggression in the Indo-Pacific. The war in Ukraine has, however, provided the U.S. with a necessary wake-up call. The conflict has exposed the extent to which NATO allies were sitting on stockpiles of arms and ordnance in poor or downright unusable conditions. It lit a fire under private defense subcontractors and suppliers, who are racing to keep up with the demands imposed on them by a deteriorating international-security environment. It has crystalized for U.S. policy-makers the imperatives associated with providing for the defense of the American-led world order, like, for example, the incomprehensible foolishness of outsourcing the production of explosives like TNT to foreign manufacturers.
It’s not uncommon to hear Kyiv’s skeptics lament the extent to which its European partners have relied on the U.S. for the bulk of Ukraine’s assistance. If that talking point was ever valid, it is no longer. The European Union’s commitments to Ukraine are now double America’s, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Indeed, “the gap widens” when including non-E.U. members to “a total of $166.92 billion in commitments by all main European donors (EU and non-EU), compared to less than $75 billion by the U.S.”
Likewise, some persist in arguing that the West’s support for Ukraine risks crossing a Russian “red line” that would draw NATO directly into a conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia. This argument is unfalsifiable insofar as it has survived the crossing of Moscow’s many supposed “red lines.” From the dispatching of HIMARS, tanks, drones, anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and Patriot missile-defense systems to Ukraine’s attacks on targets inside Russia and in the areas it occupies in Ukraine, opponents of U.S. aid insist Russia’s red line is forever just over the horizon.
It is also not true that the aid to Ukraine is a magic increment of funding that, if it weren’t spent resisting Russian aggression, would seal our Southern border or end the phenomenon of homeless veterans. It is expensive, no doubt, but a drop in the bucket compared with the domestic programs that are driving the debt (and that many of the populist opponents of Ukraine aid don’t want to touch).
It would be preferable, of course, if Russia had not embarked on a war of conquest in Europe, unleashing some of the worst atrocities the continent has seen in over 70 years. But the Western world is now confronted with an undesirable but inescapable choice: allowing a land-hungry despot to upset the European order, with deleterious (and expensive) consequences, or buttressing Kyiv.
Providing for Ukraine’s defense — and, in so doing, diminishing Russia’s capacity to menace Europe and to divert U.S. resources in the process — is vastly preferable to the alternative.