For the second time in seven months, a fringe of the razor-thin House majority is threatening to suicide-bomb the Republican speakership over regular order of spending bills. This time, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is facing friendly fire for pushing forward foreign aid bills to our allies in Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and Ukraine. It is the $61 billion in aid to the latter that has incensed at least two House Republicans, who, under current House rules, could unilaterally propose a motion to vacate and blow up the party’s control of the lower congressional chamber.
Reasonable Republicans can disagree over the amount of aid we send to any of our allies, the structure of said aid packages, and their conditions, and beyond the principle of supporting fellow democracies against authoritarians and threats to territorial sovereignty, Americans absolutely need to justify to whom we send aid on the basis of pure realpolitik. But the case against assisting the Ukrainians by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is constructed on the lie that assisting them is not in America’s interest.
Already, America’s investment in Ukraine has paid off in the form of quite literally decimating the army of one of our most pernicious adversaries. According to a declassified intelligence assessment, Russia has lost nearly 90% of its prewar personnel and nearly two-thirds of its tank forces. The United States has assisted in such a feat without losing a single American life or deploying a single American body on the front lines and for the cost of about $100 billion over the course of two years. That’s tantamount to an eighth of our total annual defense spending, 5% of our annual deficit, and 1% of what we spend in taxpayer money in just one year. In other words, that’s a solid return on our investment.
But the real reason we continue to have a self-interest in curtailing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to prevent the logical conclusion of that possible achievement: America’s legal obligation to deploy our own troops (and, theoretically, our own nuclear weapons) if Russia succeeds.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he doesn’t wish to invade Poland, Latvia, or any of the other Baltic NATO members, and he would be suicidally stupid to do so. But he also said the same about Ukraine about a month before invading his neighbor, and again, America did indeed warn Russia that it would be suicidally stupid to do so. Unlike the Paris Agreement, the Iran deal, or any other number of 21st-century left-wing diplomatic deals, America’s commitment to NATO was ratified by the Senate and is considered legally binding under the Constitution’s supremacy clause. Should Putin expand his territorial aims and invade a NATO member, we, and the rest of the rest, would be legally obligated to aid not just in the form of measly aid packages but likely troops, if not at least the imminent threat of nuclear weaponry.
Normal people, including Republicans outside of the “swamp,” understand this. According to a new American Action Network poll, a plurality of GOP primary voters in safely red districts supported sending some form of aid to Ukraine, compared to a 40% minority who opposed, and more importantly, these Republican voters are virtually united in blaming Russia, not Ukraine, for the conflict. About 4 in 5 GOP primary voters in safely red districts said Russia wrongly invaded Ukraine and considered the former an enemy to the U.S., and two-thirds said Putin “wants to reestablish the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe.”
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Even though some other polls have found Republican voters more generally pushing back on the dollar amount of aid or giving additional aid to Ukraine, the AAN poll showed broad GOP primary voter support for forms of aid that either focus on rebuilding American defense capacity and funding or structuring such aid as a loan, either directly paid by Ukraine’s government or in the form of seizing Russian assets. The GOP point of contention here is obvious and rational: Independent of any dime allocated to defense spending, Uncle Sam has a stark spending problem, and such proposals could be sold as deficit-neutral in the long run or worthwhile investments.
Reasonable people can argue over how much to give Ukraine, whether we can afford to increase discretionary spending entirely while mandatory spending is slated to double our debt-to-GDP ratio in the next 30 years, and over the efficacy of Ukrainian leadership and military strategy. But this notion that America does not have a personal interest in avoiding Russia expanding its borders to further NATO front lines is nothing more than a lazy strawman constructed by deeply unserious people.