Why Even America-First Conservatives Should Back Aid to Ukraine

According to USA Today, the $40 billion, added together with $13.5 billion passed just in March, is more than a quarter of the size of the pre-war Ukrainian economy and more than 80 percent of Russia's defense budget last year.

All told, the direct military assistance to Ukraine will now come to nearly $10 billion — more, as the progressive explainer site Vox notes, than the $4 billion that went to Afghanistan last year before we pulled out and more than the $3 billion or so that goes to Israel every year.

The bill reflects the natural tendency of any bipartisan spending initiative to get bigger rather than smaller. Congress is spending more than President Joe Biden's original request of $33 billion, and the $40 billion will get us to only the end of the fiscal year in several months.

The spending has led to the forceful expression, once again, of populist skepticism about assisting Ukraine, which had temporarily been submerged by the blunt fact of Russia's invasion. It's easy to exaggerate the extent of the opposition. Only about a fifth of the GOP Conference in the Senate and a quarter of the GOP Conference in the House voted against the bill. Yet, it has become a lightning rod for a neo-isolationist tendency in the GOP that isn't going away anytime soon.

The root cause of the expense is that it costs money to support a country fighting a war in the 21st century against an advanced, if incompetent, military foe. By no reasonable standard did Ukraine provoke the war with Russia. It seeks only to regain its sovereign territory against an enemy that hates the West and wishes to create an international order, along with China, more to its liking.

We would have saved tens of billions of dollars, at least initially, if we had never aided Ukraine and contented ourselves with letting it get overrun. But a victorious Vladimir Putin would have posed a more direct threat to NATO, precipitating and necessitating an even bigger military buildup than we are seeing now, and one that we would have to participate in, unless we were to simply give up on our leadership of the world's most important alliance.

If Putin were ever tempted into a direct confrontation with NATO, we would be faced with the dissolution of the alliance or the involvement of U.S. troops in an even more costly conflict. The Ukraine war might be expensive, but it is the Ukrainians who are doing the fighting. They are degrading the military of an adversary of the United States and trying to push it away from NATO's borders without a single U.S. or Western soldier firing a shot or being put directly in harm's way. All things considered, this is a deal.

If the top-line number of the aid package is $40 billion, not all of that money is being sent directly to Ukraine.

Nearly $9 billion replenishes U.S. stockpiles after Biden sent U.S. weapons to Ukraine on an emergency basis using his so-called drawdown authority. These weapons shipments had near universal assent, and in fact, Republicans tended to want Biden to do more — criticizing him for not going fast enough and not blessing a deal for the Poles to give MIGs to the Ukrainians and get U.S. jets in exchange.

It'd be perverse not to replenish our supplies of Javelins at this point in the name of economizing over Ukraine.

Likewise, the U.S. deployment of troops to NATO countries, also a matter of bipartisan consensus, costs money. Several billions of dollars in the package pays for these deployments.

The package contains about $4 billion to finance Ukraine and NATO countries buying U.S. weapons. Those countries have funneled their own materiel to Ukraine. Then they will turn around and purchase more modern weapons from us, increasing their capabilities and enhancing the so-called interoperability of NATO (in other words, more countries will be using compatible, U.S.-made weapons systems).

If you think, as the original America Firster and current populist kingmaker Donald Trump believes, that selling U.S. weapons abroad is a boon to our industry and nation, the package is a triumph.

Another criticism of the legislation is that we are doing the heavy lifting, and the Europeans are, once again, freeloading while we pay the bill to defend their neighborhood. The Euros, and our other allies, can be doing more, but this point can be overstated.

As of late April, according to The Economist's calculation, members of the EU, the EU council and commission, and the European Investment Bank have committed 12 billion euros and the United States a roughly equal $11 billion. Now, we are about to lap the Europeans several times over.

The contribution of some of the European countries is still noteworthy, though. Estonia has committed the equivalent of 0.8 percent of its GDP, according to The Economist, with Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Lithuania committing between 0.2 percent and 0.7 percent of their GDPs, much more than the United States. Of course, scale matters. You'd rather have a big spending package from the U.S. that is a tiny proportion of our GDP than a tiny spending package from Estonia that is big proportion of its GDP.

European countries are also absorbing a historic wave of refugees — Poland has taken in more than 3 million, and Romania almost a million — while beginning to wean themselves from Russian oil and gas, an economically painful project.

That said, we should be making it clear to the Europeans that we want them to do more. If only the U.S. can provide certain advanced weapons to Kyiv, there is no reason Berlin and Paris can't provide more food assistance to Ukraine and other parts of the world (another roughly $4 billion of the package). For that matter, the administration should be working harder to get allies otherwise sitting out the war — Israel, the Gulf Arab states — to pitch in on the food assistance.

It's a popular talking point among Republican opponents of the bill to say it's a distraction from other priorities, especially the baby formula shortage and the border crisis. But the bill has nothing to do with either of these. The baby formula issue involves FDA regulatory policy, which is completely unaffected by how much we are or aren't spending on Ukraine, and Biden isn't magically going to become a border hawk if we cut off assistance to Ukraine.

GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has said his "biggest concern" with the bill is that it doesn't represent "a nationalist foreign policy." What constitutes a nationalist foreign policy is open to debate, but the bill, and our broader support for Ukraine, falls comfortably within a common-sense definition.

Assisting a sovereign country in defending its borders against a nation bent on regaining imperial glory, while ensuring other sovereign counties are better able to deter that would-be imperial power from further aggrandizement is a broadly nationalist project. So is resisting an adversary that wants to reduce our national power and influence. And, finally, one would think that a nationalist would feel a little resentment over a foreign power repeatedly threatening to nuke us if we don't get out of its way.

Hawley further contends that the $40 billion distracts from the need to focus on China. It is not a zero-sum game between Europe and East Asia, though. We will need a robust trans-Atlantic alliance to help contain China. If we leave Europe to deal with the Ukraine crisis on its own, it's less likely to be there for us on China. On top of this, Beijing is obviously watching how we deal with the Russian invasion as part of its calculations with regard to Taiwan. If Russia gets it way, or if we pull up short in our support of Ukraine, it will send the wrong message.

No piece of legislation in Washington is perfect and it's not unreasonable to blanch at the cost of our Ukraine assistance. But we shouldn't be penny-wise in a conflict that will profoundly affect the future of Ukraine, the robustness of the Western alliance and perhaps the nature of the Russian regime, too. There's a time for green eyeshades, and this isn't it.

(COMMENT, BELOW)