Stabbing Ukraine in the Back
How House Republicans are sabotaging Kyiv's war effort.
If House Republicans deliberately wanted to sabotage Ukraine’s war effort, it’s hard to imagine they’d be acting any differently than they are now.
First, Republicans in both the House and Senate insisted that any additional military aid to Ukraine and Israel include changes to America’s immigration policy. But when Senate Democrats and Republicans sat down to hammer out a compromise measure that would address stated Republican concerns on immigration and provide desperately needed military assistance to Ukraine, House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana all but declared it dead on arrival in the House. Under pressure from former president Trump and facing a potential rebellion from the far right, Johnson has refused to take yes for an answer and demanded assurances that “Ukraine will not be another Afghanistan”—never mind there are no American troops fighting in Ukraine or, more importantly, that Ukrainians have more than proven themselves willing, ready, and able to defend their nation against an unrelenting Russian onslaught over the past two years.
For their part, Senate Republicans seem to be operating in good faith—but they’re fighting what now appears to be a losing rearguard battle against their party’s ever-growing conservative isolationist tendencies. Along with Trump’s commanding victory in the Iowa primary, the House’s intransigence on Ukraine aid gives a good indication that the Republican Party has been almost fully captured by Trump’s isolationist, gated community mindset. Trump himself has been the party’s leader for almost a decade now, and that’s left its mark on his party’s foreign policy attitudes and orientation to the point that he and his followers effectively set the Republican foreign policy agenda.
That’s been apparent in the months-long ordeal President Biden’s most recent Ukraine aid request has faced in Congress. This episode has been disastrous for America’s national security, revealing even more the Republican Party’s continued descent into Trump-style isolationism and, more ominously, its seeming willingness to sacrifice American interests—not to mention the Ukrainian people—to sink its political rivals.
The domestic political implications of near-term Ukrainian battlefield defeats, moreover, would likely prove ruinous for President Biden. If Ukrainian forces started giving up large swathes of territory due to a lack of material support from the United States, he would almost certainly take a significant political hit. Though they would bear primary responsibility for engineering such a calamity, Republicans would undoubtedly attempt to hang it around President Biden’s political neck. That’s not to say Republican opposition to Ukraine aid is wholly cynical or partisan, however; many House Republicans no doubt sincerely object to supporting Kyiv’s war effort and see no problem with handing the Kremlin a victory in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian defeat and a Russian victory would, if anything, prove even more disastrous for the world. Naked aggression and brazen territorial conquest will have paid off, with the United States and other democracies appearing too weak and internally divided to do much of anything about it. The world will likely see more attempts by autocratic governments to change the status quo through force—with Taiwan the most obvious next target. It would be a world that will quickly come to be “dominated by the philosophy of force,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it before America entered World War II.
The main way to avoid such a bleak scenario is to keep Ukraine in the fight through the next twelve months—something that ought to be a top policy and political priority for President Biden. His late October attempt to link military aid for Ukraine and Israel fell short, in part because the White House did little to sell it to Congress or the American public. Success won’t win President Biden any credit with voters, but failure would damage his political standing and hurt his re-election chances.
In the short term, then, the Biden administration needs to keep Ukraine in the fight—with or without funding from Congress. For Ukraine itself, that likely means a shift to the strategic defensive in an attempt to deny Moscow any opportunity to make significant breakthroughs in the coming year. Kyiv already appears to have made such a decision, and the United States should help Ukraine conserve its military resources and deny Russia a victory in whatever way it can.
Equally important, the United States needs to better organize its allies to plug the gaps in support to Ukraine. To a certain extent, that’s already happening. America’s allies in Europe are aware of the problem, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz calling on the European Union to “step up” its military assistance to Ukraine and characterizing currently planned arms deliveries as “by all means too small.” Together with the United States, France has organized an “artillery coalition” of 23 nations to manufacture artillery shells and dozens of CAESAR mobile howitzers for Ukraine. NATO, for its part, announced plans to buy another 1,000 Patriot air defense missiles, while Japan changed its arms export rules to allow the export of Patriot missiles to backfill American stockpiles; both NATO member nations and Japan manufacture these missiles under license. A similar arrangement was struck with South Korea to indirectly supply artillery shells to Ukraine via the United States.
Comparably creative measures need to be put in place, and in a more systematic fashion—at least for now. America’s allies can’t fill this gap entirely and certainly not indefinitely, but they can help keep Kyiv in the fight until Congress gets its act together.
The Biden administration also needs to act with a greater sense of urgency than it has to date. It has promised and delivered weapons systems like modern tanks, ATACMS missiles, and F-16 fighters only after significant public hesitation and handwringing over possible escalation. These delays redounded against the United States, likely prolonging the war and allowing Putin to hold out hope that a second Trump presidency will deliver him from his Ukrainian quagmire. It’ll take much greater urgency to assemble a stopgap coalition for Ukraine in the days and weeks ahead.
Over the long term, however, internationalists on both the left and right need to build out a new vital center to counter both Trump-style conservative isolationists and the indecent left. It’s a difficult proposition, but a necessary one. Enough common ground exists between internationalists on the center-left and those on the center-right, but both sides need to recognize that this common ground in fact exists—that they have more in common with one another when it comes to foreign policy than they do with conservative isolationists or indecent leftists.
That will require them to pull together a common internationalist narrative to counter the gated community mindset of conservative isolationists and the “blame America first” worldview of the indecent left. These two factions share the notion that the world would be a better place if America absented itself from the global stage and left beleaguered nations like Ukraine to fend for themselves in the face of aggression and predation by their neighbors. Their narratives are as wrongheaded as they are false, but they have not been forthrightly challenged by internationalists—indeed, many internationalists on the center-left (including some now serving in the Biden administration) were content to echo the “endless war” rhetoric coming from the indecent left in recent years. Likewise, the conservative internationalists who remain in the Republican Party have failed to stand up to former president Trump and his America First acolytes in Congress.
Until this new vital center comes into being, though, the world will be in the dangerous and precarious situation where one of America’s two major political parties wants to shirk the geopolitical responsibilities that come with its objective economic and military power, with all the risk to the country and the world that entails.