Bipartisan majorities of Congress support renewed funding for Ukraine, but it’s still in doubt that more aid will be approved for the embattled Western ally.
The Biden administration is warning that money will run out for Ukraine at the end of the year and is proposing a package of $106 billion for Ukraine, Israel, and the border, with roughly $61 billion for Ukraine. (The New York Times cited Pentagon officials as saying the current aid can last through winter.)
At issue in Congress is the level of funding, what transparency and accountability provisions are appropriate, and how to deal with the border.
The first thing to say about all this is that it’d be national-security malpractice for Congress to cut off Ukraine.
The debate comes against the backdrop of a largely stalled Ukrainian counteroffensive. The West had high hopes for the Ukrainian operation, but it has ground down against deeply dug-in Russian forces, supplemented by Moscow’s traditional willingness to solve military problems with prodigious supplies of artillery and manpower. The U.S. thinks the Ukrainians should have concentrated their attack in one area; the Ukrainians think the U.S. underestimates the importance of Ukraine’s lack of air superiority and how drones and other technologies have transformed the battlefield, while it has been slow to provide Kyiv needed weapons systems.
Regardless, Ukraine now likely needs to shift to a more defensive approach that conserves men and matériel for a struggle of attrition.
This is a disappointment compared to a vision of Ukraine sweeping to rapid victory, but it doesn’t mean that the U.S. investment in Kyiv’s war effort has been a failure; on the contrary, without America’s assistance, Russia very likely would have taken Kyiv in the early days of the war. Instead, Ukraine has held the Russian behemoth to its eastern territory. One can easily imagine a counterfactual in which a triumphant Russia was hard against Poland’s border, or menacing Estonia by now. Ukraine’s fight for self-preservation has buffered our NATO allies from a revanchist Russia, while significantly degrading Moscow’s military forces.
To dump Ukraine now would amount to an egregious abandonment of a foreign partner — and it’d be occasioned by a relatively small cost to Americans compared with previous overseas commitments that we lost our stomach for.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands of Americans had been killed in combat, over the course of years or even decades. Of course, not a single American has died in Ukraine. The amount of assistance that the U.S. had transferred barely tops $100 billion. That’s a large number considered by itself, but a modest one in terms of the scale of the threat from Russia and our overall defense budget — not to mention that there’d be significant costs to a Russian victory, too.
The funding has also given the U.S. defense-industrial base a jolt in a way that standing idly by never would have. Our friends who warn that America’s Ukraine assistance hampers efforts to arm Taiwan are missing this critical part of the equation. U.S. officials were so complacent about our ability to produce weapons and ammunition for so long that the relative revival of America’s defense industry that’s taking place would not have come about absent Washington’s commitment to Kyiv.
The benefits of a continued ramp-up will accrue directly to our defense posture, and to U.S. partners such as Taiwan and Israel, as well.
Congress should approve the new Ukraine funding. As for more accountability, as some skeptical Republicans demand, whatever measures add to our understanding of where money is going are useful; purely pretextual demands meant to gum up the works aren’t.
Of course, many Republicans want to extract concessions on immigration, too. The House Republican position is that they want all of the immigration measures they passed earlier in the year, in H.R. 2. That was the best enforcement bill ever passed by a chamber of the U.S. Congress and would be a massive leap ahead of where we are now, but is obviously a nonstarter in a negotiation with a Democratic Senate and Democratic president.
A more achievable goal, and one that would make a significant difference in the situation at the border, would involve serious restrictions on parole and mandates for more detention space. Simply giving this administration more resources and more authorities to detain and remove migrants would be meaningless, since the administration is declining to use the resources and authorities it already has. Republicans have to insist on airtight provisions that prevent the parole of migrants except for very limited reasons — for example, medical emergencies and court appearances — and that direct the rapid construction of adequate detention facilities on the border.
If the message is ever sent south of the border that people entering the U.S. illegally won’t be released into the country, the flow will diminish. But this requires detaining these illegal immigrants and returning them home, which is supposed to happen under the law anyway.
The argument will be heard that Republicans are holding an important national-security goal hostage to border politics. Of course, the other way to look at it is that the Democrats are making continued Ukraine funding dependent on a continued open border. If the connection between Ukraine funding and U.S. border provisions is arbitrary, the negotiation is an opportunity to make progress on two important national goals — keeping Ukraine in the fight against Russia and bringing a greater element of sanity to our border.
Since this is Congress, failure is always an option, but would be remarkably short-sighted and self-defeating.