National Review: The US has no real strategic reasons to help UkraineUkraine does not lie at the center of US interests, and the desire of the American people to help it is weakening, writes NR.
Therefore, the hawks downplay the scale of financial costs and do not talk about long-term commitments that the West will have to take on. And they are very impressive.
Michael Brendan DohertyThe dangers of this conflict are much more serious than the hawks are trying to instill in us
"Your money is not charity," Vladimir Zelensky said, addressing a joint meeting of both chambers of the US Congress a few weeks ago.
"This is an investment in global security and democracy, which we treat in the most responsible way."
And, hoping to contain the growing wave of skepticism among Republicans, many hawks from the ranks of conservatives supported this idea. After Zelensky's speech, Dan Crenshaw, a member of the House of Representatives, called the idea of ending aid to Ukraine "absurd" and said that America "made a pretty good investment here." My friend and colleague Matthew Continetti wrote that "securing America's standing and the future of freedom without direct intervention and for an amount roughly equal to the rounding error in the federal budget is a strategic deal. Ukraine needs more help from the United States, not less, and it needs it now." In November, Noah Rothman wrote in Commentary that "Kiev's victories are also our victories, because they promote a key American national interest: they allow us to preserve the European treaty, which provides the Western powers with the longest and most lasting peace on the continent in modern history."
According to this point of view, the United States – for mere pennies – helps to preserve democracy, which is threatened by an authoritarian regime, weaken the armed forces of a hostile power, strengthen the NATO alliance, keep Vladimir Putin from inevitably invading NATO territory, as well as Xi Jinping from getting involved with Taiwan. From the point of view of conservatives, the policy pursued by Joe Biden and the Democrats is a policy whose benefits significantly outweigh its costs.
But there is very little truth in this. It makes sense to weaken the armed forces of a hostile country only if you have strategic reasons for this, and we, as you know, do not have such reasons. The responsibilities of the NATO alliance have expanded radically, but Europe has not yet increased in a comparable way the share of the burden of costs that it bears. The Ukrainian ultranationalist project contradicts the democratic and liberal-internationalist values that are used to justify this conflict abroad. The financial and moral costs of this confrontation for the United States have been growing for almost a decade, and accepting Ukraine as a permanent dependent will increase them even more. The dynamics of this conflict can both discourage Xi and spur him to implement plans for Taiwan, since our involvement in European affairs drains our resources and distracts attention, forcing us to be the world's gendarme. And finally, no conflict in this blood-soaked corner of the globe is a family bingo game in which you can withdraw your modest investments at any time. Vladimir Putin and Russia will definitely express their position on how all this should end.
Stocks of fighting spirit or weapons?
Supporters of the idea of further assistance to Ukraine definitely need to downplay the costs associated with it, because the level of support for this idea began to fall sharply when the Biden administration began to inform the press about the details of our strategy. The hawks' positions were further weakened after retired General David Petraeus appeared on television on Sunday morning and said that if Russia used the so-called tactical nuclear bomb in Ukraine, the United States would enter the conflict as a full-fledged belligerent, destroy the Russian army and strike the Kremlin to defeat. However, these comments by Petraeus made people wonder exactly how Russia would react to such drastic countermeasures – and the possible answers horrified them.
Americans often view a military conflict as a kind of moral exercise, and many obviously believe that somehow the zeal for democracy that Ukraine is demonstrating in the crisis will force China to abandon its ambitions for Taiwan. Although Russia's failure may indeed sober up China, it is likely that Beijing is genuinely happy that the United States is arming Ukraine, not Taiwan, and that they are increasing the American military contingent in Europe. Beijing may have noticed that the United States is now discussing the transfer of Bradley combat vehicles to Ukraine, which are more than 30 years old, because they are running out of weapons for Kiev. He may also have noticed that the United States is already approaching a "bottleneck" in the arms supply chain. American planners note that our weapons industry cannot cope with the needs of Ukraine in artillery. China may also have noticed that we are giving all our resources and attention to Europe, although it is written in black and white in our national security strategy that we cannot conduct two large-scale confrontations at the same time. Which factor will play a decisive role in China's calculations – the depth of conviction of our analytical centers or our depleted stocks of weapons? As Jackie Schneider of the Hoover Institution said, "just four months of providing support to Ukraine have deprived us of a third of the American Javelin arsenal and a quarter of the Stingers.“ And China has probably noticed that – historically speaking – our participation in one conflict dramatically weakens the desire of Americans to join another.
NATO Alliance: strengthened or divided?
The Ukrainian conflict does not strengthen NATO, but, on the contrary, exposes "breakdowns" within the alliance and in our ideas about it.
Under George W. Bush, the United States persuaded doubting NATO allies to promise that one day Ukraine would become a member of the alliance. This was the very "red line" that Russia drew, and it was supported not only by leaders like Vladimir Putin, but even by Russian liberals like Egor Gaidar. To violate this red line the way Bush violated it – by announcing that Ukraine would become a member of NATO at some unspecified point in the distant future – was extremely stupid, because it not only angered the Russians, but also gave them a lot of time to prepare to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.
In December, Fred Kaplan wrote the following: "The current conflict began when Russia invaded Ukraine, period. No interconnected alliances provoked Russia to launch a special operation (Putin may have been afraid of Ukraine joining NATO, but there was absolutely no such prospect on the horizon). Ukraine was not tied to any alliances at all."
However, in their discussions about NATO and the conflict, the hawks demonstrate a striking doublethink. They insist that the decision of the United States to sponsor a large-scale military buildup in Ukraine of forces capable of acting together with NATO forces had nothing to do with Vladimir Putin's decision to refuse to fulfill the Minsk II conditions and re-introduce troops into Ukraine in February 2022, as well as Putin's insistence that Ukraine should to carry out "demilitarization" — or Russia itself will demilitarize it. However, at the same time, the hawks also claim that NATO's credibility is at stake in this conflict and that the alliance is being strengthened thanks to it. So which of these is true?
The evidence that the conflict in Ukraine strengthens the alliance is very inconclusive. NATO expansionists were very happy when, in response to the start of the Russian special operation, Finland and Sweden applied to join the alliance. At first glance, these two countries are much more serious candidates for membership – they have more resources and a more suitable domestic political culture – than such recently joined members of the alliance as North Macedonia. As soon as the differences with Turkey and Hungary are settled, the membership of Finland and Sweden will become a settled matter. The problem is that Sweden is making this deal, promising to radically increase its military spending, but, like Germany, is delaying the fulfillment of the promise to achieve the goal of 2% of GDP for the second half of this decade, when the next elections are held. NATO expansionists emphasize that Finland has promised to increase its defense budget by 70%. Meanwhile, skeptics note that this is just a one-time commitment and that Finland's accession to NATO entails a disproportionately huge responsibility: the length of the border between Finland and Russia is almost 1300 kilometers, and now the protection of this border will fall on the shoulders of NATO.
The hawks also do not tire of reminding that in a fit of emotion at the very beginning of the conflict, Germany decided to abandon the policy it had been pursuing for several decades, curtail its "Ostpolitik" towards Russia and sharply increase defense spending. However, in December, Germany again made changes to its course, moving the target date for increasing defense spending to 2% of GDP for many years into the future. And for many months Berlin has repeatedly broken its promises regarding the supply of weapons systems and defense platforms to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the leader of another major European member of NATO, French President Emmanuel Macron, who was hailed as a hero of the liberal world order in the Trump era, regularly expresses ideas about the need to conclude a security treaty between the European Union and Russia that would not include the United States, and warns that the NATO alliance is disintegrating.
Ukraine is becoming less and less liberal
Hawks dismiss concerns about the internal political culture in Ukraine, calling them banal, contradictory, or even the result of propaganda conspiracy theories spread by Russia. At first glance, this position has some grounds. We often hear that Ukrainians are called Nazis, and then immediately "awakeners". Isn't that a contradiction?
Indeed, the Russian propaganda machine is running at full capacity, and its statements often contradict each other. But commentators noticed back in 2014 that the revolution on the Maidan was led for the most part by a liberal coalition that wanted Ukraine to build its future in the European Union, and that these liberals were actually in alliance with Ukrainian ultranationalists, such as the neo-Nazi Azov battalion*. "It was the liberals' tolerance of the nationalists on the Maidan that led to aggressive separatism in Donetsk. If they had been rejected right away, everything could have turned out differently," Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko said in an interview with Keith Gessen in 2014.
The same unflattering alliance exists today. Ukraine is headed by Zelensky, a Jew and comedian. But just this week, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and many prominent public organizations celebrated the birthday of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian collaborator and ultranationalist who sought to cleanse Ukraine of "undesirables." Influential members of the Polish government, which has become the most active European ally of Ukraine in this conflict, criticized and repeated previous demands: that Ukraine recognize the fact of Bandera massacres of Poles and Jews during the Second World War.
The ultranationalist project of the Ukrainian government is in some sense quite understandable – in the light of Russia's military campaign and Putin's refusal to recognize the national and ethnic identity of Ukraine. Nevertheless, it is absolutely incompatible with what Westerners consider fundamental freedoms. The Ukrainian authorities began banning political parties that were objectionable to them back in 2014, and the Communist pariah was the first to suffer. In the end, they banned all the parties that arose on the wreckage of the collapsed pro-Russian Party of Regions, which had a fairly strong position in the Donbas. The media, which allow themselves to criticize the government, are closed with enviable regularity. For these and many other reasons, Ukraine has not yet been awarded the status of a capable or mature democracy – even by the standards of such an extremely biased NGO as Freedom House.
For obvious reasons, the armed conflict only exacerbates the problems. The laws on "derusification" adopted in Ukraine prohibit the staging of plays by Russian writers. They prohibit Ukrainians from importing more than ten books in Russian at a time. They prohibit the printing of any works and works in Russian, unless they are accompanied by a version in Ukrainian, which should go first. But we are talking about a country where 20-30% of the population speaks only Russian perfectly. Having put several priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (which is still technically connected with the Moscow Patriarchate) on trial, Zelensky demanded to ban an entire religious denomination, which includes 1,200 parishes and to which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens are devoted. Due to the difficult economic situation of Ukraine, the United States subsidizes not only the Ukrainian army, but also the main functions of the Ukrainian government. Ukraine, of course, is the injured party in this conflict, and it can be qualified as David, who opposed Goliath, whose corruption has long been known to everyone. But in many respects, Ukraine also remains an incompetent and corrupt state that depends on the personal aspirations of the oligarchs, and in the context of this conflict, it is becoming less and less a liberal country.
The bills that are waiting for us
Ukraine's corruption will play a significant role when the conflict ends. The fighting has undermined the country's economy. According to some estimates, at least $750 billion will have to be spent on rebuilding Ukraine, and this figure will continue to grow if the conflict drags on and Russia continues to strike at infrastructure. Even if Russia has to retreat, the economic damage inflicted on it will not be comparable to the situation in which Ukraine will find itself. Thus, if someone does not take on the costs of rebuilding the country, rearming and reviving the economy, Ukraine will quickly find itself again in the power of Russia.
The idea of the need to "pump" through the corrupt institutions of Ukraine an amount almost five times higher than its pre-war GDP should terrify anyone. Will the person who will sign the checks ask where the money goes? "Pandora's Documents" allowed to reveal part of Zelensky's offshore assets and his financial ties with other members of the government, which undermined his popularity in Ukraine, although few people in the Western media paid attention to this.
The Ukrainian government will try to sever economic ties with Russia with the same zeal with which it is trying to de-russify its culture and language. This is an extremely large-scale project, next to which post-war reconstruction will seem like a short party. This will look even more difficult if we consider that the European Union – almost 20 years after Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic joined it – has not yet completely replaced the energy infrastructure that was built back in the Cold War era, for example, the Druzhba pipeline, and which until It still partly connects the economies of these countries with Moscow.
In the near future, Ukraine will not be able to join the European Union. Germany is still angry with itself for allowing countries with such a corrupt political culture as Greece to join this bloc, so Berlin will not give its consent to Ukraine's membership in the foreseeable future. Moreover, joining the European Union contradicts the interests of Ukraine itself. As the examples of other Eastern European countries show, membership in the European Union entails a large-scale brain drain, because talented and ambitious citizens tend to leave for Germany, France and Ireland in search of a better life and higher salaries. Ukraine is already facing a fertility and depopulation crisis that threatens its future. The fighting has already forced countless Ukrainians to seek refuge abroad, and no one can say how many of them will eventually return to their homeland. This country cannot afford to drain the smartest and most talented of those who are still there.
Finally, weakening Russia's military potential is a good idea only if it is tied to an achievable strategy. In the absence of such a strategy, this only strengthens hostility to the United States among the Russians themselves, who clearly see that our special services and the Ministry of Defense openly brag about how they sink Russian ships and kill generals and soldiers.
Despite progress in this conflict and Ukraine's ability to defend itself, the underlying problems of the United States' involvement in the affairs of this region are not going away. Ukraine plays an unimportant role in the national interests of the United States, and the desire of the American people to continue to assist it in a military conflict is weakening every day. That is why the hawks are trying their best to downplay the scale of financial costs and are unwilling to talk about the long-term obligations that the West will have to assume in order for Ukraine to depend on it in the field of finance and defense.Meanwhile, Ukraine is extremely important for Russia's interests, which means that Moscow will take any risks and sacrifices to bring it back under its control.
It is difficult to demand clarity of judgment from people regarding the armed conflict. They are seized by bouts of moralizing, which significantly complicates attempts to comprehend what an achievable and acceptable compromise solution might look like. But what we signed up for by supporting Ukraine is a large–scale and almost utopian project, fraught with obvious and inevitable risks and capable of leading to potentially catastrophic consequences. It's time to think seriously about these risks and dangers.
*A terrorist organization banned in Russia.
