Questions for the Washington Uniparty on Ukraine, One Year Later | Opinion
President Joe Biden's surprise visit to Ukrainian premier Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv earlier this week was an unmistakable sign of solidarity with Ukraine on the one-year anniversary of Russian kingpin Vladimir Putin's
reckless, unjust invasion. To the extent Biden's aim was to send such a
symbolic message to Moscow and its allies, he succeeded.
Unfortunately,
Biden's trip, especially seen in concert with recent similar actions
such as Zelensky's December speech before a joint session of Congress and even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) sartorial choice to wear a Ukrainian flag-colored necktie
to Biden's State of the Union address earlier this month, raises a
number of discomfiting questions about the Washington, D.C. uniparty's
seemingly interminable commitment to prolonging this Eastern European
quagmire. On the one-year anniversary of the culmination of Europe's
first extended land war since World War II, here are some pressing
questions for establishment politicians from both major political
parties.
1. What is the meaning of "as long as it takes?"
In Kyiv, Biden reiterated that the U.S. "will remain with Ukraine as
long as it takes." This presumably entails both a moral and, more
relevant, fiscal commitment—indeed, Biden promised a new tranche of
military aid to Ukraine, on top of the $113 billion in aid U.S.
taxpayers dispensed with in 2022, and on top of recently announced
top-tier materiel such as Patriot missile defense systems. But items
such as Patriot missile defense systems and M142 HIMARS rocket launchers
don't grow on trees; resources are necessarily scarce, and each
additional item we ship off into a proxy war against a nuclear-armed
hegemon necessarily depletes our own military arsenal. Furthermore,
America is massively indebted with soaring annual budget deficits. And
Chinese President Xi Jinping surely grins as America strips bare our military and ships off the parts to Europe, not Asia. So how long is "as long as it takes"—and, related, do we simply not care at all about the costs?
2. Is the U.S. national interest in the conflict synonymous with Ukraine's national interest?
The bipartisan foreign policy establishment's absolutist stand with
Ukraine—at seemingly all costs, "as long as it takes," and so
forth—implicitly conflates the national interests of the U.S. and
Ukraine. After all, if the U.S. is that existentially committed
to Ukrainian "victory"—whatever precisely that entails, and however
Zelensky defines it—then it follows that our national interest in the conflict
is precisely coterminous with Ukraine's own national interest. But
although there is strong overlap, this is simply not the case; the
national interests are not coterminous. Ukraine's national interest is
indeed the maximalist stance Zelensky espouses—namely, refusal to
countenance yielding even a square foot of territory in the Donbas (or
Crimea). The U.S. national interest, by contrast, is definitely served
by Zelensky's remaining in power in Kyiv and not being toppled for an
Alexander Lukashenko-style Moscow puppet; crucially, however, there is
exceedingly little (if any) U.S. interest in where the exact national
boundary lines are drawn in eastern Ukraine, where the population is
often closely divided between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. The
crude post-Soviet dissolution boundaries in this part of the world are
not akin to Moses descending Mount Sinai with the Word of God.
3. Is the U.S. fearful of all-out war with Russia?
Russia is the country with the single most confirmed nuclear weapons in
the entire world: 6,255, as of 2021. (The U.S. was second, with 5,550
at that time.) As Zelensky sometimes flirts with openly calling for
World War III, and continually endeavors to drag NATO—and thus, the
U.S.—further into the conflict, does the prospect of cataclysmic nuclear
war with Russia not cross the minds of the Washington uniparty and
bipartisan foreign policy "blob?" That fear, if anything, should be
exacerbated by Putin's de facto withdrawal of Russia, over the past
week, from the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). Putin
(loathsomely) speculates fairly openly about deploying nuclear
weapons—all while the U.S., as well as European nations such as Germany
and Poland, ship off increasingly sophisticated materiel. Is no one here
interested in de-escalation and avoiding what Biden not-so-reassuringly referred to last October as nuclear "Armageddon?"
4. Has the U.S. learned anything about "endless wars?"
The American public is naturally war-weary after decades of failed
regime change wars and moralistic nation-building crusade boondoggles.
There is simply no political appetite right now for a dramatically
prolonged military engagement—especially one in Europe, while our actual
top geopolitical threat, China, flies spy balloons
over our continent unimpeded and tests nuclear-capable hypersonic
missiles around the world. The Washington uniparty's desire for
escalation in Eastern Europe may aid rapacious Beltway defense
contractors, but it is manifestly contrary to the expressed interests of
the American people, who would rather our elected officials focus
instead on our own porous southern border with Mexico. In every way, the
Biden administration's current approach is "America Last," not "America
First."
5. What is the U.S.'s long-term plan to deal with Russia?
It is unclear at best whether anyone in a foreign policy
decision-making capacity has given a second of thought to what
U.S.-Russian relations might possibly look like when this war is finally
over. At this rate, and absent a course correction toward de-escalation
and direct mediated negotiation between the warring parties, Moscow
will loathe America and Europe after the conflict even more than they
did prior to the conflict's onset. But given that China, and not Russia,
is this century's dominant threat to America, a shrewder and more
forward-looking approach to the conflict would at least lay the
groundwork for possibly peeling Russia away from China and slightly
closer to the Western sphere of influence after the war is over.
Unfortunately, there is thus far no reason to believe this has a chance.
Political leaders of both parties should be asked these important
questions. The stakes, as Biden's "Armageddon" slip of the tongue
inadvertently revealed, could not possibly be higher.
