A Dispassionate Case for Supporting Ukraine
It's not about arming Ukraine; It's about disarming Putin
Perhaps you’re not sold on this whole breathless support for Ukraine thing... I get it.
You don’t owe anyone an apology for questioning why an imperfect democracy’s squabble with its next door neighbor should be subsidized by the American taxpayer. You probably wonder why Ukraine has suddenly earned “blank check” status from Congress. You’re right to ask questions, and it’s entirely healthy to take at least a slightly skeptical approach toward this or any other prevailing political narrative.
Let’s set Ukraine aside for a moment and consider the nature of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The Russian leader is a deeply corrupt kleptocrat who likely murdered hundreds of innocents to consolidate his power and continues to murder rivals and opponents to maintain his power.
Putin runs a broken down gas station that employs a whole lot of muscle.
With a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) smaller than that of Italy or Canada, the Russian Federation greatly under-performs on its vast economic potential. In spite of this, Russia commits between 4%-5% of GDP per year to military spending. By comparison, Canada devotes around 1.4%, and Italy spends about 1.6% of its economic capacity on defense.
As with any neighborhood bully, Vladimir Putin is insecure. He demands respect he does not deserve, and he picks on those he calculates he can overpower. To paraphrase the late Senator John McCain, Russia is effectively a gas station masquerading as a nuclear superpower. Though extremely rich in natural resources, Russia suffers domestically from a culture of corruption and extreme income inequality.
Call it “superpower envy,” because Putin is overcompensating for an anemic domestic economy.
Let’s set aside Putin and Russian military commanders for a moment – ask the average Russian citizen which country is their top adversary, and you’ll likely be told it’s the United States. The average Russian is inundated with anti-Western, anti-American propaganda that fosters a sense of siege mentality among the populace. Why is Russia’s economy a shell of what it could be? America. Why does Russia spend tens of billions on its military when rural Russians are literally starving? NATO Aggression.
The current War in Ukraine notwithstanding, the Russian military isn’t as pathetic as we may think. The country that gave us the AK-47 has a proven knack for producing cost-effective, user-friendly military equipment that keeps relative pace with Western technological advances. Russian fifth-generation fighter aircraft rival American F-35’s for a fraction the unit cost, and Russian anti-aircraft capabilities are so robust that Turkey was actually kicked out of the F-35 program because the NATO member went all-in on Russia’s advanced S-400 missile defense system.
China + Russia = a powerful force for bad.
Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have fostered closer ties and deeper cooperation agreements in recent years. China brings economic might and the world’s largest population and workforce to the table while Russia offers an impressive military industrial complex and a deep well of natural resources. Together, China and Russia make for a formidable adversary to the West.
In terms of American military readiness, every loss to Russian offensive capabilities is a net gain to American defensive capabilities. Putin’s economy is slowly cratering due to economic sanctions, a devastating brain drain, and catastrophic battlefield losses, and now even Russia’s prodigious defense industrial base is further eroded by cannibalization due to Putin’s “partial mobilization.”
At the outset of the war in Ukraine, the Russian Federation boasted twice as many tanks as the United States Armed Forces. After losing nearly 7,500 combat vehicles, including over 1,400 tanks, Russia has now been forced to pull mothballed and antiquated battle tanks from deep storage – many of which are nearly as old as Putin himself.
And with Russian military capabilities deeply degraded, that intimidating Russia-China dynamic duo suddenly becomes a little less formidable.
Putin’s nuclear blackmail is hollow, but the West risks setting a terrible precedent.
Assuming for a moment that Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling is entirely genuine, the West faces a crisis of precedent. This would usher in a world in which the cruel hold the peaceful hostage. A bully who loses a fight cannot be allowed to bring a bomb to school. The West must show unified resolve in the face of terroristic threats. If the West capitulates to Putin’s demands, they risk incentivizing every tin pot dictator the world over to pursue nuclear capabilities and leverage those capabilities at every turn. At such a point, nuclear weaponry becomes the trump card which overrules any act of global diplomacy.
If Putin were to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, he would undoubtedly incur the wrath of the world. His domestic approval would suffer its greatest hit since mass mobilization, and he risks inviting a Western-backed, or perhaps even an organic coup within the Kremlin. China has no interest in nuclear escalation and would therefore distance itself from Putin’s actions, and India would likely cease its economic partnership with Russia. Such an action would be political suicide for Putin, and it may even cost him his life.
At every step in the Russian invasion, Western intelligence has telegraphed Russian actions. While we cannot underestimate Russia’s unconventional weapons capabilities, we cannot overestimate their operations security capabilities. In February, US intelligence warned the world that invasion was imminent even as Russian leaders denied their true intentions. American intelligence has led to dozens of senior Russian military officers being targeted by precision strikes, and Western intelligence no doubt contributed to the Ukrainian sinking of the Russian flagship Moscow. Putin’s actions have been telegraphed by the West, and it’s led to panic and general sense of defeat within the Kremlin. An order to go nuclear would also be telegraphed by the West, and it’s likely that decisive action would be taken before such an event could even take place.
American investment in downsizing Russia’s military is already paying dividends.
Unlike with support for the Mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war, the United States is not winning today’s battle by arming tomorrow’s enemy. Ukrainians yearn to build ties with the West. They are literally begging for NATO membership. In Ukraine, the United States is strengthening a bulwark against Russian aggression – and perhaps even Chinese aggression. In Ukraine, the United States is investing in a vital geopolitical partnership for generations to come.
It's impossible to accurately determine the monetary value of Russian equipment losses in Ukraine, but Russian equipment losses undoubtedly dwarf American military investment in Ukraine. At this point, Russia has lost control of the momentum in Ukraine, and with it Putin has lost his ability to project meaningful, conventional offensive military power for many years, if not decades. Approximately half of Russia’s original invading force is either dead or permanently unfit for combat. Entire battalion-sized units, including vaunted Russian Spetsnaz formations, now exist only on paper.
Russia was until recently considered the second-most powerful military in the world. Today it’s probably only the second-most powerful military within Ukraine. Putin’s colonial ambitions have been utterly dashed, and his once compliant subjects now find themselves embroiled in a bloody and expensive war of attrition. With hundreds of thousands of Russian men being forcefully conscripted into the war, Putin’s so-called “special military operation” is not the distant incursion it once seemed.
American investment is setting an important precedent far beyond Russia and Ukraine.
Our allies on the democratically governed island of Taiwan are watching nervously as the West demonstrates its commitment to global order. While it’s true that Putin doesn’t pose the same conventional military threat once posed by Hitler, the Western world nonetheless risks setting a Chamberlain-esque precedent to bully states and rogue nuclear nations. This isn’t just about Ukraine – this is about maintaining a peaceful world order in which aggressors are universally condemned and victims of aggression are empowered by the free world.
So, while $17.5 billion (and counting) is certainly a high price for the American taxpayer, it’s a drop in the bucket when compared to annual American military expenditures. For context, The US will likely spend $1 trillion on the F-35 lifetime program alone, and current American spending on Ukrainian military assistance is the rough equivalent to just one Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier.
$20 billion – or even $200 billion – is a small price to pay to de-militarize a hostile near-peer adversary and to uphold the peaceful world order.