Many of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters, it must be said, are deeply hostile to the idea that another cent of US funding should be directed towards the Ukrainian Government’s ongoing defense of its nation in the apparently endless war with Russia. This weekend, as the US Congress finally voted through a $60.8billion aid package, the opposition was led by Republicans. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene offered an amendment which would have reduced every dollar amount in the aid package to zero. In the end, a small majority of Republican Congresspeople voted against it, with the bill passing with the unified support of Democrats and a minority of Republicans.
The stated reason on the “MAGA” right of American politics for not wanting to fund Ukraine is, of course, that the US has problems of its own. There is a significant issue on its southern border, with immigration now reliably one of the top two issues for American voters heading into November’s election. Why are we funding Ukraine, many Republicans ask, when our own borders are not secure?
It’s a fair question. Or it would be, had the majority of those same Republicans not voted – within literal minutes of their vote against funding Ukraine – to send almost $40billion to Israel and Taiwan to aid the militaries of those two countries. Congresswoman Taylor-Greene offered no amendment to reduce the dollar amounts in those bills to zero.
Apparently, only some foreign aid dollars could be better spent at home. And apparently, only some “foreign wars” should be defunded.
Indeed, beyond the matter of funding, Ukrainians probably looked at events in Israel last weekend with a mixture of bafflement and anger: When Iran fired hundreds of Shahed drones at Israeli cities, the US Air Force and the Royal Air Force took to the skies to shoot them down. Yet Ukrainians can reasonably point out that hundreds of these very same Shahed drones – made in Iran and exported to Russia – are fired at their cities every other week. When that happens, the RAF and US Air Force can reliably be counted upon to stay safely on the ground.
Why are Israeli civilians worth defending from these weapons, and Ukrainian civilians not?
Trump, for his part, says it’s a matter of duty and responsibility: Europe, not the US, should take the lead role in defending Ukraine, he tweeted (or truthed) at the weekend.
Politically, of course, Trump is playing a game: Neither wanting to commit to funding Ukraine, in order to hint to the Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s of the world that he’s with them, or wanting to commit against it, in order to commit the old-school conservative wing of his party that he’s with them. In the style of the old-style con-man, he’s hoping that both sides will believe that it is the other that is being fooled. He is almost certainly right that both will.
On the policy, whatever about the politics, however, Trump is correct. One key difference between Ukraine on the one hand and both Israel and Taiwan on the other is that in the latter two cases, US interests are much more directly at stake: A huge preponderance of international shipping passes through the middle east, and the region is vital to US economic interests. The US is also in a formal military alliance with Israel, which has been a vital intelligence and security partner for Washington for decades. Similarly, Taiwan is the US’s single most important supplier of vital superconductor technology which, were the island to fall to China, has potentially crippling consequences for the US economy.
In Ukraine, however, the US national interest is vastly more limited. There is no alliance, and the economic impact of Russian control over Ukraine on the US is likely to be meagre. If a rationale for US support can be divined, it is more theoretical than practical: That deterring Russia would in turn deter China in the far east by demonstrating that the US is serious about opposing invasions of friendly countries.
In terms of economic interests, however, Ukraine is objectively less important to the US than either of the other two countries on which it lavished funding this weekend.
The reverse, of course, is true for Europe: While the EU shares a broad interest in keeping the Middle East peaceful, the Ukraine War is a much bigger threat to the EU than it is to the USA. Russia, after all, supplies most of the Gas (or did, before the war) that keeps European lights on. Russian nationalism, should it be permitted to metasize with eventual success in Ukraine, is likely to turn its eyes to other former provinces of the Russian Empire, which include at least three EU member states on the Baltic Coast. It is Europe, not the USA, which has been destabilized by a flood of Ukrainian refugees since the war began.
In economic terms, the EU as a whole is actually larger than the USA (estimated EU GDP of about US$26trillion versus $25.5trillion for the USA). Yet the US spends vastly more on its own defences and those of Europe than EU nations do.
In 2022, for example, total EU defence spending was estimated at $211billion. This is less than a third of what the Americans spend ($766billion), and only barely rises to more than a third of the US figure if you include the now-non-EU British, who spend about $54billion per year.
In terms of aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the war, the USA has contributed more in both dollar amounts and military equipment than the EU as a whole. When Donald Trump asks “why?”, doesn’t he have a point?
The irony here is that European Union opinion towards Ukraine is much more united than opinion in the US. European leaders can whinge and moan about the possibility of Trump winning the election and turning off the taps to Ukraine, but the bottom line is that the continent has the resources to replace that aid should it choose to do so.
That it is not doing so, thus far, at least, is a political choice. One that the Americans have every right to be sore about.