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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.
No. 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?
No. 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.
