Republicans Divided on Foreign Policy
As memory of the Cold War fades, so does support for American primacy.
Three WaPo reporters engage in a bit of hyperbole, asserting “A Republican ‘civil war’ on Ukraine erupts as Reagan’s example fades.”
When Ronald Reagan addressed a brand new organization of upstart conservatives nearly five decades ago, he cast U.S. entanglements abroad as part of the nation’s destiny to take on “leadership of the free world” and to serve as a shining “city on the hill” that inspired other countries, sparking thunderous applause.
At a dinner named after the former president at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering earlier this month, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake pushed a very different message to the party’s activists.
“We are living on planet crazy where we have hundreds of billions of dollars of our hard-earned American money being sent overseas to start World War III,” Lake said in her keynote address, inflating the amount of U.S. aid that’s been sent to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion. “This is not our fight. We are ‘America First!’”
Lake’s strident aversion to deepening American involvement in Ukraine, echoed by many speakers at CPAC, has been dismissed by some Republicans in Congress as a fringe viewpoint held by a handful of conservatives that does not meaningfully threaten NATO unity against Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Congress has appropriated more than $113 billion since the war started in multiple bipartisan votes.
At that inaugural CPAC in 1974, Reagan was near the end of his second term as governor of the largest state in the union. Lake is a former local news figure who has never held political office. I’m not sure their views should be given equal weight.
But, of course, Lake isn’t alone.
But Republican voters are increasingly adopting those same skeptical views, with surveys showing them becoming colder to continued U.S. aid as the conflict drags into its second year. Likely and declared GOP presidential candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former president Donald Trump, as well as a growing faction of Republican lawmakers in the House, are promoting that skepticism as well, with potentially seismic consequences for the conflict and the party itself.
DeSantis recently told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that helping Ukraine fend off Putin’s invasion is not a “vital” security interest for the United States, dismissing it as a “territorial dispute” in a written answer to Carlson’s Ukraine-related survey for 2024 candidates. (That marks a reversal from DeSantis’s earlier support for arming Ukraine in 2015 after Russia annexed Crimea.) Trump agreed, urged President Biden to negotiate a peace deal, and said Europe should pay back the United States for some of the funds they’ve provided Ukraine.
Trump is a Russian toady who was impeached (the first time) for strongarming Ukraine, so his views aren’t surprising. DeSantis, on the other hand, is a former Navy lawyer and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Whatever on thinks of his antics as Florida governor, he’s a serious player. I disagree with him on Ukraine, of course, but his position isn’t crazy. We’ll return to that later.
More than a year after Russia invaded, the war in Ukraine has reached a bloody stalemate, with troops on both sides fighting over mere yards of territory along a 600-mile long front line in the country’s south and east. The United States and western partners have donated tens of billions of dollars in ammunition and weapons systems, hoping to break the deadlock on the battlefield. But the prospect of a decisive victory, by either side, seems less likely than a grinding war of attrition with the possibility of a dangerous nuclear confrontation lurking just over the horizon.
Beneath the shift from Reagan to Lake is a story of the Republican Party’s own transformation on foreign policy in the past few decades, as a segment of notable conservative figures — most influentially, Trump — began to overtly reject the Cold War-era Reagan posture of leading the “free world” to push a very different view of America’s role in the world.
“This is an ongoing civil war, and I think that the realists and those of us who believe in a more restrained foreign policy have momentum,” said Dan Caldwell, vice president at the Center for Renewing America, the policy shop led by former Trump White House budget director Russ Vought. “You are seeing more Republicans at the grass-roots level, at the policymaker level, and even at the institutional and donor level embracing a foreign policy of realism and restraint.”
I would argue that realism and restraint is the default US foreign policy position, regardless of party, going back to our earliest days. The Cold War made it seem otherwise, making whether a given otherwise insignificant country was “red” or “blue” matter in what amounted to a giant game of Risk.
In recent memory, the Republican Party has often been aligned with a muscular foreign policy summed up by Reagan’s “peace through strength.” Long before Reagan, however, there had been a tradition on the American right of nationalism and skepticism toward foreign intervention (sometimes called isolationism, though today’s conservatives reject that term). The motto of “America First” originated with a group of influential conservatives who opposed aiding the Allies at the outbreak of World War II.
Again, it’s not just the right. Hell, Franklin Roosevelt ran for re-election in 1940, for an unprecedented third term, on a platform of keeping us out of what would become World War II. Despite John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson getting us into the war, the 1968 and 1972 Democratic nominees ran on a platform of getting us out of Vietnam. The humanitarian interventions of the post-Cold War period, and the “Global War on Terror” that followed the 9-11 attacks, had significant opposition from the pacifist left and the paleocon right.
After the war, the threat of the Soviet Union and international communism served to unite Republicans behind a more aggressive foreign policy, temporarily papering over ideological differences over America’s role in the world, according to Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University.
“As soon as the Cold War comes to an end, that kind of nationalistic, noninterventionist strain of the conservative movement comes roaring back,” Hemmer said. Most prominently, failed presidential candidate Pat Buchanan revived the “America First” slogan to advocate for withdrawing from overseas military entanglements in the 1990s. Republicans criticized President Bill Clinton’s interventions in Somalia and Kosovo, and George W. Bush campaigned for president in 2000 by opposing the concept of nation-building abroad.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed Bush’s plans, and his presidency became dominated by a doctrine of preemptive strikes and interventionism premised on promoting democracy. For a time, the anti-interventionist strain of conservative thought appeared extinct, summed up by Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot as “four or five people in a phone booth.”
But by the time Bush left office, the costly and drawn-out conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan became a drain on his approval rating, including among Republicans. A resurgence of antiwar sentiment fueled Rep. Ron Paul’s long-shot, but attention-grabbing, presidential bid in 2008 and the tea party wave of 2010. In 2014, the network of conservative groups led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch expanded investments in foreign policy, setting up think tanks, advocacy groups and activist organizations that built an intellectual case for a more restrained approach to foreign affairs.
“Being more hawkish isn’t necessarily a real political winner in 2012, and by the time that Trump comes around in 2016, he sees an opening with key parts of that Republican base that are done with the Bush wars and this idea of remaking large parts of the world in America’s image,” said Douglas Kriner, a professor of government at Cornell University.
Yes. But, again, that’s hardly a Republican-only position. Barack Obama upset favorite Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries precisely because he, alone among the serious contenders, had opposed the Iraq War.
More fundamentally, starting with the 1992 election, domestic issues, not foreign policy, dominated our presidential campaigns. Certainly, the Iraq War was a major issue in 2004 and 2008 but, as stark as the foreign policy views of Obama and John McCain were from each other, the economy was far and away the bigger issue. Certainly, 2016 was almost entirely about domestic issues—with foreign policy factoring in only to the extent that trade and the like impacted the home front.
Writing on her Substack, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson asks, “Do Republicans really not care about Ukraine?” The answer turns out to be a bit complicated.
She contrasts DeSantis’ messaging on Ukraine with that of Nikki Haley:
“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory, including avoiding a wider war…If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine. And if Russia wins, then its closest allies, China and Iran, will become more aggressive.”
That’s more or less my position, as well as that of Republicans like Lindsey Graham.
She provides this graphic of polling from Echelon Insights:
Presuming this polling is accurate, there has been a steady souring on the war effort by those who lean Republican. Indeed, answers to the question have essentially flip-flopped over the course of the year.
But then she looks at the crosstabs and breaks it down demographically:
She observes,
[W]hen you take party out of the equation and you look at which voter groups tend to be more supportive of the view that U.S. interests aren’t really at stake, it isn’t exactly the demographic groups you think of as “MAGA Republican”.
[…]
Men, white voters, seniors…they are the ones most likely to say, you know what, Ukraine’s war is our war. (Caveat: In our January survey crosstabs, gender and race divides were more muted.)
The notion that this is just a view held by viewers of Fox News primetime misses that there are many Americans who have probably never watched a minute of conservative cable news in their lives who nevertheless haven’t been persuaded by our leaders that “Ukraine’s war is our war.”
That’s not shocking.
Anderson, who was born around the time I was a high school senior (1983-84), offers her own evolution:
My entrypoint into “center-right” thought came about in high school, upon learning about the Cold War and the depravity of Communism. I have joked that I’m the only person who came away from reading The Handmaid’s Tale in English class wondering why the rest of the world did not take up arms to liberate the oppressed women of Gilead. (I’m not sure Margaret Atwood intended her novel would have that effect on teenage girls forming their politics.) I often give copies of Vaclav Havel’s Summer Meditations to students I have the chance to mentor, and his noble fight against socialism and authoritarianism remain inspirational to me.
Republicans speak of Ronald Reagan with deep reverence. Nearly 9-in-10 approve of the job he did as President, making him the top rated past president in the eyes of GOP voters. Fighting Soviets ought to be in our party’s DNA, and it has been clear for years that Vladimir Putin would very much like to revive the Soviet Union in some fashion.
I am an Old Millennial. I don’t particularly remember the Cold War; its influence on my thinking came about as a student. It had such an effect on me that, at one point, I (unsuccessfully) studied Russian in hopes of being a Cold War historian.
But what I do remember seeing in my lifetime were September 11th, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while I still think that an assertive American foreign policy is valuable, if you are my age – or certainly those who are younger – there are fewer clear examples of American expression of power as a positive influence in the world.
Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that DeSantis’ positioning is genuine rather than poll-driven posturing. Born in late 1974, he’s roughly halfway between Anderson and me agewise. So, while he has some personal memory of the Cold War, it was essentially over by the time he graduated high school. It shouldn’t be shocking that he’s less concerned about the prospect of an expansionist Russia than I am.
She produces this polling to show the generational divides on foreign policy positions:
The grouping of these questions strikes me as a little odd. For example, I think we did the right thing in withdrawing from Afghanistan even while l thought the exit itself was a bit of a shit show.
Still, it’s rather interesting that under-50 Republicans pretty much track with “all voters” whereas the over-50s are definitely more hawkish. Indeed, while I no longer support the party, I’m in the modal grouping of that group (4 of 5). And I suspect DeSantis is in the 3 of 5 camp, which is the modal answer for his age group.
Anderson finally includes both parties in this question:
That Democrat-leaners are more enthusiastic than Republican-leaners about defense cuts isn’t the least bit surprising. But note that the over-50 Republicans are the only group adamantly opposed. And, indeed, the over-50 Democrats—remember, there were a lot of Democratic hawks during the Cold War—are also leerier than the younger cohort.
As to Ukraine, I wonder how much of the partisan difference is a function of an older Democrat being in charge. Because Biden was very much a Cold War hawk, he sees standing up to Russia as vital in a way that Obama did not. That he’s so adamant about aiding Ukraine’s fight, Democrats are more likely to line up behind their President whereas Republicans are more likely to reflexively oppose his policies.
Part of the problem is that while Republican desire to end support for Ukraine us often couched in realist terms, the actually reason for ending it is that many Republicans are actually on Russia’s side
Excellent piece. But GOP positions on Ukraine have nothing to do with anything exalted or complicated or historical. Putin hates queers and loves Trump. That’s the MAGA foreign policy.
Look, the bottom-line is that anyone who voluntarily ended up at Gitmo and hasn’t spoken against it since is probably into authoritarianism and torture. I’m guessing DeSantis would love to be in charge of a Putin-like state where his enemies (college professors, etc) end up falling out of tall buildings at an unusual rate. And most of the hacks who swim in the Republican sea would support it as well. They would love, love, love to have these accidents happen. Like sees like.
Sorry, that’s just a bridge too far. Trump’s apparently going to have some fun contrasting clips of DeUseless supporting Ukraine a year ago with clips of his current statements.
When talking about “Republicans” or “Democrats” we have to be clear about which Rs and Ds we’re talking about, voters or pros. This is especially true for Republicans. The civil war is more between the pros. I heard a talking head last night say the “populist” MAGA pros are anti- Ukraine but the funders, and therefore the establishment McConnells, Grahams, etc. are pro-Ukraine.
It should be noted that back when GOPs uniformly opposed Russia they were expansionist authoritarian godless commies. Now they’re expansionist authoritarian Orthodox capitalists.
But I feel everybody’s overthinking this. It’s mostly Cleek’s Law, Biden favors funding Ukraine so many GOPs reflexively oppose it.
“That’s more or less my position, as well as that of Republicans like Lindsey Graham.”
Unless DeSantis becomes president, in which case Graham will have always opposed our involvement in Ukraine.
I don’t know why you would make that argument. DeSantis was for Ukraine before he was against Ukraine.
DeSantis in June, 2015;
DeSantis today;
DeSantis is just another MAGA whiner who’s only “posture” is to not have any principles. To assume there is anything genuine about this man is a mistake. Unless it’s to assume he is a genuine asshole.
Sorry, I had to laugh at this:
That is arguably true for the Cold War, but the last 30 years have had little realism or restraint.
Anyway, this is a good post that looks at the bigger picture. WRT to DeSantis, I have no idea what his real FP views are and I don’t trust that things he or his campaign are saying now are accurate. There’s also the fact that the Presidential campaign is an eternity away in time compared to the reality on the ground in Ukraine.
On the war itself, the facts are that this war isn’t going to end anytime soon, and it is going to cost the US $100 billion or more per year to support Ukraine, in addition to the need to make the long-term investments and contracts to increase our defense industrial base to be able to provide Ukraine with the ammunition and equipment it needs, as well as the operational costs of our direct support. We are already seeing most of Europe balk at this except for Poland and the Baltics which are small players in the grand scheme of things and have very strong historical reasons to want to see Russia defeated.
So the relevant question is not how support for Ukraine will look now, but how it will look in a year. Given the limitations and constraints on both sides, an attritional fight is likely to be the norm.
It’s good that we are finally seeing some more realistic assessments about the future of this war, as opposed to the hopium of last summer and fall when many were predicting a decisive Ukrainian victory. This war is not going to go like that. Ukraine is already short of ammunition and supplies, it’s trying to build 3 Army Corps but won’t have the equipment for that for a year at least, it’s already lost most of its best troops and, like Russia, primarily relies on mobilized personnel now of varying quality and training.
The Russians, meanwhile, have more manpower, more artillery, more artillery and ammunition production, and have set up defenses in-depth for the expected Ukrainian offensive in the spring.
In short, neither army is provisioned, equipped, or trained for large-scale offensive maneuver operations, so the attritional fighting is what is likely to continue.
So what is the Presidential campaign here going to look like in a year if this slogging attritional fight continues? Are politicians and the American people still going to be willing to spend $100 billion + annually on a war that most of Europe don’t think is vital enough for them to really invest in?
Put me in this is mostly about opposing anything Biden supports camp. As an Occam’s Razor approach it explains most of what the gOP says and does.
Steve
@Andy:
Biden and his team have managed this war perfectly by any realistic standard. I’m sure they have some outline of what a settlement would be and how to get there and I’m guessing a lot for Putin will change after this year is over. That’s what so bizarre about the discourse. This has been a masterclass in handling a reckless and unnecessary war but these guys are going on like this was another Iraq and Biden is in over his head.
MTG doesn’t think Putin plans to invade Europe.
Spoiler alert; Ukraine is the 8th most populous country in Europe.
Off topic, but yesterday she had a battle of wits with a bag of sand, and lost.
https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1636030532332011520
https://twitter.com/USBPChief/status/1636091215035629570
You cannot make up how stupid this woman is.
@Andy:
Re: Discouraging piece at WashPo:
A different opinion:
https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1635625524029542402
It’s a thread, more at the link..
@Michael Reynolds: Like many, even most, haters before him, Putin hates queers enough that I’m persuaded it’s a very personal topic for him.
@daryl and his brother darryl:
Ha. Exactly the hopium fake realists like Glenn Greenwald and so-called Russia “experts” like Matt Taibbi were selling just before Putin tried to take Kyiv last February, embarassing them and proving that blind contrarianism does not sound foreign policy make (and that expertise is often not all it’s cracked up to be).
At any rate, the United States should continue to support our European allies against Putin’s warmongering imperialism as long as it takes — with the caveat that the US cannot be more invested in Europe’s security than Europe itself. That’s even though a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is downstream of a potential Russian victory in Ukraine. The moment Germany, France, and the UK bail on Ukraine is the moment the US should, but I very much doubt that will happen. They will whine and gripe, but Scholz and Co. are in at this point. With Israel soon to join.
Ron DeSantis’s position on Ukraine will be an albatross around his neck outside of the extremely online weirdo fringe — like his position on gays, drag shows, book banning, Disney, wokeness etc. A majority of voters — particularly the older voters on which a Republican nominee relies — will never agree that sitting back and letting Putin’s fascistic, genocidal Russia rollover Ukraine is in US interests, morally or practically. This isn’t 1940. Nor is it 2002.
@Andy:
Confirmation bias, motivated reasoning? Do you expect the war to drag out and reason accordingly?
@Tony W:
He’s just about weird enough to be a closeted homo, but nah, homophobia still runs deep in Russian culture. He’s just a natural byproduct, unlike American holdouts who truly do seem to have some psychological projection issues.
In 2008, Romney criticized Obama for not recognizing that Russia is a threat to the US, Europe and American interests.
In 2012, John McCain probably said something, but I don’t remember what. He was no squish on Russia though.
In 2016, Trump openly supported Russia and Russia semi-covertly supported Trump. You can either assume serendipity or conspiracy, it doesn’t matter for this. Pro-Russian sentiment rose in the party.
Russia bought themselves into the Republican Party. There’s no “they don’t remember the Cold War”, there’s not even Obama-esque naivety, the pro-Russian wing are just whores (with all due apologies and respect for actual whores who simply sell their bodies and their time, rather than their country and their loyalties).
Plus Putin hates the gays.
@Michael Reynolds:
And he’s a white autocrat and strongman.
@Gustopher: I think you got 2008 and 2012 mixed up.
The devil is in the details for me. There is a matter of objectives.
If the Russian objective is still to end the existence of Ukraine, no question we should act to prevent that from happening.
But I suspect achieving the stated Ukrainian objective of re-taking every bit of territory lost in 2014 may not be worth it, and that too depends on more details. If the Russians turn out capable of a dogged defense of all those cities there will be no way to take them without destroying them, and it could take years and tens, even hundreds of thousands of lives, hundreds of billion$. It might be wiser to let the people within those areas demand their own separation over time if they really want it. If those people want to be free of Russia they can get it by playing the long-game.
A lot of ifs. We don’t know the true Russian nor the true Ukrainian objectives, only what they say, and objectives change.
@Gustopher:
I think that Obama recognized Russia as a threat, he simply stated that China was the bigger threat…which remains true today.
A minor quibble that has no impact on the point you were making.
@Kylopod: You’re right, or gaslighting me successfully.
Remember Palin saying that she could see Russia from Alaska, and Putin’s shifty evil eyes or whatever? I wonder if she has fallen into line with the Trumpy pro-Putin mob.
@DK:
I don’t expect that to hurt him. If he gets the R nomination he’ll immediately pivot from lying to impress the MAGA position to lying to impress GOP moderates and GOP leaning indies. Also pro-Ukraine GOP funders.
@Gustopher:
No. It was Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live doing her Sarah Palin imitation who said that.
@charon:
Well–you’re kind of both right, and both wrong. Palin’s original comment was “You can see Russia from land here in Alaska”–a statement that was accurate in itself, though it was within the context of a pretty stupid answer to a question about her foreign policy credentials. Fey’s version was “I can see Russia from my house.” A lot of people mistakenly believe Palin actually said the second version. But Palin did say it was possible to see Russia from Alaska (though without claiming she had personally seen it herself).
@Gustopher:
I was wondering about that last year during her congressional run. This was what I found, from back in October.
So she kinda sorta came out against Russia, and for helping Ukraine, for the time being. And rehashed her stupid argument from a decade-and-a-half ago about how Alaska is somehow relevant to keeping Putin in check. But she sounds noncommittal enough that she could easily shift her position later.
Even though we correctly see Palin and her following as somewhat of a precursor to the MAGA movement, she was deeply ensconced in the right-wing culture of that time, which still had a leg in the more hawkish Bushian foreign policy. I’m not attributing any sort of ideological depth to what she was saying, but it was the way most American right-wingers at the time beat their chests and showed their machismo, which would later change as isolationist thinking grew more popular in right-wing circles and they began to identify with Putin as an ideal strongman.
@Andy:
Wrong; it’s Poland, the Baltics, Nordics, Czechia and Slovakia, at minimum.
And that combination has a greater combined GDP than Russia.
2021 c. $280 billion vs $180 billion
Combined population 81.3 million, which is close to Germany 83.8 million.
They are NOT negligible as an alliance block.
And the UK is on the same page on this matter.
@gVOR08:
Not in the Putin-puppet primary, no, nor with the kind of reflexively contrarion clueless white guy who subscribes to the substacks of Taibbi, Greenwald, Iglesias, and Sullivan and thinks they and Maher and Rogan are super smart (lol pfft) — and is thus convinced “wokeness” is a bigger threat to liberal democracy than Putin and MAGA.
But as we found out in 2022, while such people may comprise a disproportionate share of the media and can thus influence the white male establishment narrative accordingly, they actually don’t have that much voting power. The normies who do not spend all day online do not agree with that kind of thinking.
Neville Chamberlainism is not going to play with enough of the general electorate in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. DeFascist will not be able to memory-hole that.
He alone was able to pretend he had opposed the Iraq War, based on a speech of which there was — conveniently for him — no extant record.
Obama really never actually opposed the Iraq War from the jump. And for the record, Romney was right about Russia.
@Modulo Myself:
I agree that Biden has handled things very well – that’s not my criticism.
@charon:
Nance is talking about one WAPO article about one unit. Ukraine has a lot of units with various experience levels.
My views are informed by my experience in intelligence analysis of foreign military forces and also military experts who were experts on the Ukrainian and Russian militaries long before this war kicked off. Of those, I would put Michael Koffman at the top of the list. He’s a dedicated military analyst – not a pundit like Nance – who had deep knowledge of the military forces of both countries. He’s been to Ukraine multiple times including to the front lines in Bakhmut just last week and talks to and has the trust of Ukrainian leaders and personnel at multiple levels. He and other peer analysts have a very good analytical track record on this war so far, and are clear and honest about unknowns and information gaps – again unlike pundits like Nance.
You are welcome to go back to what I wrote here months ago and compare it to what others were saying (Ukraine would inevitably win, they are good, Russia is bad, etc), compare it to the present situation, and judge for yourself. As one example, I’ve been talking about the problems of sustainment, particularly with equipment and ammunition for a very long time now – and these are things that have only recently made it into the mainstream press reporting. And the two things I identified back in the fall as being particularly important are artillery ammunition and air defense and now we are getting mainstream press reporting about the severe shortages of both these in the last month.
My assessment is my assessment and I continue to think that this war will primarily be attritional in nature due to the limitations of the forces on each side. We will see what happens when the expected Ukrainian offensive begins at some point this spring, but those who are expecting a US-style mobile offensive from Ukraine should – IMO – temper those expectations.
Maybe that’s motivated reasoning. Maybe that’s confirmation bias. As compared to what? Malcom Nance, the incendiary pundit? No one is immune from confirmation bias or motivated reasoning and I’m happy to have my assessments criticized based on substantive criticisms or be shown to be wrong through the course of time.
And I could very well be wrong! Part of the problem in analyzing this war is that most things are propaganda and half-truths with a lot of unknowns, particularly when it comes to Ukraine, where almost no negative information comes out, and what little that does is immediately swatted down by Twitter pundits.
@Andy: Do I infer you are predicting something along the lines of a ‘Korean Settlement’?
One more thing about Nance – He is calling an anectode about one commander of one unit BS and his evidence is his own anecdote from when he was in Ukraine (checks watch) 8-10 months ago. A lot has happened since then and these are two anecdotal accounts that actually do not conflict – both can be totally true, especially given the separation of time and space.
@JohnMc:
I have no idea, but that’s one possibility.
At this point I don’t think either side has the offensive capability to decisively win. Obviously that can change over time, but right now the character of this war favors the defense.
The biggest open question (IMO) in the short term is Ukraine’s capacity to conduct large scale offensive operations against entrenched Russian positions and that is not a capability that’s been demonstrated yet. Ukraine has a lot of skill at the tactical and small unit level. Conducting large, coordinated, combined arms operations is different ball of wax. A lot is riding – politically and militarily- on the spring offensive which will likely come in 1-3 months.
What is the cash value of 1) degrading Russia’s technological development, 2) severely limiting their one real source of income, 3) destroying the reputation of Russia’s military as well as, 4) their arms industry, 5) getting Germany to re-arm, Sweden and Finland to join NATO, 6) helping the Ukrainians to kill off Russia’s breeding stock thus exacerbating their demographic woes, and other little things like the brain drain, like putting pressure on the oligarchs, like encouraging internal squabbling etc…
Is that worth $100 billion a year for, say, five years?
@charon: Nance ought not be so upset at “discouraging” news from the “journos”: what they are trying to do is to prepare the American public for the possibility that the tide of this war could turn decisively against Ukraine at any moment. That’s why the reporting on good news for Ukraine has always been hedged with “this might not last” style caveats.
Percy were told Ukraine was hoping to see outman and outgunned into prepare for the fall of Kyiv. When that did not happen, we were told that while Ukraine was mounting a spirited defense, to expect Russia’s alleged military superiority to win out in the end. Then as Russia’s military has descended into embarrassment and infighting, we were warned of a coming early 2023 offensive that was hyped as a potential death knell for Ukraine. Of course, that offensive has turned out to be overhyped.
This type of reporting my be frustrating for Ukraine cheerleaders like Nance who, unlike keyboard warriors who dismiss him, actually spent time embedeed with fighting troops in Ukraine and thus should be taken more seriously than his critics. But this ‘hedged bet’ reporting is necessary to temper expectations — I don’t mind it.
To that point, this type of reporting — typified by headlines like Russia Isn’t Winning in Ukraine, ‘but It’s No Longer Losing’ — also makes claims that the prevailing narrative contains nothing negative towards Ukraine look silly to me. But people tend to see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear.
@Michael Reynolds:
Whatever the monetary cost, it pales in comparison with the cost in blood, suffering, disability, and destruction Ukraine is paying.
The war, unfortunately, could last almost two more years. Figure Mad Vlad will hold out for a GQP victory in November 2024. He may think a president beholden to the Cheeto base, even if not the Cheeto himself, will end support for Ukraine and maybe press other NATO countries to follow along.
therefore it’s not only imperative that Biden win in 24, but that he make an iron-clad commitment to support Ukrain into his second term.
@Michael Reynolds:
That’s likely going to be a major FP debate for the next campaign, one that doesn’t cut neatly between the partisan divide.
I think the Jury is still out on Germany re-arming. They have already begun to backtrack on previous pledges. They’ve been very slow to issue new and expanded contracts.
And this brings up the age-old argument about burden-sharing in NATO and the pattern is beginning to repeat, where the US does all the heavy lifting.
@DK:
That’s also more accurate reporting than cheerleaders like Nance like. Without a doubt, Ukraine has done much better than expected and Russia has done much worse, but the fundamentals of war and warfare, the actual vs perceived capabilities of forces, all the various complex elements (many of which we do not understand, including Nance), are what really matter here in deciding the future course of this war.
The fact that the Republican Party doesn’t even have a platform is illustrative.
Whatever the voting base feelings about Ukraine or any other foreign policy, their votes are driven almost entirely by domestic grievances.
Like changes to M&M mascots, if the Ukrainian war can somehow be associated in their minds with “Woke” or anything liberal, they will turn on a dime and despise it.
Evidence for this assertion is that poll after poll shows that majorities of Republicans favor liberal policies on gun control, abortion, and LGBTQ rights.
But in the end, those feelings (like their feelings about states rights, free market capitalism or limited government) just don’t matter much.