J. D. Vance’s Logic of Surrender

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 12, 2024

 

Senator J. D. Vance took his ongoing campaign against the effort to bolster Ukraine’s defense to the New York Times opinion pages on Friday. There, he issued the latest of his evolving rationales for acquiescing to Moscow’s territorial demands in Europe. Because he’s one of the more articulate advocates for the restoration of anti-American spheres of influence around the globe, his argument deserves to be read — and rebutted – in full.

 

President Biden wants the world to believe that the biggest obstacle facing Ukraine is Republicans and our lack of commitment to the global community. This is wrong.

 

Ukraine’s challenge is not the G.O.P.; it’s math.

 

It is worth noting at the outset that Vance’s view that Ukraine’s cause is lost, with or without America’s support, is not a dispassionate conclusion arrived at following a careful review of the facts on the ground. No such analysis was possible on the very day Moscow embarked on its second invasion of Ukraine, which occasioned a statement from Vance advocating American neutrality, with denunciations of Ukraine itself — a “corrupt nation run by oligarchs” — the “Cheney Republicans” he dislikes, and the foreign-policy professionals who have “blundered” their way through crisis after crisis.

 

“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance famously remarked in the days before the onset of the worst war on the European continent since 1945. Both of these statements sidestepped the question of Ukraine’s relation to U.S. interests in favor of his contention that America didn’t have the bandwidth or wherewithal to punish Russian aggression. That’s worth recalling ahead of the argument Vance presents to Times readers as a more-in-sorrow revelation:

 

$60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war. . . .

 

Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.

 

That’s a disturbing verdict, not just for Ukraine’s sake but for America’s national security. Vance is correct that Ukraine has been forced to ration artillery shells due, in part, to the delays in delivering ordnance that Vance himself helped orchestrate. Meanwhile, Moscow’s stocks have been replenished by anti-American powers such as North Korea, and Russia has shifted its economy to a war footing, juicing its GDP artificially with government spending devoted exclusively to the manufacture of bullets, bombs, and weapons platforms.

 

So Kyiv is at a grave disadvantage, but not an insurmountable one — particularly because Russia’s artillery strength has been greatly diminished since the outset of this war. “That drop has forced the Russian military to rely on “‘meat assaults’ — waves of troops to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses — in the protracted fight for the town of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine,” Veronika Melkozerova and Eva Hartog wrote for Politico earlier this year. This is a target-rich environment for a properly equipped force.

 

One would think that anyone who reached Vance’s conclusion — that the United States cannot meet the threats it faces abroad — would therefore resolve to address America’s deficiencies. Such calls are absent from his op-ed, perhaps in part because the Ukraine-aid bill he helped block was designed to revitalize America’s domestic defense-industrial base.

 

Nearly $35 billion would have been appropriated for the replenishment of Defense Department stocks transferred to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan — funds devoted wholly to U.S.-based arms manufacturers. Billions more would have gone to the U.S. submarine-manufacturing sector, the procurement and production of artillery and air-defense ordnance, the manufacture of sophisticated munitions components, and systems to counter unmanned aerial vehicles — to name just a handful of the legislation’s priorities.

 

Vance helped scuttle that initiative, and now he denounces the effects of his own advocacy. He also veers wildly away from the logical conclusions of his own outlook into a moral case against helping Ukraine:

 

Proponents of American aid to Ukraine have argued that our approach has been a boon to our own economy, creating jobs here in the factories that manufacture weapons. But our national security interests can be — and often are — separate from our economic interests. The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict.

 

This bewildering claim ignores the desperation with which Ukrainians seek American support for their war of national survival, and it dismisses the concerns of America’s menaced partners abroad, like Taiwan, which is lobbying with increasing concern on Ukraine’s behalf. They’re right to worry. This logic could (and, I submit, absolutely will) be used to justify American hesitancy in support of Taipei should the Chinese Communist Party attempt to subsume the island nation into the People’s Republic of China by force. In the meantime, the 2 million Americans who work in the defense sector will have to find contentment in the fact that their idleness fits within J. D. Vance’s preferred moral framework.

 

He continues:

 

Take the Patriot missile system — our premier air defense weapon. It’s of such importance in this war that Ukraine’s foreign minister has specifically demanded them. That’s because in March alone, Russia reportedly launched over 3,000 guided aerial bombs, 600 drones and 400 missiles at Ukraine. To fend off these attacks, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and others have indicated they need thousands of Patriot interceptors per year. The problem is this: The United States only manufactures 550 every year. If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires.

 

Vance goes on to address the threat to Taiwan in the same terms, noting that the U.S. has delayed delivery of $900 million worth of Patriots to Taipei because they are needed elsewhere. This is a valid concern, but the senator appears to believe the problem is intractable — a belief that does not make the demand for new Patriots somehow disappear.

 

As the logic of demand would suggest, suppliers are scrambling to meet it. Contractors like Boeing and Lockheed are engaged in a crash capital-investment program, building massive new facilities, funding “sub-tier suppliers” to mitigate supply-chain disruptions, and cranking out Patriot missiles at a breakneck pace. They are doing so in anticipation that, eventually, the Pentagon will one day fund missile-production increases.

 

“The service needs supplemental funding,” Defense News reported this week, “in order to ramp up capability like the PAC-3 MSE weapon, noting the pending supplemental request to replenish American stockpiles of weapons and equipment sent to Ukraine includes $750 million to help Lockheed increase capacity by more than 100 a year over its current capacity.”

 

Again, Vance has put his finger on the challenges, but he seems to suggest they are irresolvable. They’re not.

 

At this point, the senator presumes to speak for the average Ukrainian soldier, who he appears to posit wants nothing more than to surrender to the Russian forces, who are engaged in a campaign of brutality, ethnic cleansing, and subjugation in the territories they occupy the like of which has not been seen in Europe in generations:

 

The average Ukrainian soldier is roughly 43 years old, and many soldiers have already served two years at the front with few, if any, opportunities to stop fighting. After two years of conflict, there are some villages with almost no men left. The Ukrainian military has resorted to coercing men into service, and women have staged protests to demand the return of their husbands and fathers after long years of service at the front. This newspaper reported one instance in which the Ukrainian military attempted to conscript a man with diagnosed mental disability.

 

Many in Washington seem to think that hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart and are happy to label any thought to the contrary Russian propaganda. But major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic are reporting that the situation on the ground in Ukraine is grim.

 

It is fair to worry that Ukraine cannot field enough soldiers to beat back the Russian onslaught, though Vance’s hostility toward the country’s “draconian conscription policies” does not extend to Moscow’s even more ruthless draft. Kyiv has recently lowered the mobilization age from 27 to 25 to address manpower shortages. Nevertheless, the invaluable Institute for the Study of War finds that the foremost obstacle to forming new combat-ready units is the shortage of weapons and ordnance, not manpower: “ISW continues to assess that Western-provided materiel continues to be the greatest deciding factor for the Ukrainian military’s ability to restore and augment its combat power.”

 

The notion that there is some popular resistance in Ukraine to its war effort is also unsupported. Morale in the country has declined as the straits imposed on it have grown more dire, but a February survey of Ukrainians found two-thirds of all respondents wanted to continue “all out resistance until it recaptures its territory.” Despite some fatigue among Ukrainians, that figure is more or less consistent with polling in the country from the outset of Russia’s war.

 

Vance opposes the provision of the matériel Ukraine needs now because he insists that the United States lacks the industrial capacity necessary to provide for its embattled partner.  He concludes with a full-throated argument in defense of the proposition to which he has adhered even before the shooting commenced — that Ukraine should be compelled to surrender:

 

By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence. But this would require both American and Ukrainian leadership to accept that Mr. Zelensky’s stated goals for the war — a return to 1991 boundaries — are fantastical.

 

The White House has said time and again that they can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.

 

Vance has previously outlined what his vision of peace means: “What’s in America’s best interest is to accept Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians,” he told CNN last December. Why was it, therefore, not in Israel’s best interests to surrender its territory when it was vastly outnumbered and outgunned in 1973? Why should Israel continue to resist an Iran-led onslaught on all sides today? Must the Taiwanese people be consigned to prolonged suffering and slaughter at the hands of the Chinese merely because the U.S. has convinced itself that free commercial navigation of the South China Sea is in its interests? How many more American investments in the hegemony that was blessedly bequeathed to us would be sacrificed if Vance’s logic becomes American policy?

 

Fortunately, more Americans reject Vance’s position than agree with it. And for good reason. Land-hungry despots are never sated by their first conquest. We don’t need to look to history for evidence of that — we need only look to Vladimir Putin, whose appetites have only grown with the acquisition of this or the other tract of territory. The abandonment of Ukraine would fracture the Atlantic alliance, leaving its more exposed members on the periphery in a state of anxiety that could lead to freelancing — a prospect that carries infinitely more danger of resulting in a conflagration than a united front led and maintained by the United States.

 

Vance and other critics of the Biden administration are justified in their frustration with Kyiv’s inability to outline a clear theory of what victory would look like, and they’re correct to speculate that is because no such theory exists. Though survival as a primary objective demands no such theory, Ukraine’s more strategic objectives certainly do. But degrading Russia’s ability to reignite a frozen conflict in Ukraine at a time of its choosing is preferable to gifting them such a conflict at a time when Moscow is committing all its resources to this fight.

 

Ukraine’s cause remains a sound investment of the 2 percent of the federal budget America has committed to it. It not only advances our geopolitical interests, but it has also led to a revitalization of America’s vital defense capabilities. Vance’s op-ed performs the noble service of articulating the logic of retreat not just from our priorities in Europe but from everywhere else on the globe. He’s clever enough not to say as much outright, but his fellow retrenchment advocates, possessed of his outlook but not his discretion, have made it clear. Their problem is not so much with Ukraine but America — its post-war obligations, its power, its alliance structure, and, most of all, the Americans whose belief in the U.S.-led world order stands athwart their domestic spending priorities.

 

Vance may believe the country he serves in Congress is a spent force, but the rest of America should not. The world’s freedom-loving people certainly don’t — and so long as that is the case, the logic of surrender articulated in his op-ed will struggle to find a constituency.