The Wages of Defeatism

By Robert Zubrin

Saturday, November 12, 2022

 

In an interview with Punchbowl News on October 18, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said that if the GOP was to win the election, “there would be no blank check” for further aid to Ukraine.

 

McCarthy did not say there would be no further aid. He just said there would be no “blank check.”

 

The former position would be repugnant to American voters, over 70 percent of whom strongly support Ukraine and virtually none of whom side with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, so Democratic Party–aligned media rushed to smear Republicans with headlines warning that they planned to cut Ukraine off from aid if they gained control of the House and Senate.

 

This smear campaign was given enthusiastic support by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.). Speaking as the warm-up act for Donald Trump at a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, on November 4, Greene said that “under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine.”

 

Trump did not contradict her.

 

Let’s consider what this means: Putin has repeatedly proclaimed that his invasion of Ukraine is a war on America. Greene and Trump are apparently fine with that.

 

Did the nominal representatives of a political party ever go so far out of their way to coat their side with skunk essence? With friends like these, does the Republican Party need enemies? Is it any wonder that with such spokesmen, the GOP should perform worse than any opposition party has done in any midterm election in four decades?

 

The GOP should have slaughtered the Democrats in the recent midterm elections. Biden disgraced the American military by ordering our forces to flee from the Taliban. He has conducted a war against U.S. fuel production that hurt people at the pump and cost Americans even more by destroying over ten percent of everyone’s savings through hyperinflationary policies.

 

But he got a pass for the rout in Afghanistan because he was actually implementing Trump’s defeatist policy. The same is true for his hyperinflation monetary policy, which began under Trump. Now, his ruinous policy of limiting arms aid to Ukraine while it is defending the West from an enemy attack is not being subjected to any coherent critique by the GOP. Far from it. The loudest Republican spokesmen are proclaiming that, if given power, they would do even worse.

 

Let’s not mince words. The Biden administration’s policy regarding Ukraine has been both imbecilic and morally depraved. The United States knew as early as October 2021 that Putin, inspired by the sight of the American soldiers showing their backs to the Taliban, had set into operation a plan to invade Ukraine. We had plenty of time to deter the invasion by shipping arms in advance and training Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s. The Biden administration did no such things. On the contrary, it chose to send practically no arms and launched no advanced-weapons-training programs. It even went out of its way to eliminate strategic ambiguity by publicly announcing that if an invasion were to occur, the U.S. would not intervene “under any scenario.”

 

Then, when acting on this invitation, Putin invaded, the Biden administration chose to limit its arms aid to little dribs and drabs, allowing Ukraine to hold the line, but willfully avoiding sending sufficient arms to enable Ukraine to win. Most recently, following Putin’s decision to destroy Ukraine’s energy and water-supply infrastructure with massive drone-aircraft attacks, the Biden administration chose to stall sending antiaircraft defenses to Ukraine. It took a month to send just two NASAMS antiaircraft batteries — with six more offered to be delivered next August — and no Patriot batteries or fighter-aircraft aid offered at all.

 

As a consequence of these disastrous policies, hundreds of thousands of people are now dead, over 10 million have been made homeless, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of property has been wrecked, and trillions in wealth has been destroyed worldwide.

 

If this policy continues, things could get much worse. As a result of the war, Ukraine’s GDP is down 40 percent, and the country could collapse economically. It could also be defeated militarily. Ukrainian armed forces have been performing miracles of courage on land and in the air, but their troops are limited. Russia, meanwhile, is training a new army to take the field in the spring. Defying all expectations, Ukraine has kept its fighters in the air. But, without replacements, sooner or later, they will run out of jets, giving Russia air supremacy. The consequences of that can be seen in Mariupol, which was too far away for Ukrainian fighters to intervene and was bombed into non-existence by uncontested Russian air power.

 

If Ukraine falls, the cost to America will be immense. Russian forces, greatly improved by the lessons of this war, will advance to the borders of NATO allies Poland and Romania, and the Ukrainian army will be eliminated from the West’s order of battle, as will Russia’s strategic vulnerability on its southwest border. Under such circumstances, the only thing that could possibly save the NATO-allied Baltic states (which Putin has stated he intends to annex) from invasion would be the perpetual deployment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to their borders — costing hundreds of billions in American taxpayer treasure for decades, and possibly many American lives in the future.

 

Furthermore, by allowing Ukrainian defeat, Biden’s policies will encourage Chinese aggression in the east — both because of its demonstration of weakness and because its sequel will force us to divert our military strength from Asia to Europe.

 

Where is the GOP critique of this incredible folly? We find some within its ranks proclaiming that the $19 billion the U.S. has sent is arms aid this year is too much when, in fact, it only amounts to 2 percent of our military budget — and is the two percent that is actually being spent to kill our enemies and break their stuff — and the alternative to this expenditure would be to spend vastly more in the future. We find others who say we should allow Ukraine to be defeated because we need to focus on Taiwan. That is hardly credible. We can achieve victory in Ukraine by sending it a hundred F-16s — aircraft we don’t even use anymore — without risk to a single U.S. soldier. In contrast, to try to defend Taiwan, we would need to risk the whole American Pacific Fleet. No: The way to defend Taiwan is to deter China, which can only be done by winning in Ukraine.

 

Americans should not be left with a choice between a party that wants to inflate away their savings and abolish fuel, meat, Boy Scouts, and baseball, and one that wouldn’t mind global victory for the totalitarian Russia–Iran–China Axis.

 

The GOP could give them an alternative to such an unpalatable choice. It needs to take a clear stand, though, saving both itself and America in the process.