Is the Key to Unlocking Ukraine Aid Annoying All the Right People?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, April 02, 2024

 

Let’s be frank: The obstacles that have prevented Congress from providing additional material support to Ukraine’s war of resistance against Russian domination have little to do with the war itself — at least not if we’re to take the complaints emphasized by Ukraine skeptics at face value. Their opposition to Kyiv’s cause is an extension of their domestic political objectives.

 

It’s rare to hear the (few) members of Congress who oppose the provision of lethal arms to Ukraine discuss in much detail the U.S. interests that would be imperiled by providing Kyiv with the weapons and ammunition it needs. That is relegated to a throat-clearing aside, if it is addressed at all, before the inevitable pivot to the domestic issues American policy-makers should be focused on to the exclusion of all others.

 

This dynamic was rendered explicit by the attempt to couple funding for Ukraine’s defense (and Israel’s, and Taiwan’s) with enhanced border security — a scheme that seemed reasonable at the time, but quickly subsumed the issue of American national-security interests in Europe into the intractable morass of domestic immigration politics. It is also implicit, but no less observable, in how opponents of Ukraine aid talk about their American adversaries.

 

Senator J. D. Vance deemed the Ukraine-aid bill that passed the Senate in February “a plot against” Donald Trump conceived and executed by quisling Republicans to “save Joe Biden’s presidency.” Congressman Paul Gosar is so zealous in his crusade to popularize the anti-Ukraine cause that he and his staff must have overlooked the phrase “Jewish warmongers” that graced the headline above an article linked in his newsletter. “Vladimir Putin wants out of this — you heard that on Tucker Carlson,” Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville recently declared. Meanwhile, “it is D.C. warmongers who want to prolong the war.” Marjorie Taylor Green went beyond them all. “You know who’s driving it?” she asked of the conflict Russia inaugurated. “It’s America. America needs to stop pushing the war in Ukraine.”

 

The logic of negative partisanship, to the extent we can call it “logic,” guides Ukraine’s Republican opponents. If the governing wing of the Republican Party is for it, they’re against it. But the problems associated with negative partisanship might also be remedied by negative partisanship. It is not inconceivable that the impasse over Ukraine aid could be broken if the GOP’s Ukraine skeptics could be persuaded to redirect the passion that they reserve for denunciations of their fellow Republicans to denouncing Democrats. That seems to be the approach now favored by House Speaker Mike Johnson.

 

When Congress reconvenes next week, the speaker will reportedly take another crack at pushing an aid bill through the House. To satisfy Kyiv’s critics, the small portion of the aid package that is devoted to keeping the government’s lights on will be structured as a forgivable, interest-free loan. That is only objectionable to those who resent having to provide Ukraine’s GOP opponents a face-saving way out of the rhetorical corner into which they’ve painted themselves, but it would have no impact on the funding or arms Ukraine needs. Beyond that, Johnson is reportedly open to legally confiscating Russian sovereign assets in U.S. jurisdictions to finance Ukraine’s war effort. While fraught and potentially replete with unintended consequences, reappropriating Russian assets is a step that Ukraine’s boosters have long lobbied in favor of. None of this would, however, satisfy Ukraine’s loudest detractors. That’s where Joe Biden’s backdoor ban on liquified-natural-gas (LNG) exports comes into play.

 

“We want to have natural-gas exports that will help un-fund Vladimir Putin’s war effort there,” Johnson told Fox News host Trey Gowdy on Sunday. That’s an argument Joe Biden would find hard to rebut. He made that very case himself at the outset of Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine at a time when his understandings of his political interests and American national interests in Europe were not yet in conflict. But even if the Biden administration is willing to abandon its moratorium on new LNG-export terminals, the progressive left is not.

 

“The desperate attempt to force the Biden Administration to reverse its pause on new LNG exports is clearly not what is right for American families, our economy, or our fight against climate chaos and autocrats across the globe,” Oregon senator Jeff Merkley said in a Monday statement. Onetime House Progressive Caucus co-chair Raúl Grijalva agreed. “The Biden administration and my Democratic colleagues must not abandon the climate and frontline communities just so Republicans can continue to line the pockets of Big Oil and Gas,” he said. The climate-change-activist class is prepared to wield all its influence to prevent Congress from moving on Johnson’s proposal, and the Democratic Party’s leadership in the House seems likely to cave to its demands. “The Senate bill is bipartisan, it’s comprehensive, and it’s the only viable way forward” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies.

 

Maybe. Or maybe not. Joe Biden was willing to sign the Senate supplemental even though its immigration-related provisions were heavy on enforcement and included none of the sweeteners immigration doves usually demand. He may be similarly willing to irritate the climate maximalists on his party’s fringe to secure a new tranche of aid to Ukraine. But he has so far been a bystander to an intra-GOP dispute in which Republicans are negotiating against themselves. If Johnson can perform an Indiana Jones–like switcheroo in which he substitutes Republicans for Democrats as the targets of the anti-Ukraine caucus’s ire, that may go some way toward satisfying the GOP’s holdouts.