Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor, The Rocky Mountain Voice
House Speaker Mike Johnson is experiencing a defining moment in his career. As Congress resumes, he seems to have successfully – one hopes – hammered out a workable deal to finally get arms flowing to the Ukrainians as their defense starts to falter.
Effective support for Ukraine’s defence is the central foreign policy question facing Western leaders today. There are, of course, no shortage of serious foreign policy dilemmas – one could toss a dart at a world map and chances are pretty good that wherever it lands there is some kind of trouble brewing – but it is difficult to understate the importance of Ukraine. The Israelis are tough and will likely prevail with or without American support (though how much better for our own national honour were they to be able to count on our commitment.) Iran’s relative strength is largely subsidized by Russia; and while China is arguably the bigger threat, the fate of Taiwan and the Western Pacific hinges to a great extent on how things turn out in eastern Europe.
The Ukrainians have done well, better than most expected; but they are running out of ammunition (and men), are facing a much larger enemy that can just keep feeding more men and material into the grinder, and, as a result, Kiev’s bedraggled military is on the ropes. Without substantial Western support (meaning American) they will, at the very least, be forced into a desperate and horrific negotiating position that will see Russia prevail. Europe will be destabilized to an extent not seen since the end of the Second World War, when Russia, as the Soviet Union, last rolled over Eastern European nations – communist aggression merely replacing Nazi aggression under the lamentable watch of the Western powers at Yalta. Perhaps even more consequently, Russian victory, even a pyrrhic one, will weaken America’s position in the world. If it as a direct result of American insouciance, the damage to our national posture will be comparable to that suffered after our abandonment of the South Vietnamese, and the Afghans 50 years later.
It’s emblematic of the absurdity of our contemporary political climate that Johnson is facing substantial opposition – from the nominal right. The neo-isolationist Code Pink faction of the Republican Party in the House has held up military aid to Ukraine for some time now, long enough for the tactical situation on the ground to transform from something once akin to hope, to being on the verge of panicked despair.
The reasons given for the intransigence have not been compelling. There is the budgetary angle; but the figures we are considering in providing for Ukraine’s defence amount to a rounding error. Besides, what is the purpose of government – for a conservative – if not to ensure the nation’s security? In the nuclear age, doing so is rather more complex than sealing the gate and flooding the moat.
Some have expressed concerns with Ukraine itself, raising objections to certain progressive policies of the Zelensky government, and rampant corruption – but so what? The governments of El Salvador and Saudi Arabia were not always on their best behaviour, but those concerns are tangential to America’s strategic interests. Internal politics do not always factor into geopolitics.
Johnson’s proposal includes some masterful elements, beyond the strategically necessary aid to Ukraine, ranging from the appealing but improbable (structuring the aid as a loan; but how does anyone expect Ukraine to actually pay it back?) to the obvious but elegant (pay for it by seizing and liquidating frozen Russian assets,) to the simply obvious (tying the aid to a corresponding reversal of President Biden’s myopic ban on the export of liquified natural gas.)
As strategic blunders go, Biden’s LNG export ban has to be in the running for all time champ. Rarely does a national policy like simply allowing the export of LNG to energy-hungry markets in Europe offer such a trifecta of strategic benefits: 1) supporting the domestic economy, 2) keeping our allies lights on and industry
humming, and 3) putting a major economic squeeze on an adversary that is engaged in an aggressive enterprise. And yet, that is the hill on which the Biden administration seems ready to kill a few million Ukrainians.
This illuminates an issue that Republicans could have – should have – taken advantage of if they could only get out of their own way. For Democrats to be the adults in the room on issues of national security and foreign policy is not a natural or comfortable place for most of them. They are uneasy with it; their newfound fondness for the mobilization of U.S.-led Western power against Russia fueled mostly by an entirely political pivot in around 2016, started by nebulous claims of Russian collusion, a bait which Donald Trump fully took. If Trump can be credited with one historical achievement, it is convincing Democrats after 100 years that Russia is a problem.
But, with notable exceptions over the years, Democrats are not really good at this sort of thing, being more predisposed to a worldview informed by John Lennon’s Imagine than by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. And it shows, with the Biden Administration’s chronic hesitancy, trickling of weapons and supplies, and inordinate concern over how the war might affect the climate agenda.
Biden has not shown leadership on the Ukrainian crisis. A growing number of populist Republicans are trying to knock that bar even lower. Mike Johnson has an opportunity to fill that void, and much rests on his success.