Last year, the Ukrainians defeated Russia’s invading army on the battlefield, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin all of his core objectives for the war. He failed to de-militarize Ukraine, install a puppet government in Kyiv, bring Ukraine back into Russia’s fold, and stop NATO expansion. Today, Ukrainians are more committed to their nationhood than ever, and their democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, remains in power. Ukraine now has a stronger military and closer ties to NATO than ever before; Finland has joined the alliance, and Sweden is set to follow. In 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces won the Battle of Kyiv, the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Battle of Kherson, liberating more than 50 percent of the territory that Russia had occupied since launching its full-scale invasion.
Now, some of these successes could be reversed because of waning U.S. support. The false claim of a battlefield stalemate has brought about a new narrative that Americans should stop helping Ukraine because it cannot win. Alarmingly, the U.S. House of Representatives has delayed voting on the Biden administration’s request for supplemental military aid. Without new assistance from the United States, Ukraine will soon run out of arms, ammunition, and funds to fight effectively against the occupying Russian forces. Most urgently, the Ukrainian government needs air defense systems to protect its people and civilian infrastructure against Russian missiles and Iranian drones this winter. And Ukraine also needs additional weapons to defend and extend last year’s gains.
Putin clearly understands Ukraine’s precarious position in the U.S. Congress. Recently, he boasted that Ukraine would last only a week if the United States stopped providing military assistance. Putin is wrong: The Ukrainians have made it abundantly clear that they will continue to fight. Recall how, in February 2022, thousands of Ukrainians across the country prepared Molotov cocktails to defend against the Russian invaders. Putin’s statement, however, once again proves that he is not seeking to negotiate. Instead, he is waiting for the United States to quit on its Ukrainian partners so he can launch a new offensive to seize more of Ukraine and destroy its democracy. Without U.S. assistance, more Ukrainians will certainly die, and Ukraine may well lose more territory.
By delaying further assistance to Ukraine, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his supporters are acting against the United States’ own interests. Congress should approve new aid to Ukraine as fast as possible—not as a gesture of charity for Ukraine but as a hard-nosed and clear-headed investment in U.S. security objectives.
The moral argument for supporting Ukraine is clear. Despite the United States’ numerous past mistakes and current flaws, I still believe that it should be a force for good in the world. Russia’s war of colonial conquest is immoral and wrong. We cannot allow the world to return to a state of anarchy, where powerful countries can change borders at will. We cannot stand by as civilians are slaughtered, prisoners tortured, people raped, and children kidnapped. Withdrawing military assistance to Kyiv will not end the war but rather prolong it, leading to more deaths on both sides. The war in Ukraine is a democracy defending itself against a dictatorship. It is simply wrong to let an autocrat invade, occupy, annex, and destroy a country with a political system that Americans and so many others around the world deeply believe in. Global public opinion polls show that a majority of the world’s people prefer democracy to other forms of government. Unlike some other wars, there can be no confusion about right and wrong in this conflict. Those in Congress who cherish international law, human rights, and democratic values should not find it hard to pick a side.
But if moral arguments are not enough to sway members of Congress and their constituents, there are also some compelling realpolitik arguments for providing more aid to Ukraine. U.S. military assistance to Ukraine directly serves U.S. national security far beyond Ukraine. There are four ways a Ukrainian victory advances core U.S. interests.
1. A Ukrainian victory will dramatically diminish the threat from Russia. Even this year, which some observers have wrongly described as a military stalemate, Ukrainian forces have been systematically degrading the Russian army, destroying military infrastructure, and pushing the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea and the western Black Sea. The U.S. government now estimates more than 350,000 Russian military casualties—enormous losses for a fighting force once thought to be the world’s third-most powerful. The Ukrainians have destroyed massive amounts of Russian weaponry, including main battle tanks, fighter aircraft, submarines, and landing ships.
Without any direct U.S. involvement in fighting Russia, U.S. assistance has helped substantially degrade a major military threat to U.S. allies and potentially the United States itself—a strategy called “offshore balancing.” A defeated or vastly depleted Russian army will allow the United States to spend less on European defense, send fewer soldiers to NATO bases in the Baltics and Poland, worry less about being drawn into a future European war, and shift its money and attention toward other problems at home and abroad. Ukrainians are fighting the Russians today so that Poles, Estonians, and perhaps Americans do not have to fight them tomorrow. Russia’s imperial appetites will be neutralized only after a clear, humiliating defeat. A Russia that finally stays within its own borders is clearly in the U.S. national interest.
It is also premature to give up on Ukraine winning back its territory. This year, Ukrainian forces had to launch a counteroffensive without the weapons they needed to do so effectively. If the United States and Ukraine’s many other supporters stay the course, that will not be the case in future counteroffensives. Senior Ukrainian officials I met in Kyiv in September believe, as many outside experts do, that time is on Ukraine’s side in a drawn-out fight, especially when their warriors are better protected by fighter jets and air defenses, better armed with longer-range missiles, and better equipped with more sophisticated, domestically developed drones.
After the war ends, Ukraine will emerge as a powerful U.S. and NATO ally. Ukraine’s military will be one of Europe’s largest and best-armed, a defensive bulwark to deter future renewed Russian aggression and keep the peace. Already, Ukraine is moving away from its Soviet-era systems and adopting U.S.- and NATO-made weapons. After the war, Ukraine should quickly be invited to join NATO as it will become a serious provider of security for all of Europe. Ukraine could also become a reliable weapons supplier to NATO—who is building better sea drones than Ukraine today? It will also emerge as a major customer of U.S. weapons. More generally, a democratic, market-oriented, reconstructed Ukraine embedded in the European Union and NATO will be a significant economic partner for both Europe and the United States.
For Russia, defeat in Ukraine will speed up the demise of Putin’s domestic system of autocratic rule, just as the Soviet Union’s bloody and humiliating defeat in Afghanistan hastened the end of the Communist dictatorship. The end of Putinism will not happen overnight; it will most likely gain momentum only after Putin’s death or incapacitation. The United States and its European allies have a profound interest in weakening autocratic rule in Russia. A Russian defeat on the battlefield accelerates that outcome.
The opposite in equally true. If the United States abandons Ukraine now, the Russian threat to U.S. allies in Europe will only grow. Putin’s regime will become even stronger and threaten the United States’ democratic European allies even longer into the future.
2. The war’s outcome has clear implications for U.S. security interests in Asia. A Ukrainian victory, bolstered by strong U.S. and allied support, will make Chinese President Xi Jinping think harder about invading Taiwan, an assessment I heard repeatedly from top officials in Taiwan during a trip there last summer. If the United States continues to help Ukraine, Xi will be more likely to believe that the U.S. commitment to help Taiwan is credible. A U.S.-supported Ukrainian victory will also undermine Xi’s hypothesis that the United States is a declining, overextended power and that the democratic world can no longer act in unity for any sustained period.
Again, the opposite is equally true: If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, Xi will feel emboldened. If the United States stopped supporting Ukraine, Xi might assess that U.S. support for Taiwan would be temporary and feckless. Just as Putin is trying to do today in Ukraine, Chinese leaders will wait for politicians in Washington to doubt the wisdom of military and financial assistance to an embattled Taiwan and then call on Taipei to negotiate. To all those Republican members of Congress who argue that the focus should be on countering the China threat: Defeating Putin is a critical component of that grand strategy. Cutting military aid to Kyiv is precisely the wrong message to send to Beijing.
3. The war’s outcome will affect global U.S. interests. A Ukrainian victory would be a win for all those wanting to preserve the rules-based international order established and maintained by the United States since the end of World War II. Among that order’s amazing achievements have been the end of European overseas imperialism, establishing the taboo of annexation, and setting the global rules that brought an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity to the world. Wars of outright conquest and annexation, so frequent before 1945, rarely occurred, even during intense superpower competition during the Cold War. These outcomes served U.S. interests and made the world safer for Americans. A return to a Hobbesian world of annexation and imperialism would not serve U.S. interests. Americans would be dragged into these conflicts and potentially be at war with other major powers. The United States has no interest in returning to that kind of world.
4. The outcome of the war will have major implications for the contest between democracies and autocracies. Throughout its history, the United States’ enemies and rivals have been dictatorships, not other democracies. Think of imperial Japan, imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. When autocracies become democracies, it makes the United States safer. Think of post-1945 Japan, Germany, and Italy and then post-communist Europe, including Russia during its brief democratic phase in the early 1990s. Similarly, powerful autocracies make Americans less secure. Think of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. A Ukrainian victory will chalk up a win in the democracy column, perhaps even helping to reverse a nearly two-decade global trend of democratic erosion. In the great-power contest with China over the next several decades, democratic and liberal ideas constitute some of the greatest advantages of the United States and its democratic allies; this makes defending democracy a national interest. This is not just idealism: As former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued, “Promoting democracy … is not just the right thing to do. For America it is the smart thing to do.” Nowhere is this struggle of ideas more acute than in Ukraine. If Ukraine wins, the momentum for democrats around the world will grow, including those in neighboring Russia and Belarus. If Ukraine loses, the momentum for dictators will grow. The stakes are that high.
It is time for Congress to vote on a new assistance package for Ukraine. A yea vote is not only good for Ukraine but also a prudent investment in the national security of the United States.
