Ukraine aid and the U.S. interest

As in any geopolitical or local conflict, we need to know which side we are on and support it with the best available options. Military aid improves our options to protect populations under siege and prevent more deaths while buying time until cooler heads prevail. In Ukraine, our security assistance is preventing more deaths in its cities and on its battlefields and preventing Russia from spreading into Europe.

Russia’s war there has created a messy, ill-structured problem with multiple sub-problems and many outcomes that are not easily identifiable or soluble in the short run. Targeted U.S. military aid can and should be supported even if for the selfish reason of additional jobs in our home districts.

George Guess, Potomac

There is another dimension of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine beyond Marc A. Thiessen’s excellent analysis of how U.S. defense contractors and U.S. forces are benefiting from providing military equipment to Ukraine from current inventories.

Just as cooperation between the United States and Israel has provided the U.S. military access to sophisticated Israeli missile technologies and drone capabilities, so, too, is U.S. military support of Ukraine providing similar benefits. U.S. military planners are gaining invaluable, combat-tested insights into Ukrainian military technologies, including naval drones, countermeasures against Russian/Iranian drones, Russian military tactics and strategies for countering Russian electronic warfare.

Although we are expending a portion of our treasure on Ukraine, we are doing so without spilling American or NATO allies’ blood on a battlefield while gaining many significant benefits and insights. U.S. aid to Ukraine is not an expense but a long-term strategic investment.

Len Zuza, Solomons, Md.

Having failed to convince the American people that a blank check to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in their interests, the Ukraine First caucus now claims the aid primarily benefits American workers. Marc A. Thiessen’s op-ed exemplified the pivot.

This is disingenuous and dangerous. The fact that weapons of war are made in America does not justify sending them abroad, and a $100 billion foreign aid package is not pro-worker manufacturing policy. It undermines our national security by exhausting critical resources on a strategic quagmire.

We support increasing defense spending and building up our defense-industrial base. An expansion of our military manufacturing capacity benefits American workers and bolsters our national security. Washington is more focused on sending our limited military stockpiles to a conflict in Ukraine with no clear path to victory.

The Biden administration’s new message fails to account for grave shortages in our stockpiles. Thanks to nearly two years of mission in Ukraine, the United States is perilously unready for any additional contingency. Anything with a solid rocket motor is in short supply, including the SM-6s that would be needed in the Pacific. The high demand for Stingers, Javelins and Patriot interceptors in Ukraine means we are desperately short of the weapons that would be needed in Taiwan. Replenishing them is going to take years.

New aid packages don’t add to those stockpiles. Instead, they grant President Biden authority to continue sending weapons to Ukraine faster than we can produce them. That might make sense if prolonging the war in Ukraine were America’s top priority.

If we are expected to oblige every request for weapons “Made in the U.S.A.,” there would be no conflict from which we abstain. Why not send weapons to Myanmar and take a side in the Ethiopian civil war? Using Mr. Thiessen’s tortured logic, this makes great sense as long as the weapons are made in America.

War is not a business venture, and the United States is more than just an economy. We are a nation with discrete geopolitical objectives and security priorities.

Ukraine aid proponents have failed to secure victory or end the conflict. This failure has come at great cost to U.S. taxpayers and to the Ukrainian people. Mr. Zelensky’s senior officials admit the war has reached an intractable stalemate and that hundreds of billions in foreign aid has fueled rampant corruption. The failure machine must be stopped.

Polling from Morning Consult showed that only 41 percent of Americans support further aid for Ukraine. The Biden administration is fully aware of this. Politico reported in October that congressional Republicans and the White House fine-tuned their talking points for a conservative audience. They missed the mark.

Political spin cannot obscure that Americans no longer support aid for Ukraine. Neither should the Senate.

J.D. Vance, Washington

Tommy Tuberville, Washington

The writers, both Republican, represent, respectively, Ohio and Alabama in the U.S. Senate.