Sprinting to Nowhere

Congress and Ukraine Aid Part II

Tyler Hicks, The New York Times

It’s been about two and a half months since I wrote the first piece about the political future of American military assistance to Ukraine, and it feels like a good time to write a brief follow-up piece on where I think things stand going into 2024.

For a summary of where we stand at the current moment, it’s worth just running through the various stances on any sort of aid package that has emerged over the last few weeks.

Despite the Senate having reached a tentative deal for Ukraine aid, it is starting to look dead on arrival with the House. Trump has publicly pressured GOP members to reject all but the most hardline border legislation possible and Speaker Mike Johnson has flatly rejected the bi-partisan Senate bill. House members have also already very publicly threatened to oust Speaker Johnson and send the House back into chaos if he brings any form of Ukraine aid to the floor.

Democrats in the Senate will of course not agree to any sort of hard-line border bill brought up by the House—it’s just flatly not going to happen.

Some of this can be chalked up to public rhetoric for the sake of improving the House GOP’s negotiating position, but I have a hard time dismissing most of it. Don’t forget that we’re on our third continuing resolution now, and one GOP speaker has already lost his job over this.

At a certain point, you just have to start taking people at their word when they say they’re happy to see the whole world burn rather than give an inch. Which gets me to where I think we’re heading.

We’re rapidly approaching a point where if Congress doesn’t manage to pass some sort of aid package—there’s just not going to be any aid at all until the November elections.

With the Republican primary all but over, the center of political power in the Republican Party is going to be entirely focused on the general election, and by extension working to maximize Trump’s electoral chances. The current GOP-led House has been spectacularly unproductive, and I think the constant grinding deadlock in Washington has played no small part in the overall American dissatisfaction with Biden’s Presidency.

It all is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 political blockade by Mitch McConnell to stop President Obama from appointing a judge to the Supreme Court by citing the upcoming election as a reason to forbid him from taking any lasting actions. The GOP has said it themselves that they see no reason they should give Biden any sort of win going into the 2024 election.

In this instance, I think we’re careening towards a point where the GOP house refuses any sort of substantive legislation through appeals to Trump’s ongoing campaign—and they just freeze anything until November. It’s not guaranteed of course, but the window to get something done is getting smaller.

The difference this time is that instead of blocking a judge from taking a seat on the Supreme Court, we’re going to get thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed at the front. While I’ve tried to stress before that Ukraine still has a robust defense industrial base, and Europe can fill in for the United States—we aren’t replaceable for an entire year.

There simply aren’t enough 155mm rounds to go around without the United States providing additional support. European countries can provide some limited ammunition, but firms like Rheinmetall are still years away from being able to create the production capacity to meet Ukraine’s needs.

This of course without mentioning America’s ability to provide IFVs and MRAPs in much more significant numbers than most European countries. The CV90 is a great IFV, but there aren’t thousands of them just lying around like there are with the Bradley.

The longer this drags on the worse things are going to look on the front in Ukraine as the Russian superiority in fires will only increase, and Ukranian matériel will gradually erode with no capacity for replacement.

This doesn’t mean that I think Ukraine will just surrender because the United States was too caught up in our domestic fights to help, but I do fear that if this goes on too long the Ukrainian military may suffer too much lopsided an attrition rate to ever fully recover.

The Russian military industry in contrast has been mobilized for this entire time, and the Russian military will only grow in strength through the entire period that American support is missing. Despite horrific and lopsided losses around town like Avdiivka, it won’t matter on a macro scale as the men and matériel lost by the Russian military will not impact their growing battlefield capabilities.

Ukrainian soldiers and systems cannot be as easily replaced as Russian systems can, and Zelensky cannot just simply snap his fingers and have new brigades appear from the ether—there will be real consequences if this goes on for too long.

This should all be lighting a fire under our lawmakers to get this done, since if we don’t, I’m not particularly sure we’ll get the chance to do so again.