War and Political Will

The Myth of an Economic Burden in Supporting Ukraine

More Production, Zudor

Geert Wilders and the PVV outperforming expectations in the Netherlands has given fuel to the notion that public exhaustion with supporting the Ukranian war effort has reached a breaking point. It has become a relatively common occurrence to see some variation of an argument that there’s no longer any ability in liberal democracies to maintain essential military support to Ukraine.

The most recent high-profile incident was when Richard Haas made an appearance on Morning Joe and claimed that there was no longer any realistic path toward a Ukrainian victory—and that subsequently Western nations ought to pressure Zelensky to relinquish the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

The argument more broadly goes something like this: there is simply no more available military equipment to spare, and the prospect of standing up more production capacity is so onerous that it is beyond contemplation. While there are certainly constraints, and creating this capacity is a multi-year venture we’ve made progress, and the investments being made are still woefully short of getting us to where we need to be.

Most importantly—and what I want to talk about here, however—is the idea that domestic populations are justified in being tired of supporting the war effort.

A common theme you see among various voters is that the war in Ukraine is just too taxing on the budgets of their respective countries, and money that has been earmarked for aid and equipment going to Ukraine should instead be redirected to whatever domestic issues of the week is in vogue. It’s an argument that has been popular since the day that Russian tanks first crossed the Ukrainian border.

If it wasn’t for American assistance to Ukraine then the wildfires wouldn’t have happened, or Philadelphia wouldn’t have a homeless problem. Putting aside that these are just proxy issues that really function as a way to bolster their own political pet causes—in the United States usually as a way to present the GOP as being the party that actually cares about Americans. Regardless of the sincerity of these complaints, they really have had an effect on domestic support for providing necessary aid to Ukraine.

This is why I want to make a point here about what domestic populations in countries providing support to Ukraine are actually sacrificing. Put simply, they aren’t sacrificing anything.

Setting aside that it’s Ukrainian soldiers who are the ones fighting and dying and the notion that providing arms should be seen as some sort of burden is ridiculous—there’s been no actual economic pain either. Domestic voters quite frankly aren’t sacrificing anything when their governments are supporting the Ukranian war effort.

As I’ve previously pointed out, the United States’ current spending on defense is only slightly above 3% of our GDP. We’re not even close to spending what we had spent during our military conflict in Afghanistan, let alone in a historical context of spending that was consistently above 5% of GDP during the Cold War. In the course of almost two years of war, we’ve contributed a measly 44.2 billion in aid. To contextualize this, that’s about 8 Taylor Swift Eras Tours.

What I’m getting at here is that we’re hardly putting our economy on a war footing. There are no tradeoffs being made by the American public, and the notion that we just cannot manage to provide anything else isn’t true. The constant public messaging is giving people a false impression that the DoD is reaching into everyone’s bank accounts when in reality we are spending an unnoticeable fraction of our annual budget. To contextualize this again, the American budget is so large that we lose 247 billion dollars a year—more than five times the amount of aid we have sent to Ukraine.

More directly, not a single dollar that has been appropriated for military assistance has been felt by an American taxpayer. It’s simply not true that the reason you couldn’t afford a new television was that Joe Biden sent infantry fighting vehicles to the Ukrainians. You literally in fact could not tell, because there was a significantly higher chance that your tax dollars were actually just lost.

To broaden this out to the entirety of American allies, and to put this in the context of the Russian economy—we account for 47% of the global economy and Russia is about 2.8% of the global economy. The scale at which liberal democracies dwarf the Russian economy is almost comical in our collective ability to provide support to Ukraine. There are of course some structural problems—namely in industrial production—but these are problems that can be fixed with political will.

So long as we continue to erroneously tell voters that the notion of a Ukrainian victory is an elusive impossibility, we will be unable to work to leverage our almost limitless advantages to provide the Ukrainians with the means to achieve victory. The United States Army needs 3.1 billion dollars in investment to stand up the production capacity for 100,000 155mm artillery rounds per month—but cannot do so because Congress has been unable to actually pass a budget.

We have the resources to accomplish these goals, and as I think I’ve amply demonstrated—providing these resources isn’t an actual burden on taxpayers. Yet for some reason, various talking heads can’t stop themselves from finding an easy way to relevance by outwardly mythologizing constraints that don’t exist.

In the same way that an economic recession can arise from an illusory spiral of negative consumer sentiment creating an expectation of a recession that in turn creates more negative consumer sentiment that makes a recession real—the constant refrains about how onerous it is to support Ukraine can become its own death spiral.

We owe it as actual professionals to contextualize the actual scale of the military assistance that is being provided and to explain what it is we can actually do to help the Ukrainian people win. Democratic nations can earmark significantly more resources to produce and provide military equipment, all without domestic taxpayers ever noticing the money was spent. I just unfortunately doubt many people care to be the one that goes on a morning show to say that.