The Cost of Not Supporting Ukraine

The Revolutionary War lasted eight long years (1775-83). Our allies the French were very helpful in the eventual American military victory. America did not reject foreign assistance. In fact, Benjamin Franklin cultivated it.

Today, Ukraine, Israel, and the Republic of China on Taiwan need our help. Will America respond? 

After a year or so of Ukraine’s resistance against a Russian invasion, some were saying that the United States should pull the plug on Ukraine, causing a refugee crisis throughout Europe and America as millions more flee the inevitable Russian advance. 

The cause of denying Ukraine the right of self-defense has united the communists backing Vladimir Putin of Russia with “conservatives” like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just posed for pictures with the Marxist women of Code Pink, a group also arguing against U.S. aid to Israel. What is interesting is that Code Pink also serves as a mouthpiece for Hamas, the Iranian-backed terrorist group which has just invaded Israel. Iran, in turn, is backed by Russia, which has hosted Hamas leaders on a regular basis in Moscow. 

Israel will get the aid it needs and has a sophisticated military. It doesn’t need American troops on the ground. Ukraine is the question mark, even though Iran supplies drones to Russia to kill the Christian people of Ukraine, led by a Jewish President.

If House Republicans deny Ukraine the assistance they need, blood will be on their hands. Then, America’s sons and daughters will be called into duty and sent to NATO member Poland, the new front-line state, and the cost in money and blood will be even more significant.

It would be politically helpful for China Joe to blame the Republicans for assisting Putin’s brutal invasion. It could be Joe’s ticket to re-election.  

“Opposition to Ukraine Aid Becomes a Litmus Test for the Right” is the headline over a New York Times article about the coming battle in Congress.

There was a time, under President Ronald Reagan, when American conservatives were in favor of aid to anti-communist and other resistance movements and friendly allies. Now, because of the success of Russian propaganda, many conservatives have been confused and misled about the stakes in Ukraine. These people think Putin was somehow provoked into starting a war that has cost 500,000 lives. 

To set the record straight on Soviet/Russian tactics and strategies, America’s Survival, Inc. (ASI) is publishing a detailed analysis of the origins of the Russian-backed propaganda that the government of Ukraine and its military forces are dominated by Nazis. The analysis traces the propaganda to a lie manufactured by Russia’s Tsarist Secret Police and currently used by the former KGB officer and current Russian President Vladimir Putin.  However, new versions of the Big Lie have appeared over time, in order to mask the anti-Semitic nature of the Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion.

Our report is titled, “The Big Lie Driving Russian Influence in the Conservative Movement and the Destruction of Ukraine.” 

We all concede that Ukraine is corrupt. So is Russia. So is America. Still, foreign assistance to Ukraine makes sense, if only to stem the flow of refugees fleeing a Russian advance that will inevitably target Poland and other European states.

If Ukraine falls to Russia, we will have another refugee and migrant crisis that will spread beyond Europe’s borders.

According to the estimates, as of February 2023, more than 271,000 Ukrainian refugees have been admitted to the United States. Those who monitor the problem say, “The devastating war led to Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II, with over 6 million recorded refugees from Ukraine globally as of July 4, 2023, and over 5 million internally displaced individuals within Ukraine as of May 23, 2023.”

A Russian takeover means more refugees, including possibly hundreds of thousands or millions more to the U.S., in addition to the deployment of U.S. troops to Europe to stop a Russian invasion of NATO territory. That would make current spending on Ukraine seem penny ante.

What passes for “modern” conservative wisdom from the likes of Stephen K. Bannon, in claiming that defunding Ukraine will somehow “stop” the war, is dangerously absurd. His links to Putin’s geopolitical strategist Alexander Dugin, who mixes communism and fascism together for a new Russian ideology, are alarming and must be examined in detail. 

We must go back in history to understand current events.

When the American Revolution was in danger of failing, Benjamin Franklin worked to gain French support for American independence. An official history noted, “His popularity and diplomatic skill - along with the first American battlefield success at Saratoga - convinced France to recognize American independence and conclude an alliance with the thirteen states in 1778.” Later, France supplied men and arms.

In Mel Gibson’s great movie The Patriot, based on actual events, we see the British were defeated at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 when the French Navy arrived to blockade the British. General Cornwallis admits defeat and surrenders.

At this point, America is only supplying arms to Ukraine. They need more and better arms to overcome the Russians and the predicament Biden left them in, after declaring that he might tolerate a minor Russian “incursion” into the country. Before Biden, Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Clinton disarmed Ukraine of its conventional and nuclear arms through such agreements with Russia as the Budapest Memorandum.

Israel, by contrast, has a significant nuclear arsenal. It can act against Iran and can also support Ukraine in its war against Russia with offensive weapons. It can and must do so. 

Conservatives who opposed aid to Ukraine are looking like complete fools as they now scramble to support Israel and retreat from the “Fortress America” concept.  

In retrospect, it turns out there was a Russian plot but it was not the one Hillary peddled to the FBI so they could go after Trump. Putin's former KGB comrades manipulated some “conservatives’ into backing his cause. 

It is time for the opponents of aid to Ukraine to reverse course, admit the error of their ways, and urge the House under new leadership to pass a budget with higher defense spending, more aid to Israel and Ukraine, and a plan to secure our southern border based on the identification and deportation of all suspected terrorists immediately.  

It is clearly time to admit the threats are global in scope and return to the Reagan Doctrine.