During his 1976 presidential campaign, the late senator Bob Dole once recounted the toll from “Democrat wars.” He might better have cited the costs of retreats and abandonment by Democratic Congresses and administrations, of which Vietnam and Afghanistan are the most dramatic examples.
But today’s congressional Republicans who adhere to the cut-and-run message of Donald Trump on Ukraine are betraying the peace-through-strength philosophy of Ronald Reagan.
Former President Trump has said more than once that, if elected again, he “would solve” the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” Yet, Vladimir Putin has given no indication that he is prepared to withdraw Russian invasion forces from Ukraine, especially with the increased support he is receiving from China, Iran and North Korea.
Perhaps the most decisive factor in Putin’s intention to continue his criminal war of aggression is the faltering of Western will. It was demonstrated last week by the insistence of Trump loyalists in the House of Representatives that Ukraine aid be stripped from the compromise continuing resolution that prevented a government shutdown.
Given the very real possibility that Trump will win the 2024 election if President Biden and his own loyalists insist on his running, Putin has every reason to hold on to the 20 percent of Ukraine that he still occupies illegally. He clearly expects that Trump will enforce his hostile advice to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop his liberation counteroffensive by simply cutting off further U.S. aid. “I would tell Zelensky, no more. You got to make a deal.”
That will have an unraveling effect on other Western governments that follow the U.S. lead — or, rather, its failure to lead. That has been the pattern since Russian forces, undeterred by Biden’s threats of economic sanctions, poured across the Ukrainian border in February 2022.
Each time Biden refused to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needed to defend itself, key NATO allies also withheld theirs, to Ukraine’s grievous detriment. Germany, for example, refused to send Ukraine its Leopard tanks until Biden agreed to send America’s Abrams. The delays and procrastination by both countries have hurt Ukraine’s ability to counter Russia. Now, for fear of being the first to escalate, Chancellor Olaf Scholtz is again using what he calls a German-U.S. “strategic lockstep” to link deliveries of Germany’s Taurus missile and the U.S ATACMs.
The world has seen this cascading capitulation before, when Washington pulled the plug on Vietnam and Afghanistan, as well as in Ukraine in 2014 under the Obama-Biden administration and in Georgia in 2008 under Bush-Cheney.
Domestic opposition to American support for South Vietnam during its conflict was fairly bipartisan in the end. But, for a decade before that, a principal Democratic theme was that the war was not only costing lives but was diverting U.S. resources from pressing domestic needs.
The parallel argument from Trump-influenced congressional Republicans is that attention and material resources devoted to Ukraine are a distraction from the urgent need to stop illegal immigration from Mexico. “We’re not stopping the invasion at the southern border but we’re gonna make sure we’re gonna stop the invasion in Ukraine,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene (R,-Ga.) last week, ignoring the reality that America must — and can — do both.
The need to challenge aggression from authoritarian powers pertains in the Indo-Pacific as well. Putin’s revanchist ambition to reconstitute the disintegrated Soviet Empire is matched by Communist China’s sweeping claims to virtually the entire South China Sea.
The Philippines is one of five U.S. treaty allies in the region. In 2012, Chinese forces occupied Scarborough Shoal, which is within the Philippines Exclusive Economic Zone, preventing Filipino fishermen from entering their usual fishing waters. The Obama administration arranged a settlement under which both Chinese and Filipino forces would leave the Shoal. The Filipinos complied but the Chinese never left, and never suffered any consequences from the Philippines or the Obama administration.
In recent years, China has been making aggressive moves against Second Thomas Shoal, which is also within the Philippines EEZ and is presently occupied by the Philippines. Manila fears Beijing may try to seize it and repeat the Scarborough scenario.
But President Ferdinand Marcos II has vowed military resistance to any such effort and the Biden administration has said conflict there would invoke the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Security Treaty. Whether Biden will fulfill that pledge is an open question, since it would involve a clash between two nuclear powers.
The other major flash point in the Indo-Pacific is Taiwan, with which the U.S. does not have a mutual defense treaty or even a security guarantee like that given to Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for Ukraine’s turning over its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. Xi Jinping must be calculating how seriously he should take Biden’s four impromptu remarks that America will directly intervene to defend Taiwan when he will not even allow a carrier battle group to pass through the Taiwan Strait during peacetime.
Like Putin, Xi is no doubt contemplating whether it is better to bide his time and hope for a Trump victory in 2024. Despite the transformative policies on China and Taiwan of several officials in the Trump administration, recent disclosures about his term in office reveal his own lack of conviction or coherence on East Asia security issues.
America may have to choose in 2024 between an erratic former president and a fearful incumbent.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.