By Leonid Bershidsky / Bloomberg Opinion
As the rich soil dries in Ukraine’s south and east and the Kyiv-led military prepares to counterattack, it’s a good time to revisit a key question for the invaded country’s Western allies: “Is Ukraine worth supporting, and if so, why?”
Throughout the West, support for supplying Ukraine with weapons has been wavering. In the U.S., the share of people who say the government is doing too much for Ukraine is on the rise, and in Germany, a steady majority contends that diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict are insufficient. While the West’s political and security establishment (with a few exceptions, notably Hungary) agrees that Russia must be defeated to uphold the liberal world order, prevent Russian aggression from spreading and teach a lesson to dictators tempted to follow Vladimir Putin’s expansionist example, millions of people outside this establishment are unmoved by such arguments.
For many who live in Germany, France or Japan, the liberal world order is at best an abstraction and at worst an attempt to put a favorable spin on American dominance. In any of these countries — and in the U.S., too — it’s hard to imagine Russia attacking one’s hometown as it has attacked Ukrainian cities. It requires less imagination, however, to fear a Russian nuclear strike on Western “decision-making centers” if Putin faces defeat in Donbass.
Even solidarity with Ukrainians — a nation brutally attacked, bombed out of its homes, forced to fight or flee — isn’t a universally appealing cause. Ukraine the country is known to be corrupt, and the latest scandal involving the biggest Ukraine charity in Estonia shows how easily aid can be misdirected. Many Europeans volunteer for Ukrainian refugees in their own countries or help individual families; for many, that’s a better outlet for solidarity than backing further weapons supplies or privately funding drone deliveries to Ukrainian troops.
Yet I couldn’t blame an American, a German or a Spaniard for not caring about rules, customs and living conditions in Ukraine or Russia. I couldn’t reproach them for not caring who wins in a relatively faraway conflict. Yes, it’s in Europe; but then, Bakhmut is about as far from Madrid as Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. I’ve heard often enough that “the Russians aren’t coming this far, especially if you don’t provoke them,” and I’ve struggled to answer without resorting to a Hitler analogy. After all, Putin has never indicated that his imperial ambitions stretch beyond the borders of his native country, the former Soviet Union. And to many Westerners — those outside the former Eastern Bloc — the Soviet Union’s former component parts still don’t appear in their mental map as “real countries.”
When governments call on Western citizens to support Ukraine, their appeals rely heavily on morals and emotion: Most people will agree that it’s wrong to start wars of invasion, that torture is abhorrent and that peaceful people’s lives are to be protected. Yet such feelings of solidarity can be evanescent, especially in the face of rising global inflation spurred by the war and the sanctions imposed on Russia and growing fears of a nuclear confrontation with an adversary as seemingly deranged as Putin.
If governments want their pro-Ukraine policies to attract lasting public support, they need to build arguments that appeal to the self-interest of distracted and distrustful voters.
They should start by playing up the cost-effective benefits of the West’s military support. As the Ukrainian journalist Vitaliy Syzov has argued, the current level of support for Ukraine is a small price to pay for stopping an aggressive and unpredictable Russia without actually putting NATO boots on the ground. The $76.8 billion spent by the U.S. government so far is only about 1.2 percent of total U.S. government expenditure in 2022. The military part of it, $46.6 billion, is about 5.3 percent of all military spending. And much of that money only crosses the U.S. border in the form of U.S.-made equipment, helping support American jobs: The U.S. defense and aerospace industry, with more than $700 billion in annual sales, is responsible for about 2 percent of the country’s employment base.
Moreover, as the Rand Corp.’s Raphael Cohen and Gian Gentile have pointed out:
“Much of American military assistance to Ukraine comes from existing, in some cases antiquated, military stockpiles; which means that when Congress pays for military aid to Ukraine, it is functionally allowing the United States to replace its older weapons with new ones. Ukraine aid also boosts the American defense industry and the American economy in the short run, and, in the long run, expands U.S. capacity to build everything from artillery rounds to air defense missiles.”
In Europe, too, the $23.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine has stimulated a defense industry that directly employs 3.8 million workers, pays more than 140 billion euros in annual salaries and accounts for 2.8 support jobs for each direct one. The militaries of the Soviet Union’s former satellites have been able to unload vast quantities of rusting Soviet-produced weapons and made deals with German, the United Kingdom and French manufacturers to replace the stocks.
For decades, the armed forces of the West have only fought much weaker rivals; and even so, managed to lose some wars. Taking a strong interest in the war in Ukraine prepares Western militaries for more serious conflict, allows them to understand the role played by newer weapons such as drones, provides opportunities to test new technology based on connectivity and artificial intelligence. The war, which few predicted, shows how important it is for any country to be able to defend itself; and in the West, it has sharpened the awareness of defense shortfalls and the resolve to correct them.This increased attention to military capabilities may come in handy if China attacks Taiwan; a move that, if successful, would establish China as at least a geopolitical, as well as technological, equal to the U.S. But if Ukraine, with the help of its allies, manages to hold off Russia, China may put off its own forceful expansion indefinitely; another argument in favor of backing Ukraine.
Another rational argument for siding with Ukraine has to do with Europe’s energy resiliency. Once reliant on Russia for their energy, European nations such as Germany did not give in to Putin’s attempt to use energy as a weapon, and have instead developed new supply channels, launched LNG terminal projects and encouraged consumers to switch to “greener” options such as heat pumps. All this activity is making the European energy market far more flexible and driving energy prices back down; and if Russia ever becomes a more reliable supplier, they can only drop further. For Americans, of course, the European efforts have opened up a greater energy export market, a clear economic win.
True, the curtailing of trade with Russia has resulted in economic losses, particularly for European exporters. It has contributed to the European Union’s biggest recorded trade deficit last year. But again, as in the case of energy, a greater diversification of export markets can only make Western producers more resilient; when Russia opens up again, they will be in for a windfall.
Finally, consider the impact that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had on global migration; which a Russian “victory” would only make worse. Europe already faces a refugee situation far worse in many ways than even the crisis it faced in 2016, which was itself fueled partly by Russia’s support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s savage war against his own people. The UN has counted almost 8.2 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe, compared with 5.2 million people from the Middle East and Africa who had reached European shores by the end of 2016. If Ukraine wins, many Ukrainians will go home; only some much-needed workers who have largely been integrated into their host countries will remain. If Ukraine loses, those refugees who burden European social safety nets will not leave, either, just as very few people from the previous refugee wave have returned to their birth countries. And whether in terms of Ukrainians fleeing the invasion or refugees from other poorer nations whose food supplies and livelihoods have been devastated by the war, U.S. borders have also felt the invasion’s ripple effects.
These arguments should appeal to conservative voters who are looking for a selfish reason to back Ukraine. They may not work with pacifists who simply feel that all or most military expenditure is essentially a waste of money and, at any rate, a drag on economic growth, or with people who believe all refugees should be welcome indefinitely. But then, it’s out of character for such people to support or even tolerate a brutal war of invasion like the one Putin is waging in Ukraine. These conflicted individuals simply should be allowed to work out their inner contradictions for themselves.
If governments fail to add such “selfish” arguments in favor of backing Ukraine to their rhetorical arsenals, Ukraine fatigue will set in quickly, especially if the planned counteroffensive fizzles. A quick ending to the fighting is not the likeliest of outcomes, and Western politicians should plan ahead to make sure that voters don’t come to see their initial resolve as a costly mistake.
Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”
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