Schroedinger's Supplemental

On Ukraine Aid and the White House's "All-or-Nothing" Approach

Winter has departed in Washington. But as the capital begins its slow trek towards its swampy summer climate, the question of Ukraine aid remains unsettled. Since February, when it passed the Senate, a super-sized supplemental spending bill containing funding for Ukraine, Israel, and other contingencies has been tucked neatly in Speaker Mike Johnson’s pocket.

Ah, spring in Washington. I think I speak for all of us when I say that America should wage a Global War on Pollen.

The speaker is caught between dueling factions of his own caucus, either of which could imperil his speakership if he chooses wrongly. Perhaps the supplemental will eventually go before the House, pass and be signed into law, or maybe it will simply continue to languish in purgatory. Aid to Ukraine is beginning to feel like Schrodinger’s cat: no one can tell if it’s dead or alive.

Despite this, there’s relatively little negotiation going on behind the scenes. A few fixes have been suggested, such as turning some of the aid into a loan to get a skeptical Donald Trump on board. But by-and-large, both sides have simply dug into their existing positions. The White House argues that the aid utterly essential for Ukraine's future; opponents in congress argue that the war is a drain on U.S. resources that cannot be won through military force alone. The media narrative surrounding the aid has become an all-or-nothing story in which congress will either support Ukraine or abandon it to Putin.

But this all-or-nothing framing of the debate does us all a disservice. It does nothing to assess what America’s national interests in Ukraine are or how to pursue them. It offers no strategy for how Ukraine can win and no plan for achieving peace. And it gives the American people no real explanation of what sending further billions to Ukraine might or might not achieve, and what the tradeoffs of continuing to heavily invest in this approach are.

Hope over Strategy

Part of the problem, of course, is that the wide-ranging supplemental spending bill has become mired in politics. Though it seemed like a smart tactical decision on the part of the Biden administration in late 2023 to link Ukraine aid to Israel aid, that linkage has proven problematic. At first, it was Republican hesitation over Ukraine that held up the Israel aid; even sweeteners related to Taiwan failed to move the needle on Republican votes. Now, several months into Israel’s punitive war in Gaza, the Israel part of the bill has become controversial among progressive Democrats. There is undoubtedly still a majority in Congress that favors at least some further aid to Ukraine, but whether this bill can succeed in its current Frankenstein form is an open question.

The fundamental problem, though, is not the usual politics of any mega-spending bill; it’s the growing unpopularity of further Ukraine spending across the political spectrum – where half of Americans think the U.S. is already doing enough or too much for Ukraine – along with the grinding, fruitless course of the war itself.

In its current form, the supplemental calls for about $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, in addition to $26 billion in Defense Department spending to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Indeed, despite the breadth of the bill, the lion’s share of spending in it is for Ukraine-related issues. Of the direct spending on defense, 76% will go to Ukraine. This is a significant chunk of change, and almost as much as the $75 billion that the United States has already spent on Ukraine over the last two years.

It is certainly true, as advocates of the bill argue, that much of this money will in fact go to defense contractors here in the United States, not directly to Ukraine. But this is rhetorical sleight-of-hand: however you look at it, the bill takes U.S. taxpayer money and funnels it – in the form of new weaponry and weapons systems – to Ukraine. 

And while the strategic foundation for some further spending is fairly strong, the argument for spending this much is shakier. The administration has largely failed to make concrete arguments about how this spending would improve the course of the war. In his remarks in December, President Biden argued that failing to pass the bill would “give Putin the greatest gift he could hope for,” and that without this spending, the U.S. might have to send troops to defend other European countries from Russian invasion. In a speech in October, he argued that the funding would help to uphold U.S. global leadership. About the closest the administration has come to discussing the course of the war itself was General Cavoli, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who told congress that without significant increases in ammunition supplies, Ukrainian forces may start to lose ground to Russia.

Avdiivka fell to Russian forces just two months after this photo was taken.

Even that argument can’t explain what another $60-plus billion dollars could realistically hope to achieve in Ukraine. The war has largely degenerated into one of attrition, with Russia holding a significant advantage in manpower and in artillery ammunition. Since the failure of last year’s counteroffensive, many military analysts agree that the prospect for significant Ukrainian territorial gains will require years of reconstituting Ukrainian forces, along with further mobilization by Kyiv. The administration appears to be reaching this conclusion too, at least in private: though officials’ stated goals are still to help Ukraine take back all its territory, privately, they appear to be shifting towards a defensive strategy and a multi-year process of rebuilding Ukraine’s forces.

If this sounds uncomfortably familiar, it might be because it echoes Americans’ experiences of debates over the War on Terror. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine have very little in common, but policy discussions surrounding both have been characterized by an unwillingness among policy elites to recognize battlefield realities – or simply the limits of military power. Just as military leaders kept promising every year that this year would be the year we turned the corner in Afghanistan, the Ukraine debate is full of familiar promises that a multi-year process of investment in Ukraine’s defensive capabilities will somehow yield victory further down the line.  

South Park got this one right.

Maybe policymakers they have convinced themselves that anything short of absolute victory in Ukraine will be a disaster. Or perhaps they’re simply engaged in that most human tendency: embracing hope and avoiding difficult choices. Either way, the end result is likely to be similar: years of spending untethered from concrete goals, with no clear path to victory.

That’s why it is so important to avoid falling into this pattern in Ukraine. Rather than simply passing another massive supplemental – kicking the can down the road - it's time for policymakers to think more seriously about tethering spending to strategy in Ukraine. They should also seriously consider whether the time has come to open negotiations in attempt to lock in existing gains and halt the drain on Ukrainian manpower and Western resources.

Strategy before Spending

The burden of elucidating a better strategy falls most heavily on the White House. Part of what has made this process so contentious is that this is fundamentally a disagreement between the executive and Congress over foreign policy, an area in which congress has limited tools. Congress can do oversight, and it can control spending.¹ But congress can’t do strategy, or at least not directly, and their refusal to fund Ukraine aid should be seen at least partly as an opening gambit to negotiations with the White House.

It’s not even necessarily a partisan issue. Various Democrats have expressed concerns about the administration’s unclear goals in Ukraine; Adam Smith, the chair of the House Armed Services committee, though a supporter of the funding bill, has nonetheless criticized the administration’s maximalist stance on regaining all Ukraine’s territory, and criticized their ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’ policy as “ridiculous.”  

Exhibit A

It is certainly true, as Biden’s spokespeople have pointed out, that most opponents of Ukraine aid haven’t articulated a coherent or workable strategy either. Former – and perhaps future – President Trump, for example, has argued that he could end the conflict in 24 hours by giving up Ukrainian land for peace. One suspects that this is just the 2024 version of his “secret campaign to defeat ISIS,” which turned out to be nonexistent.

But reasonable voices in congress on both sides of this issue are increasingly questions the strategy issue. Smith, for example, has focused his comments on the need to move away from territorial definitions of victory to one focused on preserving a “sovereign democratic Ukraine that can survive.” Senator JD Vance of Ohio, meanwhile, has focused on the limits of U.S. industrial capacity, U.S. needs in Asia, and the need to switch to a defensive strategy in Ukraine. Both appear to realize what the White House does not: absolute victory in Ukraine is out of reach, but there are a variety of other ways to ensure that Ukraine survives and thrives, while Russia is denied its goals in the conflict.

Yet it is only the Biden administration that can bring other options into the mix here. Congress can deny funding; they cannot implement strategy.

The administration could dial down their request to Congress, attempting to make aid more palatable through a lower sticker price, or through less focus on high-end offensive systems. They could devote more attention to explicit trade-offs between US needs in Asia and Europe. Even better would be for the administration to elucidate exactly what they believe further aid to Ukraine might yield in terms of concrete benefits. A more limited aid package focused on cheaper, defensive weapons, tied to an administration commitment to push for the cease-fire in the conflict, for example, could go some way towards easing congressional concerns.

Regardless of how they do it, it’s increasingly clear the administration needs a new strategy for Ukraine, with practical elements like shifting more burden to European states, embracing a defensive approach, or looking for ways to decrease the intensity of conflict. And the fight over Ukraine aid signals once again just how badly the administration needs to consider its foreign policy priorities. With war raging in the Middle East, and an increasingly assertive China in Asia, the notion that the United States can continue to massively support Ukraine’s war effort for the next three to five years (or more!) is ill-conceived at best — and potentially ruinous at worst.

1. Indeed, it’s notable that before the current spending bill became a point of contention in congress, those skeptical of Ukraine aid also tried to impose oversight of the issue, only to be defeated.