Would Reagan abandon Ukraine?

As the fighting in Ukraine continues, some representatives in Congress, primarily Republicans, oppose additional financial and military support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s ongoing invasion.

Four decades ago, a Republican president supported a different victim of Russian aggression in a situation similar to the one that the United States faces today. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, President Jimmy Carter offered limited aid to the Afghani resistance. But it was a Republican who championed and dramatically expanded funding for the Afghan mujahedeen during most of the nine-year effort to compel a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. That leader was the icon of the GOP, Ronald Reagan.

During Reagan’s first term, the prospects of wearing down the Soviet Union and convincing the Soviet leadership to quit Afghanistan did not look promising. J. Bruce Amstutz’s book “Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation,” published in 1986 as the Soviet occupation continued with no end in sight, summarized the conventional wisdom of the early 1980s that Moscow could not be pressured to withdraw.

Defying these causes for pessimism, Reagan continued and even increased his support for the Afghan resistance for many years. He recognized America’s unique role as a defender of freedom, even the freedom of an Asian nation far from the West.

Reagan’s determination paid off. The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, a historic superpower defeat that contributed to the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

American aid to Ukraine since February 2022 greatly exceeds what the United States provided to the Afghans in the 1980s. But the geostrategic stakes are much higher. In 1980, America merely aspired to take Afghanistan, an impoverished and strategically irrelevant nation, out of the Soviet sphere. Today, American aid to Ukraine is helping prevent a huge eastern European country of more than 40 million from becoming the first European nation to be conquered since World War II.

Republicans in Congress often play an eager role in funding America’s defense, and Congress as a whole spends hundreds of billions each year to prepare for notional wars in the near and distant future. It is puzzling, then, to see so many members wavering in their support for Ukraine. This is not a notional future war, but a fight for the actual independence of a real neighbor of NATO fighting a real war against real aggression by a real dictator.

If he were alive today, would Reagan be bailing out on the Ukrainians?