What Ukraine aid debate is about, and how China fits
Over the weekend Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio went to the Munich Security Conference to play an unpopular part — a spokesperson, at a gathering of the Western foreign policy establishment, for the populist critique of American support for Ukraine’s war effort.
If you were to pluck a key phrase from his comments, it would be “world of scarcity,” which Vance used five times to describe the American strategic situation: stretched by our global commitments, unable to support Ukraine while simultaneously maintaining our position in the Middle East and preparing for a war in East Asia and therefore forced to husband our resources and expect our allies in Europe to counter Russia’s armaments and ambitions.
The case Vance pressed in Munich — not isolationist but Asia-first, more concerned about the Taiwan Strait than the Donbas — has supplied the common ground for Republican critics of our Ukraine policy since early in the war. But consistency is not the same as correctness, and it’s worth looking for a moment at why this kind of argument makes Ukraine hawks so frustrated.
In part, there’s a suspicion that some of the people making an Asia-first case don’t fully believe it, that it’s just a more respectable way of sloughing off American obligations and that if the conservative base or Donald Trump decided it wasn’t worth fighting for Taiwan, many China-hawk Republicans would come up with some excuse to justify inaction.
But assuming good faith, there’s also the problem that this argument privileges hypothetical aggression over real aggression, a potential war over a current one.
Indeed, despite agreeing with the overall Asiafirst assessment, I chafe at it — enough to think that the Biden administration made the right call backing Ukraine initially and that a sharp cutoff in aid would be a mistake even if we should be seeking an armistice.
But weighing contingencies against actuality is always part of what statesmen have to do. And the weighing that prioritizes Taiwan over Ukraine, danger in East Asia over actual war in Europe, depends on two presumptions.
The first is that China is serious not just about taking Taiwan but also about doing it soon. If you think China’s military buildup and bellicosity are signaling potential annexation in some distant future, then there’s no immediate trade-off between Europe and the Pacific. Instead, in that case it becomes reasonable to think that defeating Putin in the 2020s will give Beijing pause in the 2030s and that the long-term commitment to military production required to arm Ukraine for victory will also help deter China 10 years hence.
But suppose that the peril is much closer, that
Beijing’s awareness of its long-term challenges makes it more likely to gamble while America is divided and potentially headed for four years of limited presidential capacity under either party’s nominee. In that case our potential strengths in 10 years are irrelevant, and the fact that we’re currently building anti-tank and antiaircraft missiles only to burn through them means that we’re basically inviting the Chinese to make their move, and soon.
Which in turn brings us to the second presumption: that Taiwan falling to its imperial neighbor would change the world for the worse on a greater scale than Ukraine ceding territory or even facing outright defeat.
If you see the two countries as essentially equivalent, both American clients but not formal Nato-style allies, both democracies vulnerable to authoritarian great-power neighbors, then there’s a stronger case for doing everything for Ukraine when it’s immediately threatened, regardless of the consequences for Taiwan.
But they are not equivalent. The American commitment to Taiwan goes back almost 70 years, and for all that we’ve cultivated ambiguity since the Nixon era, the island is still understood to be under the American umbrella in a way that’s never been true of Ukraine.