What MAGA has against Ukraine

So the federal government wasn’t shut down over the weekend, although we may have to go through this whole drama again in six weeks. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-California, ended up doing the obvious: bringing a funding bill to the floor that could pass only with Democratic votes, because the hard-liners in his own party wouldn’t agree to anything feasible. And the bill didn’t include any of the spending cuts Republicans have been demanding, except for one big, bad thing: a cutoff of aid to Ukraine.

Democrats appear to have agreed to this bill because they expect to get a separate vote on Ukraine aid.

But why did things turn out this way? Michael Strain of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute has called the fiscal confrontation the “‘Seinfeld’ shutdown” — that is, a shutdown about nothing. That’s a good line, but if we’re going to do popular culture references, I think it might be better to call it the “Network” shutdown, as in people shouting, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Nothing short of a coup can satisfy this inchoate rage. But McCarthy evidently thought he could reduce the backlash against his deal with Democrats by betraying, or at least pretending to betray, Ukraine. That’s clearly something MAGA wants. But why?

Whatever anti-Ukraine voices such as Elon Musk may pretend, it’s not about the money.

Right-wing hard-liners, in and outside Congress, claim to be upset about the amount we’re spending supporting Ukraine. If they really cared about the financial burden of aid, they’d make the minimal effort to get the numbers right. No, aid to Ukraine isn’t undermining the future of Social Security or making it impossible to secure our border or consuming 40% of America’s gross domestic product.

How much are we actually spending supporting Ukraine? In the 18 months after the Russian invasion, U.S. aid totaled $77 billion. That may sound like a lot. It is a lot compared with the tiny sums we usually allocate to foreign aid. But total federal outlays are running at more than $6 trillion a year, or more than $9 trillion every 18 months, so Ukraine aid accounts for less than 1% of federal spending (less than 0.3% of GDP). The military portion of that is less than 5% of America’s defense budget.

But back to the costs of aiding Ukraine: Given how small a budget item that aid is, claims that aid to Ukraine somehow makes it impossible to do other necessary things, such as securing the border, are nonsense.

And the benefits of aiding a beleaguered democracy are huge. Before the war, Russia was widely viewed as a major military power, which a majority of Americans saw as a critical threat. That power has been humbled.

Ukraine’s unexpectedly successful resistance has also put other autocratic regimes on notice that democracies aren’t that easy to overrun.

Why, then, do MAGA politicians want to cut Ukraine off?

Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Russian President Vladimir Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to dictators abroad.

So, pay no attention to complaints about how much we’re spending in Ukraine. The people claiming to be worried don’t really care about the money. What they are, basically, is enemies of democracy.