What Ukraine Tells Us About Defense Spending. Hint: It’s Something a Lot of People Don’t Want to Hear.

The Biden administration seems to be doing a pretty good job with respect to the crisis Vladimir Putin created in Ukraine.¹  NATO appears to be united, though that may be more President Putin’s doing than President Biden’s.²  President Biden did have a couple of hiccups early on, but he wouldn’t be Joe Biden if he didn’t.  Since then, things have gone fairly well.  That part of the Biden administration strategy of “deterring by disclosing” is particularly interesting.³  For example, see the statements the U.S. made warning that the Russians were planning to stage a fake attack on Russia and then use the fake attack as an excuse for invading Ukraine.⁴  In the past, countries would have learned about that kind of thing through their intelligence activities, but they would have waited until the other side actually did it before talking about it.  The Biden administration is doing it differently.  It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

However, even if President Putin doesn’t invade Ukraine, President Biden still has a problem with what comes next.  What President Putin’s little adventure has shown is that Russia is not going to sit idly by while the United States turns its attention to China.  President Biden has learned, I hope, that we can’t just deal with China and ignore the rest of the world.

The problem this causes for President Biden is that he can’t flat-line defense spending, like he wanted to (at least based on the budget his Administration submitted).  If China is a problem, and if we still have to pay attention to Europe (and who knows where else), we are going to have to spend more money on defense.  That is going to be hard.  It hasn’t been hard spending money on Covid relief.  Both parties agreed, and we just spent it without regard to where it was coming from or pretty much anything else.  Spending like that may not be as easy anymore⁵ – for a couple of reasons.  The first is inflation.  The Fed is going to raise interest rates, and it’s going to stop printing so much money because of inflation. 

The second may be even more important, however: There are a lot of people in Congress who don’t want to spend more money on defense no matter what.  A number of them are in the President’s party.  The progressives have so many things they want to do that they don’t think we can afford to spend more on defense.  In fact, instead of increasing defense spending, they want to cut it.  For progressives, “Build Back Better” was just a start on all the things they want to do and all the money they want to spend.  Is President Biden willing to fight a large number of people in his own party to spend more money on defense?

But the progressives aren’t the only problem.  In the past, Republicans could generally be counted on to support more defense spending.  I don’t know if President Biden would be willing to increase defense spending based on Republicans votes filling in for Democratic progressives who vote no.  But that support isn’t there as much as it used to be.  There was the occasional strict isolationist Republican, like Rand Paul.  Now, however, in the Age of Trump (or even after the Age of Trump), we have a lot more Republicans who think of America First and don’t think we need to care about the rest of the world. 

Seventy-five years ago, there were a number of Republicans like that.  Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican” himself, opposed the NATO agreement after World War II because of George Washington’s warning about avoiding entangling alliances abroad.  Most Republicans didn’t agree with Senator Taft then and even fewer did later – until Donald Trump came along.  Now people like Senator Josh Hawley are asking why we should care about Ukraine at all.  Senator Hawley would focus on China.  I don’t think things can be put in silos like that.  Still, there are more and more Republicans who seem to be in the same camp as Senator Hawley.  Combine those people with the progressives in the Democratic Party, and add in people who are starting to worry about inflation/government spending, not to mention a President may not be best leader we have ever had, and you have a situation where increasing defense spending, especially as much as we probably should, will not be easy.
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¹ I have no idea what Donald Trump would have done re Ukraine.
² The unity is more on a confirmation of Article 5 if the NATO agreement and less on what to do if Russia actually invades Ukraine, but there is still more unity on the latter than there was three months ago.
³ See Henry Foy, “Western allies adopt publicity strategy in novel effort to prevent Ukraine war,” Financial Times, January 25, 2022.
⁴ See James Politi and Roman Olearchky, “US accuses Russia of preparing pretext for incursion,” Financial Times, February 4, 2022.
⁵ On the other hand, we may find out if Covid takes another turn for the worse and somebody in Congress wants to throw money at people again