House Republican isolationists are threatening to make Russia great again

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, former Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed that “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”

That sums up Vladimir Putin’s real reason for invading Ukraine. A growing contingent of isolationist House Republicans, by threatening a $24 billion Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid package, are helping Putin realize his irredentist vision. Without that aid, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky bluntly said during his Capitol Hill visit, “we will lose the war.”  

In explaining her opposition to Ukraine aid, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) rhetorically asked, “What did we get out of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan?” Greene is not usually identified with serious foreign policy analysis, but her question gets to the heart of what’s at stake in aiding Ukraine.

It is not, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) insists, about accountability for American aid or Ukraine’s strategy for victory. It is about whether we should be sitting in the parlor with a shotgun, just waiting. Let me explain what I mean. 

Greene’s invocation of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan actually helps illuminate why the Ukraine War is different. Public opinion soured on those wars partly because American soldiers were fighting and dying for American allies who were unwilling or unable to fight as hard as their enemies. In Vietnam, for example, many Americans came to believe that the South Vietnamese army was only willing “to fight to the last American.”

Supporting Ukraine involves none of the tragic flaws of those earlier wars. No American soldiers are fighting; Ukraine’s soldiers are more motivated, resourceful and capable than Russia’s; and Ukraine’s defense against a barbaric Russian invasion both meets traditional “just war” criteria and furthers our national interest.

By supporting Ukraine, we have destroyed half of Russia’s combat capability without losing a single American soldier’s life.

But that could change. As Zelensky observed, “If Ukraine loses, Russia will surely go further,” and this time with the resources of a conquered Ukraine. Remember, Russia is the “no limits” partner of China in challenging American influence in the world, which means pushing back American forward defenses to our coastlines.  

So here is a return rhetorical question for Greene: If in these circumstances Ukraine is undeserving of American support, then what country or alliance ever could be?

Greene and other Republican isolationists are making the same disastrously misguided arguments that isolationists and appeasers made during the 1930s, when FDR’s Lend-Lease kept Great Britain fighting against Nazi Germany and preserved the platform for the Normandy landings. These arguments resurfaced at the dawn of the Cold War, when the U.S. replaced Great Britain as the global power.

In 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, one of the principal architects of NATO, explained in a speech why the Soviet Union’s aggressive expansionist drive required an extended security perimeter for America and its allies backed by military strength. The isolationists’ strategy, he argued, was unacceptable. 

In short, we could not afford to pull down the blinds and sit in the parlor with a loaded shotgun, waiting.

Isolation was not a realistic course of action. It did not work and it had not been cheap. And appeasement of Soviet ambitions was, in fact, only an alternative form of isolation. It would lead to a final struggle for survival with both our moral and military positions weakened.

Greene and her fellow parlor-sitters advocate the same misguided isolationist strategy against Putin’s Russia. They are on the wrong side of history but, given the dysfunctional Republican politics of government funding, they are actually in a position to grant Putin his dream of empire.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. His newest book, Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, is due out in December.