Chapter Seventeen America’s Global Role in the Shadow of the Ukraine Conflict Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden
The Ukraine War revived and sharpened a long-standing debate over America’s role in the world. What should America’s global posture be, and how—if at all—should the United States’ power be employed outside American borders? Such domestic disputations have occurred in some form or another regularly since America’s founding. The arguments have taken place during war and peace; cut across political party lines and also divided parties from within; occurred over issues such as trade, aid, military spending, alliances, and interventions; and appealed to both high principle and low politics.
Two years after the Ukraine War started, many of these issues surfaced in debates over American aid to Ukraine. To bring some analytical clarity, this chapter primarily addresses the question of American economic and military aid to partner forces. It focuses more on the expenditure of American treasure than American blood. Other instances of American engagement abroad, such as alliance memberships or overt military interventions, are also considered where they help illuminate the larger questions.
American aid rather than boots on ground is a useful proxy for broader debates over isolationism versus internationalism, precisely because it is an incessant question that beset American foreign policy in every decade from the 1910s to the present. It first emerged during World War I over whether the United States should stay scrupulously neutral or aid the Allies; continued in the 1920s in numerous places including China, Latin America, and Europe; and surged in the late 1930s with the Neutrality Acts and debates over aid to the Allies against Nazi Germany.1 And so forth into the Cold War and beyond, up to our present moment with Ukraine.
Debates around American aid are revealing precisely because they do not entail actual deployment of American forces. As damaging as the conflicts can be for the people fighting in them, they are less costly for Americans, who are asked only to contribute treasure without risking American blood. Rather, such debates are illuminating proxies for how much influence and leadership the United States seeks to exert in the world, even at comparatively low cost.
Low cost does not mean no cost, however. It is true that every dollar spent abroad could instead be spent at home (even though almost all of the Ukrainian defense aid is, in fact, spent buying weapons made in American factories by American workers). But low costs sometimes increase the prospect of higher costs. The depletion of stockpiles augurs the need for higher spending (and higher borrowing costs) in the future. And American support for one side in a conflict necessarily increases the risk of retaliation against America by the other side. Moreover, on occasion, military aid can presage significant American troop deployments such as in the case of the Vietnam War.
Still, even in the recent post–Cold War history of American interventions, the Ukraine War and the American aid program should be put in context. It did not entail a US-led bombing campaign like Bosnia or Kosovo or Libya. It was not a large-scale invasion with conventional forces like the first or second Gulf Wars. Nor was it a Special Operations–led operation with a light footprint like the campaign against ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) or the original phases of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The Ukraine debates were simply about whether the United States should provide economic and military assistance to the Ukrainian forces.
The Ukraine War
In strategic and political terms, Russia invaded Ukraine at a complicated time for the United States. The invasion was well timed to revive the Biden administration’s national security reputation after a difficult first year marked by the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Ukraine initially gave President Joe Biden a galvanizing opportunity to marshal bipartisan support at home along with an unprecedented and vigorous allied response abroad. Yet it was also poorly timed because when Ukraine defied expectations in both directions—fending off Russia longer than expected in 2022 but then failing to deliver the expected knockout blow in the 2023 counteroffensive—the war dragged into a stalemate that merged with the 2024 presidential elections. As the election campaign heated up, Biden’s effort to support Ukraine appeared to be one more casualty of the political polarization that had stymied American leaders in recent years.
President Biden’s response to the invasion, which marked a significant kinetic escalation in the new era of great-power conflict that had been simmering for a decade, raised important questions about the domestic political foundations of US foreign policy. Its disposition will also do much to determine the trajectory of a grand strategy of defending a global order favorable to US interests.
Putin’s Gamble and Initial US Response
Russia’s invasion came just as President Biden’s handling of national security reached its low point following the Afghanistan pullout. Biden’s stubborn insistence on fulfilling President Donald J. Trump’s misguided plan for Afghanistan withdrawal regardless of the costs had the predicted effect of surrendering the entire nation to the Taliban—a “strategic defeat” in the words of Biden’s own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. The humiliating images, reminiscent of the last American helicopters fleeing Saigon in 1975, euthanized the “honeymoon” of favorable public approval that Biden had enjoyed since inauguration, a disapproval that persisted into 2024.
Biden initially received favorable evaluations of his handling of the Ukraine crisis from experts and in the elite media. By most accounts, Biden’s early response—from the pre-invasion information campaign designed to expose Russian president Vladimir Putin’s disinformation to the tougher-than-expected sanctions to even the incremental but not inconsequential military aid—showed skill and sophistication. Moreover, Biden’s expressions of steadfast support and the sweeping geostrategic rationale he articulated constituted a reversal from the retrenchment logic he had used to justify the Afghanistan retreat.
Ukraine’s vigorous defense of its territory quickly exposed Putin’s invasion as a catastrophic blunder. Prodded by Biden, NATO responded with surprising speed and forcefulness, and within weeks the United States and its allies began providing Ukraine the financial, material, and political support that Kyiv had begged for to little avail since 2014. Led by a surprisingly resolute and inspiring Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine outperformed expectations throughout 2022. By a year into the war, Putin faced setbacks on all sides. The easy victory he had expected eluded him; he lost much of the territory he had gained in the initial invasion; he paid inordinate costs in further offensives; and he faced a larger and revitalized NATO alliance.
And then, 2023 proved as disappointing for Ukraine and its supporters as 2022 had been encouraging. As the war dragged on without a decisive victory in view, the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of Biden’s ambivalent Ukraine policy became apparent. For starters, the gap between the ambitious military aid that Ukraine requested and the grudging military aid that Biden granted became glaringly large—perhaps large enough to metaphorically swallow up operational success in Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Moreover, an unflattering pattern emerged in which Ukraine requested a specific weapon system, then Biden denied it on the grounds that it was not needed or posed too serious a risk of escalation, only to reluctantly reverse his decision and grant the same system much later. This incessant vacillation belied the Biden administration’s talking points and fueled hawkish concerns that Ukraine was getting just enough help to lose slowly rather than to prevail.
Meanwhile, the domestic political foundations of Biden’s Ukraine policy were exposed as brittle. Domestic opponents of American aid to Ukraine became more vocal, and the drumbeat of anti-Zelensky/pro-Putin talking points emanating from the far-right fringe of the Republican Party gradually began to have an effect on public opinion. Whereas, in March 2022, Republicans favored support for Ukraine by as much as 80%, by March 2023 Republican support had plummeted to 53%, and by December 2023 nearly half of Republican respondents were saying that the United States was providing “too much” support while only 13% were saying “too little.”2 Ukraine still enjoyed bipartisan support, especially among the Senate and some Republican House committee chairs, but the vocal Republican opponents in the House of Representatives imposed a poison pill deal that blocked further aid to Ukraine. As the 2024 campaign season came into full swing, Ukraine appeared to be a foreign policy political burden rather than a boon—the sort of issue raised more by opponents of President Biden than by his supporters.
The Long Twilight Struggle between American Isolationism and Internationalism
While the domestic debate over Ukraine had unmistakable Trumpian undertones, it channeled a much longer dialectic within American politics. These strains have their own distinct yet often overlapping lineages within both American conservatism and progressivism. Whether wittingly or not, some social media influencers and pundits, those who sought to convince the public that Putin’s aggression was mostly the fault of the Ukrainians themselves or even the West as a whole, eerily echoed the arguments of the original “America Firsters,” who argued in the 1930s that America had no legitimate interest in aiding the victims of Hitler’s aggression—if anything, American interests aligned more closely with Berlin’s and only war profiteers would argue otherwise. Thus, the notoriously inflammatory Father Charles Coughlin critiqued the status quo, claiming that American “foreign policy, devoid of all fine phrases, was one blueprinted to defend international capitalism and British imperialism, no matter what the cost might be in traditions, in dollars and in blood to the citizens of our country.”3
Similar sentiments today are articulated by the likes of pundit Tucker Carlson, who just months before the invasion declared, “Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.” A few months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Carlson claimed that the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine sprang merely from crass partisanship. “We arm Ukraine so that we can punish Russia. Why? For stealing Hillary Clinton’s coronation,” he averred, referring to Russian intervention to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election.4
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor awakened America’s martial spirit to enter World War II. Yet in the wake of the great victories over German fascism and Japanese imperialism, the impulse to return to a more modest global role re-emerged, and by late 1945 US forces were demanding to be demobilized. Despite a series of Soviet provocations, the administration of Harry S. Truman struggled at first to forge robust domestic support behind a containment strategy that required the United States to serve as a global guarantor of security, stationing troops abroad and defending sea lanes and borders thousands of miles away from the US homeland.
Again, in this immediate postwar era, some of the most foundational debates occurred not over the actual use of American force but rather over whether the United States should provide money and weapons to other partners seeking to deter or defeat aggression. These debates cut across customary partisan lines. Progressive Democrats such as Henry Wallace found common cause with right-wing Republicans such as Robert Taft in resisting the Truman Doctrine of providing aid to anticommunist forces in Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of NATO. On an issue where Republicans were more united, such as aiding the Chinese nationalists in the civil war against Mao Zedong’s communists, the Democrats suffered acrimonious internal divisions.
As with the 1930s, undergirding the particulars of each of these debates over American aid to partners abroad were more fundamental divides over America’s priorities and international role. Should American resources be devoted solely to needs at home or also be sent overseas to support American interests, values, and friends? Should the United States focus all its energies on domestic concerns, or should it try to exert its influence abroad to shape a new international order? And were the costs and risks of doing the latter worth the potential benefits?
North Korea’s surprise invasion of South Korea in 1950 seemed initially to galvanize American internationalism behind President Truman’s deployment of American troops. Yet within a year, as that war sunk into a bloody stalemate, the calls, especially within the Republican Party, for an American retreat from global commitments returned. They grew loud enough in 1952 for General Dwight D. Eisenhower to step down as NATO leader and declare himself a Republican presidential candidate so as to thwart the presidential ambitions of the neo-isolationist Taft.
America’s decades-long involvement in Vietnam emerged as a costly cautionary tale. What began in the 1950s under Eisenhower as merely an economic and military aid program to South Vietnam turned in the early 1960s into the growing deployment of American ground troops. Vietnam’s eventual tragedies included over fifty-eight thousand dead Americans, the humiliation of America’s first lost war in history, and a rallying cry ever since for critics of American internationalism. By 1972, the war and the larger geopolitical burdens it represented were so unpopular that the Democratic nominee for president, Senator George McGovern, made “Come home, America” the central theme of his platform.
The post-Vietnam rise of the New Left in American politics in the 1970s, especially its growing influence in the Democratic Party, brought a renewed aversion to American internationalism, particularly to American support for anticommunist forces abroad. Thus in 1975 the Democratic Congress terminated all US military assistance for South Vietnam and the next year passed the Clark Amendment prohibiting any US aid to anticommunist forces in Angola. Such progressive voices also pressured the Carter administration to end its support for the anticommunist Shah of Iran and the Somoza regime in Nicaragua.
Meanwhile the Republican Party suffered its own deep rifts through the 1970s. Unlike the isolationism dividing the Democrats, the GOP debate pitted two different camps of internationalists against each other: The Nixon-Ford-Kissinger wing, which favored reduced tensions with the Soviet Union through détente while maintaining American international leadership in Asia and the Middle East, may have initially succeeded in defeating the isolationism of McGovern Democrats. But these Republicans soon found themselves squaring off against Ronald Reagan’s conservative internationalist camp advocating for a more confrontational posture toward the Soviet Union and a renewed commitment to promoting liberty abroad.
Reagan’s 1980 election victory showed broad support for his hawkishness toward Moscow—and also triggered a new round of domestic acrimony over American aid to anticommunist forces abroad. Quite cautious about the actual use of force, especially the deployment of American troops in combat, Reagan nonetheless determined to resist the further expansion of communism abroad. He developed what became known as the Reagan Doctrine, which involved providing American economic and military aid to anticommunist insurgents in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Angola, in addition to providing American aid to anticommunist governments such as those in El Salvador, South Korea, Philippines, and Taiwan. During the Reagan years many progressive Democrats resisted the Reagan Doctrine and tried to block American support for the government of El Salvador, and for a time they successfully banned American aid to the anticommunist Contra forces in Nicaragua. Nonetheless, America’s peaceful victory in the Cold War immediately following Reagan’s presidency seemed to vindicate American internationalism.5
Yet the end of the Cold War and the quest for a “peace dividend” revived the neo-isolationist voices that President Reagan and President George H. W. Bush had largely quelled. Despite leading the American victory in the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, President Bush faced a surprisingly strong electoral challenge from newly remobilized right-wing critics of American internationalism, first from within the party with Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge and then with Ross Perot’s third-party challenge. The 1992 victor, Democrat Bill Clinton, had internationalist inclinations, and like his Republican successor, George W. Bush, Clinton saw public reluctance to bear geopolitical burdens as one of the most serious challenges his administration faced.
Public aversion to internationalism intensified in the early 2000s particularly as the costs of the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increased. In the next three presidential elections, the electorate chose each time the finalist who called for reduced American commitments abroad. To be sure, the elections turned on domestic and other issues far removed from geopolitics. Moreover, Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump differed in important ways on major issues of foreign policy. But there was a common thread: the restraint-oriented foreign policy platforms of the eventual victors seemed to be a net-positive in political terms, whatever their deficiencies in policy terms. President Biden’s victory in 2020, though not primarily about foreign policy, similarly was predicated on modest foreign policy goals.
Once in office, President Biden took pains to signal respect to allies and partners alike who had been bruised by rhetorical broadsides during the Trump era and to talk up democracy and human rights after Trump’s repeated poor-mouthing of those traditional American values. In actual policy terms, however, the shift was far less dramatic. President Biden maintained many of Trump’s signature policies at the southern border, Trump’s tariff-based trade war with China, and Trump’s Abraham Accords (along with the associated appeasement of Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader). Aspirationally, Biden and his team sought a more dramatic reversal in certain high-profile areas, notably climate change and a revival of Obama’s ill-starred Iran nuclear deal, but without much tangible success to show for it.
The continuity was most vivid in Afghanistan, where President Biden claimed, though falsely, to have an obligation to continue implementing Trump’s mandated withdrawal. Biden’s embrace was so dramatic that two prominent academic advocates of this restraint approach defended the Afghanistan withdrawal in a fawning review. They hoped that it may be “just the beginning,” with additional retreats across a range of fronts: a dramatic restructuring of the US global military footprint, a refusal to expand NATO (where Biden had noticeably “soft-pedaled” talk of adding Ukraine), and perhaps an unwinding of US military operations against ISIL in Syria and Iraq as well as other counterterror missions in Africa and Latin America.6
The Ukrainian Shock and Aftershock
If President Biden was indeed flirting with such a shift, Putin put paid to it with his Ukraine aggression. The Biden administration saw the invasion coming and moved to counter it with a newfound focus and ambition. There were four lines of action, all variations on the familiar internationalist playbook conducted under the auspices of energetic American leadership—in short, the antithesis of the “restraint” reflex. First, the Biden team spoke loudly and often about the threat and about how it jeopardized vital US national interests—and shared the intelligence undergirding these assessments widely and in real time to a degree never before done by US policymakers. Second, the team built a coalition of the willing to support Ukraine and protect Eastern Europe and to warn of severe consequences for Russia if Putin persisted. Third, the team developed contingency plans for translating that rhetoric into action through defense aid to bolster Ukraine and coercive economic sanctions to punish Russia and restrict Russia’s capacity to supply its war effort. Fourth, the Biden team clearly signaled its concerns about escalatory pressures and getting drawn into a kinetic conflict with Russia, and so balanced its hawkish policies with vivid redlines that spelled out what the United States would not do.
These efforts failed to deter Putin from invading, but they otherwise succeeded in galvanizing a Western response that exceeded all expectations in its breadth and depth. Under American leadership, NATO countries committed 100 billion euros in military assistance to Ukraine and adopted a multiyear program of support during the war’s first two years.7 These developments culminated in the most significant expansion of NATO in decades with the admission paths for Finland and Sweden.8 Just as consequentially, Biden helped pull countries outside Europe into the anti-Putin coalition with significant contributions coming from Asian allies, especially South Korea and Japan. At the same time, Putin’s invasion surprised in the other direction: failing catastrophically as tactical blunders compounded operational shortcomings, adding up to a massive strategic failure. Even if Russia eventually does manage to control large swaths of eastern Ukraine, it will have done so at a ghastly and disproportionate cost. Together, the assertiveness of the global coalition and the manifest strategic incompetence of Putin combined to make the first year and a half of the war something of a revival of an American-led international order.
To be sure, even during the early days there were loud domestic critics of Biden’s Ukraine policy. The loudest were critics from the hawkish end of the spectrum who warned that the Biden team was too slow in sending the kinds of war-winning weapon systems that Ukraine needed to prevail. Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was quite blunt: “Our own president needs to step up his game. We’re not doing nearly enough quickly enough to help the Ukrainians.”9
There were prominent critics from the doves, conspicuously Senator Rand Paul, who proposed that Biden concede to Putin’s demands that Ukraine forever be denied entrance into NATO in the hopes of buying off the invasion.10 Paul was soon enough joined by other congressional voices, notably Senators Josh Hawley and J. D. Vance, as well as a growing right-wing cohort in the House.11 The progressive Left echoed these critiques, with some thirty House Democrats in the Progressive Caucus sending a letter to President Biden in October 2022 urging negotiations with Russia instead of military aid to Ukraine.12 Despite these critics, through the summer of 2023, Congress continued to approve military and economic aid to Ukraine with large bipartisan majorities.
In the fall of 2023 the fortunes of war turned, ironically not long after Putin hit his low point with the attempted coup by his mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. When Ukraine’s long-touted counteroffensive fizzled, the US domestic chorus of critics grew much louder—with both the internationalists and the isolationists framing their criticisms with “I told you so.” The internationalists who wanted Biden to risk Putin’s escalatory wrath by arming Ukraine faster and more deeply argued that the failure of the counteroffensive could be traced back to Biden’s failure to give Ukraine the help it needed. Those more wary of American involvements in conflicts overseas argued that Zelensky had tricked the West into backing a losing horse and that the sooner the United States abandoned Ukraine, the sooner the war could end. That such an end would entail at best Russia retaining all the territory it took in the 2014 and 2022 invasions—and at worst the collapse of the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, massive atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians, and expanded Russian territorial control—was a price the isolationists did not mind paying.
The political winds in the United States shifted throughout 2023 for reasons only distantly related to Ukraine, but each new gust undercut American internationalism or bolstered the neo-isolationists. For instance, after the Dobbs decision ending the federal right to abortion, the Biden administration violated a half-century-long political truce against federal funding of abortion by forcing the Pentagon to pay for travel for some military women seeking abortions. Republican senator Tommy Tuberville retaliated by jettisoning the Senate norm on confirmation of flag and general officers by blocking more than five hundred nominees. The standoff continued for almost one year, with domestic political priorities preventing either side from backing down despite the severe damage incurred to American national security.
Similarly, as the House of Representatives sunk deeper into dysfunction, the beneficiaries were the factions most willing to risk extreme outcomes—a failure to pass a defense authorization bill, government shutdown, debt default—to control the legislative agenda. While these groups lacked the votes to actually pass legislation, they had enough power to block legislation, and for them, doing nothing was preferable to muddling through with yet another legislative compromise. The resulting paralysis further hindered internationalist legislative priorities.
The new anti-Ukraine version of American isolationism seemed to weave together at least four independent threads into a single confusing tapestry. These threads took age-old arguments and spun them into the neo-isolationist emperor’s bespoke new clothes, which were tailored, more or less, to the present case. First was the doubt about the efficacy of US military power and the endless reductio ad iraqum in which every war is “another Iraq.”13 The facts that directly contradict such sloppy analogizing—Putin’s blatant aggression, Ukraine’s demonstrable operational capacity, and the enthusiastic support of almost all of the key NATO partners—were lost in the steady drumbeat that emphasized the failures of the American military and its partners. Whereas the call for restraint and retrenchment in the 1990s was based on claims of American strength—“we can do less because we are not facing threats abroad”—the same patent remedy was peddled as necessary because of American weakness: “we can no longer afford to police the world, not when we face so many challenges at home and abroad.”
Second was the warped version of Christian nationalism that praised Putin as a hero of the faith and cursed Ukraine as apostate.14 This form of heresy spread into many corners of otherwise orthodox theological institutions and evoked painful echoes of the corruptions of the German Catholic and Lutheran Churches in the 1930s. The evidentiary basis for this was woefully thin and, indeed, was belied by the dramatic expansion in reach and diversity of many Christian denominations in Ukraine over the past decade.15 However, the far-fetched claims served a useful rhetorical purpose by providing a purported values-based counterargument to claims of solidarity with a Ukraine that embraced Western values and wanted to become more integrated into Europe and the liberal international order led by the United States.
Third was the firm belief that one can catalyze a virtuous circle of Europeans doing more if the United States does less, despite the evidence that it operates in exactly the opposite fashion. Biden leading by example helped push European measures and vice versa. For the neo-isolationists, however, every ally is a free-rider if it is not operating entirely on its own. Whereas “free-riding by the allies” justified leaving the allies to fend for themselves earlier in the post–Cold War era, once the allies became heavily motivated and invested in helping Ukraine, that very commitment was turned into a rationalization for letting them handle it on their own, since they care so much.
Fourth was the equally strong belief that locking in defeat and capitulation to threats in one region somehow better positioned the United States to shore up deterrence and defense in another region. Thus, one of the odder strategic arguments for abandoning Ukraine was that doing so would bolster deterrence in East Asia, as if throwing Kyiv under the bus would make Beijing think that Washington was even more resolved to defend Taipei. This argument was politically useful because it wrapped the sheep of retreat in the wolf’s hide of a hawkish posture against China.16 Of course, the argument collapsed under scrutiny, as shown by factors including Taiwan’s strong appeals on behalf of Ukraine, Xi Jinping’s increased threats against Taiwan amid American vacillation over Ukraine, and the erosion of deterrence and credibility that an American abandonment of Ukraine would indicate.17
The obvious holes in this tapestry were called out by key opinion leaders. McConnell was particularly forceful in pushing back against the neo-isolationist line.18 President Biden was less willing to use his bully pulpit and less effective in those times when he did use it. For most of 2023, as support for Ukraine softened, the White House focused its rhetorical energies elsewhere. At best, the efforts of the pro-Ukraine caucus slowed the erosion of support—at worst they did not have much effect at all.
The relatively quick erosion of support for Ukraine is noteworthy because the neo-isolationist brief has such a weak logical foundation in general and was applied to what should be a hard case for backing its approach. If, hypothetically, US troops were dying in the unsuccessful Ukrainian counteroffensive, then the decline in support would be easily explainable: the US public is willing to tolerate the mounting human costs of war provided that the war is seen as being on a trajectory to a successful outcome.19 Instead, it was Ukrainian blood with US (and European) treasure at risk, and President Biden was adamant in emphasizing that the United States would not commit its own troops to the conflict. Ukraine needs American weapons, not American soldiers, at least not while the fighting continues. Ironically, a ground commitment, should one ever arise, would come once peace was assured and a postwar settlement was needing stabilization—this is a reality that the neo-isolationists have not reckoned with, though one can anticipate that their answer in the moment will be to insist that the United States do the minimum or, less than that, to underwrite any post-conflict stabilization plan.
Beyond this, the Ukraine War had few of the factors that had eroded public support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ukraine had able political and military leadership—not perfect but much better than the Iraqi and Afghan allies that US leaders had to manage. Ukrainians were willing to fight and die for their cause and proved to be capable operational and tactical innovators. Only a few elite units of the Iraqi and Afghan security forces had reached the level of proficiency that the median Ukrainian unit reached. NATO allies did not free-ride on the US military but made sizable investments of their own. That said, Ukraine did have the problem of corruption, which had proved highly corrosive to public support in Afghanistan and had a similar effect in Ukraine.
The neo-isolationist case was bolstered somewhat by an active information warfare campaign conducted by Russia and Chinese propagandists who deployed bot-farms in an effort to exploit social media algorithms and influence sectors of the Western public.20 But while the war can be blamed on Putin and Xi, the softness of Biden’s political support probably cannot be. Instead, the key factor appears to be the dysfunction in the Republican Party. Ukraine became the unlikely focal point of a genuine intramural scrum among Republicans about the future direction of the party—and thus the country.
Finally, while Ukraine exposed the GOP’s painful internal fractures and uncertain commitment to internationalism, the war in Gaza exposed a similar rift within the Democratic Party. It became almost a mirror image of the Republican debate over Ukraine. After an ephemeral moment of unity and solidarity following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, within weeks sizable numbers of Democrats, especially in the party’s progressive base, turned vocally against US aid to Israel.21 Once again, as with Ukraine, the question was whether the United States should provide military aid to a partner nation that was attacked by an outside force. The deployment of US troops to aid Israel was not in question. The party’s grassroots and populist voices put pressure on its establishment leaders to curtail or cut off the military aid entirely. Yes, there were many ways in which the particulars of Ukraine and Israel differed, but some of the fundamental questions were the same—as were the passionate divisions they elicited within each American political party.
Whither American Internationalism
The challenge in maintaining support for Ukraine raises questions about the long-term future of American internationalism. If the United States cannot help Ukraine preserve its independence when the stakes and Russia’s perfidy are this clear, and the relative costs for the United States are so low, what are the prospects that the United States could be mobilized to defend Taiwan against Chinese encroachment when actual US forces would need to deploy in the fight? More than one observer has noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is functioning a bit like the Spanish Civil War—a dress rehearsal to a much greater global conflagration that might yet come—and Xi Jinping is surely cheering for a rapid US retreat, which would foreshadow a much easier unraveling of the US-led international order.
The waning of the internationalist consensus is not foreordained, however. It still enjoys majority support among the public, with solid strength in both parties. The dysfunction of the razor-thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives has had the unfortunate side effect of exaggerating the political power of the neo-isolationist wing—a misperception that is belied by the considerable strength of traditional Republican hawks in the Senate.
Dramatic events can also quickly change public opinion. It was not well-crafted op-eds or speeches on the Senate floor that refuted 1930s “America First” isolationism; it was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. More recently, while many Republicans in 2020 voiced an eagerness to abandon Afghanistan, the calamitous withdrawal the next year, coupled with the Taliban’s victory, caused many of those same Republicans suddenly to rediscover the relative merits of a stronger American posture abroad.
The emerging threat environment brings with it a sobering reality. The new coalition of tyrannies in Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Pyongyang spanning Eurasia pose a growing menace to the United States, our allies, and our interests. A neo-isolationist policy of retrenchment will not appease them, nor will it make the United States safer or more secure. As costly and challenging as internationalism can be, it also remains the least-bad option, grounded in the lessons of history. If the defenders of the rules-based global system prevail in Ukraine, the prospects for the American-led internationalism will improve—and that is far better for US interests and security than the alternative.
Peter D. Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, where he runs the Program in American Grand Strategy and is the co–principal investigator of the America in the World Consortium. He is the author of Thanks for Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the US Military (Oxford University Press, 2023). William Inboden is a professor and the director of the Alexander Hamilton Center at the University of Florida and is a Peterson Senior Fellow with the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. His previous service includes positions at the State Department and on the staff of the National Security Council.
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