No, Professor Allison, Americans Owe Ukraine Nothing

Harvard professor Graham Allison, famous for his theory of the “Thucydides Trap,” which posits that a rising global power will challenge the existing global leader for preeminence, writes in The National Interest that the United States owes Ukraine and its courageous people much more than the $75 billion in military and non-military assistance we have provided in the last two years for Ukraine’s weakening of Russia’s military threat to Europe for at least a decade. All of that, Allison cheers, “[w]ithout the loss of a single American soldier.” Never mind the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have suffered and died as a result of a war that Allison and others in the U.S. and Europe apparently want to continue until Russia leaves Ukrainian territory. And Allison chides Republicans in the House of Representatives who oppose “essential assistance to Ukraine” for trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

What is not a fantasy is the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian dead, the physical destruction of parts of Ukraine, and the very real danger of escalation--including nuclear escalation--if the war continues to grind on. Allison mentions none of that in his article. Instead, he invokes CIA Director and former Ambassador to Moscow William Burns (whom he calls “our nation’s most insightful Russia watcher”) to support his call for continuing to fuel the war--the same William Burns who in 1995 as a political officer in our embassy in Moscow warned Washington that “hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the political spectrum, and who later as Ambassador to Russia in 2008 wrote in a memo that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players . . .,” Burns noted, “I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” “Russia,” Burns explained, “would view further eastward expansion [of NATO] as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.” Burns admitted in 2019 that he viewed NATO expansion as early as the mid-1990s as “needlessly provocative” as evidenced by Boris Yeltsin’s strong opposition voiced in 1994.

We can admire the courage of Ukrainians fighting for the independence of their country, but we owe them nothing. Americans, John Quincy Adams memorably said, are the well-wishers of freedom and liberty to all, but the champion and vindicator only of our own.

Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.