On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) floated the idea of Congress passing one big emergency defense spending bill within the next few weeks that would cover Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. While he didn’t give a dollar estimate in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, McConnell indicated that the sums would be large, and should also include funding for the U.S. military to replenish its stocks and “expand and modernize our own weapons inventories.”
Legislators are discussing adding upward of $60 billion in Ukraine funding (enough to get Kyiv through a full year of fighting), along with what is expected to be a few billion dollars for Israeli needs in the Gaza war. The idea is to pass a joint funding bill in the Senate and then present Ukraine-skeptical House Republicans with the choice of approving or rejecting both.
Isolationist forces in the conservative movement who want to defund the Ukraine aid effort are already objecting. “Israel is facing existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) posted Monday on X, formerly Twitter.
Less than 10 minutes after Hawley made his statement, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, posted a thread arguing that Congress should consider and vote on funding for Israel and Ukraine separately. Meanwhile, far-right Ukraine skeptics and top Heritage foreign policy staffers have been arguing (falsely) that transfers from stocks of U.S. military equipment in Israel to Ukraine have been detrimental to Israel.
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy joined this chorus on Monday, claiming that the Biden administration’s decision to send ammunition from U.S. stockpiles in Israel to Ukraine “didn’t age too well.”
In fact, the idea that U.S. military equipment transfers from Israel to Ukraine have hurt the Israeli war effort is not supported by evidence. As this report from the Congressional Research Service explains, the Biden administration gave Ukraine about 300,000 rounds of 155-millimeter artillery shells from U.S. stocks in Israel. At the same time, South Korean munitions were purchased to replenish U.S. stocks. And the United States is ramping up production of those munitions rapidly.
Moreover, Kyiv isn’t asking for the types of weapons Israel will need most in the weeks and months ahead. For example, the Israeli military urgently needs more interceptor missiles for its Iron Dome system (which Ukraine doesn’t have) and smart bombs for its air force (Ukraine has very few planes).
Congress’s ability to pass any legislation in the coming weeks is complicated by the fact that House Republicans are in disarray after removing Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) as speaker. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who received former president Donald Trump’s endorsement for the job, has said he won’t bring a Ukraine aid bill to the House floor if he is elected speaker.
The current temporary government funding bill expires at the end of November. That’s also the deadline for approving U.S. aid to Ukraine before real damage is done to Kyiv’s ability to continue fighting. The House will feel pressure to pass an Israel-Ukraine funding bill quickly if the Senate sends it over. But it’s a high-risk gambit.
“If the administration and Ukraine supporters in the House and Senate don’t get together and push this through, it is very possible that Ukraine aid will not pass in the House at all,” a senior GOP congressional aide told me. “This is going to be a fight and it’s not going to be easy. But this is one of the only realistic paths forward now for Ukraine aid.”
It’s worth noting that Russian propaganda outlets are eager to present U.S. aid to Israel and Ukraine as contradictory, with President Biden forced to choose between them. The Russian government has not condemned the Hamas terrorist attacks. The Kremlin is asserting that Ukraine has sent weapons to Hamas, while Kyiv claims that Hamas received captured Ukrainian arms from Moscow.
Yet Russia is right to suggest that the two wars are connected. For one thing, Iranian assistance plays heavily into both conflicts. Iran is supplying drones to Russia to kill Ukrainian civilians and likely helped Hamas to develop the drone capability it just used to kill Israeli civilians.
Russia, Iran and Hamas are all working together to wage war against democracies and upend the world order the United States and its partners spent decades building. Republicans can’t claim to resist this challenge but provide resources for only one of its battlefields.
The U.S. game plan for both Ukraine and Israel is essentially the same. It should support the partner countries that are the victims of aggression, give them the weapons they need to fight and build a diplomatic coalition around them. GOP isolationists want to pretend the United States can fight aggression in one place by yielding to aggression in another. But that’s a foolish and false choice.
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