Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration and our NATO allies have offered numerous rationales for the initial and subsequent tranches of billions of dollars in military and economic support for our ally. Some are more plausible than others, but one rationale, in particular, should never be a consideration at any time.
Growing more prevalent as the war continued, this rationale belies NATO’s self-proclaimed concern and support for an ally and, in the eyes of the world, undermines the peaceful professions of the collective security organization at the very time it is engaging in its reason for existence: countering Russian aggression in Europe.
In Western nations, there is overwhelming support for defeating and deterring Russian aggression and, if possible, deposing Putin. Playing upon this sentiment, NATO has increasingly put forward the rationale that continued aid to Ukraine “is bleeding the Russian military.” What could possibly be amiss with this statement?
To bleed the Russian military, one must also bleed the Ukrainian people. And the Ukrainians and the rest of the world know it.
Some may attempt to justify this rationale by claiming the brave Ukrainian people are okay with this formulation and/or can intuit that there is an implicit recognition that, somehow, NATO actually cares about their losses as much as Russian casualty counts. To do so strains credulity, evinces a lack of understanding of human nature, and exhibits an absence of sympathy, let alone empathy, for suffering Ukrainians on the part of proponents of this rationale. In short, this rationale turns our flesh-and-blood allies into abstractions in a strategic tussle between NATO and Russia (and its international abettors, such as the PRC, North Korea, and Iran). In the real world, this rationale is calloused to the war’s human cost.
To wit: A family member working in Chicago came across a co-worker bent over her desk, softly sobbing. Hoping to comfort her, the family member asked the woman what happened. Through the tears streaming down her face, she replied in her still distinct accent that, while she’d just been notified her fiancé had been killed fighting Russians in Ukraine.
Do you think she received any comfort knowing he died bleeding Russia’s military?
For the more hardened among us, such losses are the price of “great power” competition. Yet, such a rationale diminishes NATO in the eyes of current and prospective allies and emboldens its enemies. Who wants to sign up to be the next expendable pawn in a great power competition?
In fact, regarding pushing away potential allies and, indeed, hardening present enemies, there is a historical irony at work, circa August 1, 1944—the Warsaw Uprising.
Per The National World War II Museum of New Orleans:
The Warsaw Uprising was catastrophic and had lasting impacts for decades to come. The lack of Soviet support, coupled with the fact that Nazi leaders used untrained SS troops to suppress the uprising, proved disastrous for the AK [Polish Home Army] and civilians living in Warsaw. Altogether, Polish losses during the uprising included 150,000 civilian deaths and about 20,000 Home Army casualties. The German forces lost an estimated 10,000 troops. Fighting stopped on October 2, 1944, with the formal surrender of the AK, but during the next three months, German forces demolished much of what was left of the city and deported 650,000 civilians to a labor camp south of Warsaw. According to the historian Maciej Siekierski, when Soviet troops finally “liberated” Warsaw in January of 1945, “Poland’s capital was a vast desert of hollow-shelled buildings and rubble.
Delaying and denying assistance, Stalin was cynically allowing his nominal allies, the Poles, to bleed his enemy, the Germans; and all the while he was calculating how much easier it would then be post-war to subjugate Poland beneath the totalitarian Soviet yoke. (This, of course, occurred after no one came to aid the intrepid Jewish Poles who led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.)
While NATO lacks Stalin’s devious endgame for Poland, the “bleed Russia’s military” rationale nevertheless damages the collective security alliance because it suggests a casualness in its price tag that includes a war-ravaged Ukraine being turned into “a vast desert of hollow-shelled buildings and rubble.” It is an excuse for NATO’s failure to successfully facilitate a Ukrainian victory and for Western governments’ failure to define realistic, achievable war aims, let alone craft an acceptable—if not agreeable—off-ramp for the carnage. Honestly, how much more blood needs to be shed?
There will be those who will dismiss noting the harm of the “bleed Russia’s military” rationale as a trivial complaint. Yet, it speaks to the larger issue that the U.S. foreign policy establishment and our NATO allies have become too rigidly ideological and too abstract in their thinking. (See the attempted reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq.) It needs to be more political, more practical—and, yes, be more understanding of and empathetic to all the peoples involved. (See the successful reconstruction of Germany and Japan.)
Speaking of practicality, just how much of our military hardware have we diverted from other allies to support Ukraine? The American weaponry being expended in Ukraine will need to be replenished. How many of these new weapons will require parts made in communist China or other nations? What happened to the manufacturing base that once armed the “Arsenal of Democracy?” Questions abound as to who is bleeding whom.
Yet, that is for another day. Presently, suffice it to say: do not speak in the abstract to build support for continuing to wage a proxy war that bleeds your enemy, your ally, and yourself.
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An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012 and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.
Kamala Harris articulated one thing correctly. When describing the Ukraine War she brought up the obvious. It was about a big country next to a little country. It was something you might have expected to hear from Tom Hanks in “Forrest Gump”.
People, and especially those in Europe, understand that aggression and force by a country with a large population and sophisticated military, which historically kept half of the continent’s population in bondage as part of the WWII Peace settlement, was something to worry about. Americans don’t want to spend treasure and lives in the shadow of other countries interests and it is why when I speak to Americans whose relatives are still in Europe and lived under Soviet Dictatorship they fear Donald Trump as a king maker who will not contain Putin’s ambitions beyond the Ukraine. And they have a point only because the American and European leftist media bought and expounded upon the propaganda that was the basis behind the 2016 Clinton campaign. Trump was characterized as a Russian Agent by the Democratic spin machine and their propaganda media. Nothing could be further from the truth and because of that the real reason behind the genesis of the Ukraine War went mostly unreported.
Putin, for many years, has been stuffing Russian Nationals into the Eastern Ukraine with the hope of confiscating Ukrainian property under the guise of democracy. People, immigrant Russian Nationals, characterized as Ukrainians, would vote just the way illegal immigrants arriving through America’s open Southern border would vote. They would devour Texas and eventually all of America via planned democracy. That plan was put on hold because an opportunity arose that became irresistible.
The Stolen Election of 2020 gave America an Administration right out a college basic, first semester DEI/ESG indoctrination class which ultimately resulted in the Afghanistan Debacle Withdrawal. Putin was quite aware that any attempt at confiscation of property, under the auspices of the prior Trump Administration, would result in disastrous consequences. The Afgan Debacle made it clear that the Biden Administration was not to be feared and Putin, with serendipitous confidence, seized the opportunity that Democrats gave him. He sent in a column of tanks that stretched for miles only to have them almost instantly destroyed by Javelin missiles previously provided by Donald Trump. Putin was right - the Biden Administration was inept and stupid but so was he. The war should have never happened but since it did it has been mired in corruption, graft, waste, nepotism and stupidity. The American people saw the body count, the cost, the debt and the management and voted against it just the way shareholders would vote against incompetent leadership running a corporation into the ground.
Captain America is back and this time he is not alone. He has put together Team America. Putin has something to worry about over and above the chronic Russian carnage needed to win what would have certainly and eventually been won if Kamala had won the election. Now he faces a deal maker that fights not with bullets and tanks but with money, tariffs, energy and Pete Hegseth. The Winds of War are changing. The Art of War is now about to face off against the Art of the Deal.
In many ways, I would rather trust the Russians than the French, the British or - well essentially all of Western Europe and our NATO, freeloading, backstabbing, almost totally useless “allies”.
At least with Russia you are dealing with a clear and present danger - an entity - whose motives are clear - even if rarely ever have been altruistic as opposed to a collective rat’s nest of socialistic, self-serving Pieces OS whose greatest claim to fame is that they have little reason to claim any claim to fame - who like the French are much too pleased with themselves; thinking themselves grandees - and “superior” based on precious little to suggest same.
We have all suffered through the deliberate and despicable efforts of Obama and Soros’s sock puppet Biden and his party’s efforts to destroy everything thing that underlies America - and “mange it” out of existence to the delight of the CCP and its surrogate the Democrats but - my feeling is that it was in retrospect necessary and fortuitous - now that we have managed to win the election and can begin to dismantle the horror that they and their machinations are.
If they hadn’t effed up so, so well; hadn’t demonstrated the same type of hubris ridden delusional thinking that those who think that resistance to them is futile, used lawfare, allowed the Afghanistan insanity, pushed mutilating children and all other forms of human decency, sanity and morality to the limits of all rational peoples’ tolerance?
Then, the landslide that was needed - born of the total and utter, systemic, visceral revulsion that resulted? Wouldn’t have been finally, at long last, after 20 or 30 years of complacent indolence - been awakened.
Now, we are going to see how things get done, are meant to happen when the real adults are in charge.
Putin may be a murderer - but he is not a fool - but he did know one when he saw Biden and? By the same token he also knows that now, with Trump, he’s dealing with a man who actually is infinitely smarter than he and powered by something Putin hasn’t ever had at his command - the truth and morality informing his judgement.
To paraphrase, Patton’s quote re the Germans he was sending American troops up against in that famous scene from the beginning of the movie:
“I almost feel sorry for those German bastards” - same sentiment one might feel regarding Putin now.
He is not going to win; he knows it, we know it.
The Ukraine war can be blamed on Putin, but the Russian autocrat’s belligerence is a symptom not of Russian revanchism and regional hegemonic ambitions, but US arrogance, deceit, and globalist imperialism—the root cause of this war.
The CIA / State Dept. sponsored Maidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014, plus the intentional and provocative (not to mention retraction of a prior promise) offer for Ukraine to join NATO left Putin with little options.
It is not an understatement to claim that this country’s greatest threat comes not from foreign powers, but from domestic entities in the IC, plus foreign policy salons in Georgetown and coastal academic lounges.
The Obama Administration stages a coup in 2014, sees part of the Ukraine cannibalized by Russia and sends them blankets for protection. Then they stage another coup in the US in 2020 and blame the war on Trump and Russia. Putin is not a good guy. But our foreign policy could provoke any bear, and especially a nostalgic KBG bear, because it was aggressive, poorly implemented and backed by a mouse. Russia, and the Ukraine, is run by oligarchs, powerful families that control wealth and business. I deal with a lot of the escapees, including their youth that came to America to start anew. I heard their complaints first hand. They said “we thought we left all this behind when they immigrated to America”. I responded dryly that America was drinking the same Kool–Aid, for several decades, as The Soviet Empire had drank. They just needed an upstart racist, ideologue to ignite the conflagration and offer themselves as the solution.
And he felt sorry for the Germans because he considered the Russians barbaric savages like no others. He would have gladly taken the war to Moscow. What did we do? We allowed Stalin to garner half of Europe as a Peace Prize for helping the Allies win the war.