Why is the US supporting Ukraine so massively?
Hardly a week goes by without some kind of aid package from the US to Ukraine. Clearly, the support is designed to continue the war and the extent of the support surprises me.
The US has been training and arming the Ukrainian military since 2015. Why the enormous effort?
At 0.4% of GDP total US aid commitments (this includes non-military aid -- military aid is about 0.2% of GDP) are similar to the UK, but only 2/3rds that of Poland. Some people might not consider that "massive", but that's how you have defined it. Also European countries have taken in many Ukrainian refugees. That cost isn't counted in these figures.
It's misleading to look at the "sticker price" of military aid -- much of this has already been produced, and would not be replaced, but would become obsolete and be scrapped (the ideal fate of any military equipment!), so giving it to Ukraine doesn't cost the US the original procurement cost of the hardware.
Of course people don't always know how much the government spends -- be honest, what percentage of GDP did you think was going to Ukraine?
The US is spending about 5.6% of its defence budget to devastate the Russian military. From a pragmatic point of view, that is a very good deal for the US.
You believe that US aid is prolonging the war?
Firstly, ending the war is not in the hands of the US, it is in the hands of Russia.
Suppose the US had not supported Ukraine? Perhaps the war would be "over", and Ukraine subjugated, but Ukraine had defeated Russia's attempt to take Kyiv after a few weeks, before the US aid you are irritated by arrived.
More likely, the war would continue as a "frozen conflict" -- Ukraine would be unable to recover its territory, but Russia would be unable to secure it.
Henry Kissinger favours that outcome, but it will not end the war because the Ukrainians believe they can win, will not accept a settlement with a country waging a genocidal war against them, and know that any agreement will be broken by Russia if they find themselves in a stronger position in the future. See Zelensky's ten point peace plan for what would be acceptable to Ukraine.
Injustice is not a good basis for peace.
If you want the war to end quickly, then a Ukrainian offensive with enough momentum that the Russians cannot reverse it is the most likely way, and that requires more, not less US help.
The above just discusses your two opinions.
Your actual question is: Why is a Russian defeat good for the US, and so worth the US spending money on?
The US (like any other country supporting Ukraine) is of the view that, in the 21st century, no country is supposed to redefine its borders by force. Any wars aiming for that should remain history ended in the 20th century.
Otherwise, if one country was allowed to get away with it, many more would be eager to follow. The whole world would engulf in fire then.
So, to prevent that from happening, the US wants Ukraine to be able to tell Russia where to get off: the borders should stay as voluntarily and peacefully agreed in the early 90s.
References:
Forty-eight percent say they favor the U.S. providing weapons to Ukraine, with 29% opposed and 22% saying they’re neither in favor nor opposed. In May 2022, less than three months into the war, 60% of U.S. adults said they were in favor of sending Ukraine weapons.
Aamer Madhani and Emily Swanson "Ukraine aid support softens in the US: AP-NORC Poll". Associated Press, February 15, 2023: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-biden-politics-poland-33095abf76875b60ebab3ddf4eede188
Americans are still largely supportive of some sort of aid to Ukraine, though. In a preelection November poll from TIPP Insights, 68 percent of registered voters said it’s important for the new Congress to direct assistance to Ukraine. And in a YouGov/CBS News poll released earlier this week, 64 percent of adults said they preferred their representatives to support U.S. aid to Ukraine rather than oppose it.
Cooper Burton and Zoha Qamar "How Americans' Support For Aiding Ukraine Has Evolved". FiveThirtyEight, January 13, 2023: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-support-aid-ukraine/
Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow "How Much Aid Has the U.S. Sent Ukraine? Here Are Six Charts" Council on Foreign Relations, February 22, 2023: https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine-here-are-six-charts
the support is designed to continue the war
It's easy to assume that an "eternal war" is USA's goal, but you have to consider that them giving more materiel to Ukraine so that they could win quickly is also controversial.
None in the least because Russia might go nuclear (which they pretty much threaten, in more less vague terms every day on state TV, albeit through the mouths of "non-official" talking heads).
And also because a certain wing of the Republican party (which seems in fact to include all their presidential candidates for the next election, except Pence and Haley) opposes an increase in support for Ukraine.
So the current level of support is really a compromise, in many respects. (If you want me to be a bit theoretical: defensive realism + logrolling are the two angles above.)
Why the enormous effort?
You're kinda shifting the goalposts here. It's "enormous" because Russia still has a lot of raw military power, so simply checking them to a stalemate requires plenty of materiel. There hasn't been a war of this magnitude in Europe since WW2; millions of rounds of artillery used etc. And Russia can strike deep in Ukrainian territory destroying/disabling their factories (and power infrastructure, etc.) while Ukraine can't do nearly the same amount of standoff damage to Russia's industry. (And the US choice to limit's Ukraine ability to do that by not giving them Tomahawks and what not is clearly a political choice; see 1st half of this answer.)
The US, as one of the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, guarantees the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The Memorandum itself does not require the US to defend Ukraine themselves but it would justify them doing so. It certainly justifies supporting Ukraine.
Many people in the Western World including but not limited to the EU, the UK and the US see the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (but also already the annexation of Crimea in 2015) as a strongly aggressive act. For the EU and UK geographical proximity might be a stronger factor. For the US, although they probably see China as the bigger rival, they surely still see some rivalry with Russia, at least wanting to contain it. And the US have interests worldwide.
The US can surely argue with democratic values that are defended in Ukraine, where a more or less democracy is attacked by an undemocratic autocracy. That by itself is a threat: Russian aggression weakens the democratic part of the World.
But the US can also argue about security interests. A weakened Russia would probably pose less of a threat than a triumphant one. A victorious Russia would pose a great danger to surrounding countries. And the credibility of the US as global power, source of stability and defender of smaller nations would be undermined. Who knows what China would or others would do next if the US would not support Ukraine now.
On the other hand, one should keep the scale of the support in context. The US support of Ukraine is barely enough to stop Russian advances currently. Significantly, it's not enough to drive Russia back to the borders of before the war.
And even if the already delivered (not promised) US aid (militarily and economically) would sum up to $100 billion in the last year, it would be rather small in comparison to other incidents (invasion of Iraq ~$3 trillion, bailouts during the financial crisis in 2008 ~$500 billion in the US, cost of the Pandemic 2020-2022 >$10 trillion worldwide). For comparison the yearly US GDP is $23 trillion, so the delivered support to Ukraine is surely below 0.5% of the GDP. Substantial, but not massive on the scale of past crises.
Your estimation is wrong. The US support to Ukraine is a carefully estimated measure to keep Russia from winning the war and keeping it from profiting too much from this aggression by imposing high costs on Russia, but that's about it.
About your statement about prolonging the war. That of course depends on what end of the war you envision. Russia could stop the war any day (didn't even need to start it). So depending on how you would like to end the war, it would be clear how different actors should behave. From a Western perspective, it's up to Ukraine to decide what to do and how to achieve a peace with Russia. That's the problem with autocracies like Russia. They do need much less to take into account moral considerations and can spend more of their own lives at will. Otherwise this war might have ended already one year ago. Why is that not so irritating?
In 1994 the US provided security assurances to Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear stockpile (which at the time was the third largest in the word). 20 years later Russia invaded and annexed sovereign Ukrainian land (Crimea). Seeing as the US had assured Ukraine that its territorial sovereignty would be respected, that obliged the US to act in Ukraine's defense.
The 1994 Budapest Memorandum is sufficient on its own to explain the US's somewhat vigorous response to Russia's current invasion of Ukraine. It also explains why the UK, the second Western signatory of the memorandum, has been perhaps the most generous supporter of Ukraine since the invasion in 2022.
Because Ukraine is actually the front for the world map chess game between US and Russia. Whoever dominates this chess piece today will have the momentum and image to project superpower status in the world.
On the russia side, losing Ukraine will mean ceding to NATO. Winning ukraine will embolden them to further eat into Europe in the future. For the US, losing ukraine will mean NATO is basically projecting weakness, crumbling the influence they have on the world. Winning ukraine will send a defeatist message to the communist world, further eating into their ambitions for imperalism in today's day and age.
Not mentioned yet: this is a clear sign to other countries that fighting against NATO is a supremely bad idea. If old NATO weapons and NATO training are already this effective, who is going to challenge NATO directly? Even China will have to consider this demonstration.
The Democrats being democratic were vehemently vocal since 2012 about opposition to a recently genocidal police rogue state and a very powerful white nation run by a rogue spy in the middle of the map of the Eurasia. Involvement in Russian reality, history, culture, peace, literature has been minimal as none of the recent US leaders has the cultural toolset to convince Putin to run his nation responsibly and safely, which would be a gamble and a compromise of human rights.
The democrats poised themselves as the arch-enemies of Putin before coming to power, giving no de-escalation timetable, as a result of Georgia invasion, overt spy poisonings, corruption of the Russian constitution, the support of puppet police states in the former USSR, including Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The democrats therefore motioned that they were only interested attrition, hostile talks and minimizing the influence of Russia under a police state.
As it stands, leading democrats were on the offensive-defensive and poised increase war games all around the Russian border of all former USSR states which could be allied.
Nobody imagined that Putin would feel paranoid, crazy, agressive denigrated and vilified enough to attempt a full-scale invasion of Ukraine using all of the Russian military machine, and America has been fast to shore up the allied state of Ukraine with as much defensive power as it can muster, because the entire combative-military degeneration of both sides is a complete disaster, and the US doesn't have any other choice now to avoid a formerly genocidal police state regain some of it's former power.
There were some good answers. However, I did not find a satisfactory answer for me. This is also because the topic of Biden was not really addressed. The aspect that an escalation existed before the actual use of force was either completely or partially ignored. So actually since 1992 (the beginning of US-Ukraine relations) through 2014 to 2022. And my question had the context of Biden, because Biden has always had a fixed hostile image on the subject of Russia. I believe that there would have been no war in Ukraine under Sanders. But I can't prove it. But that applies to both sides.
One possible answer would have been: The great interest is that Russia is down economically, militarily and politically. This would make obsolete the outdated myth that Russia is a dangerous counterpart to the Western world. With Russia's downfall, completely new starting positions for the USA would develop in other theatres of the world. And this would be clearly in favour of the USA. This would even surpass Trump's campaign slogan: "Make America great again". And since the US could not go to war directly against Russia, it could be that Ukraine and the Ukrainian population would be misused for this purpose.
For me, however, this would be the beginning of a dystopian world. In the last few days I remember a beautiful saying that was spray-painted on a bunker in Hamburg:
"Imagine it's war and nobody goes". That's what I wish for with this rotten war in Eastern Europe.
The USA has a first past the post system of democracy similar to the UK. This gives the illusion of democracy but in fact is likely closer to the Chinese one party system than true democracy.
The US has a legacy fear of Russia. This fear arose again in Trump v Clinton election and despite the exposé by Matt Taibi the notion of Russian election interference seems to persist.
For a nation on shaky foundations, Russia seems a great scapegoat on which to project and divert concern from national issues.
Russia repeatedly said it would not permit NATO in Ukraine. Initially Obama resisted arming Ukraine militarily but then the US under Trump and Biden gave military support to Ukraine and continued to support Ukraine's right to join NATO.
The US government backed Rand foundation issued a document, Overextending and Unbalancing Russia. It recommended that the best way to destabilise Russia was through Ukraine.
When Russia finally decided to act on what it saw as a security issue, the USA said the invasion was unprovoked despite years of diplomatic attempts by Russia to keep NATO and Russia's great enemy (USA) off its borders. This is straight out of the pentagon's playbook.
Ukraine and Russia agreed in principal to a ceasefire in April 2022 but following the visit of Boris Johnson, the deal was aborted, apparently as Ukraine were told they would lose UK/ US support if they dealt with Putin.
John Kirby (National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications) recently said it would not consider the ceasefire suggestions put forward by China.
A third world war was close to happening when Russia attempted to put missile bases in Cuba in response to the bases the US put in Turkey. The US would not allow missile bases in Cuba but it seems to think it should be allowed to have them on Russia's border.
It all seems to suggest that the US is content for the war to continue in the hope of destabilising Russia despite the horrific lose of Ukranian and russian lives.
Energy and strengthening the USA by weakening Europe. For the USA, the mix of Germany as a technology location and Russia's cheap energy resources has always been a problem. This war shows impressively how 20 years of economic boom in Germany crumbles within a few months. Even if some in Europe do not feel it yet. Europe is economically as well as politically not well. And an important reason for this is the loss of Russian energy resources. In Europe, some small and medium-sized companies have already changed or announced to change the location Germany for other energy secure locations. Indicated were production relocation to the USA or even China (BASF). And since Germany is unfortunately no longer the innovation stronghold and the industrial sector is also breaking apart, Europe's leading economic nation will falter. And so will the whole of Europe.
To solve the energy problem in Europe, gas could flow directly from Ukraine to Western Europe if the Ukrainians (USA) win the war. And maybe it plays then also a small role that Biden son sat with the largest Ukrainian gas supplier of the country Burisma in the supervisory board (2014 to 2019).
For me, this can be a sign that this war was planned by the USA for a long time. In order to protect this long-term investment, Biden's USA is currently investing a lot of money in Ukraine.
The USA does it for humanistic reasons? No. It doesn't. Unfortunately, there are many war zones in the world. Yemen or in middle and east and west Africa, a disgusting war of extermination has been raging for years. Here we do not help. At least not to this extent. The USA has always acted in this way. Sometimes stronger, sometimes less. In my opinion, Biden is the one who is exaggerating the most.
