A remarkable document has been circulating among Republicans in Congress. It’s called the “Proposed Plan for Victory in Ukraine,” even though it’s nothing of the sort. As its provenance and contents make clear, it should instead be titled “Proposed Plan to Keep the GOP From Failing the Test of History.”
Before we get into that pamphlet, though, here’s where it did not come from: Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president who this week alit in Washington for his third and most anxious visit since Russia invaded his country last year. His own top general recently admitted that the Ukrainian counter-offensive had failed and that the war was now a “stalemate.” Ukraine’s struggle for national survival has turned into a war of attrition, which it can win only if it keeps getting money, weapons and ammo from its friends, especially the U.S. and the European Union. Hence Kyiv’s growing alarm. In both the E.U. and the U.S., support for Ukraine is flagging.
One reason is the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has distracted attention from the atrocities Russians are committing in Ukraine. Another is disinformation spread by Russian President Vladimir Putin, meant to woo like-minded politicians in the West away from the pro-Kyiv consensus. Notable in that camp is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who’s campaigning for Putin and against Kyiv. Bumping into each other in Argentina this week, he and Zelenskyy had what looked like an intense standoff.
For both his authoritarian style and his Russian affinities, Orban is also a model for many of the American pols turning away from Ukraine, which are mostly to be found in the GOP’s MAGA wing, beholden to former and possibly future president Donald Trump, another Putin buddy.
Some of these Republicans have concluded that Ukraine can’t win, and they don’t want to throw good dollars after bad. “What is $61 billion going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?,” as J.D. Vance, one MAGA senator, puts it, referring to the additional aid the White House wants to send to Ukraine. Vance wants to “accept Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians.”
Others, though, understand that Putin must be stopped in Ukraine to prevent him from threatening other countries in Europe next, thereby drawing the U.S. into the war at immeasurably greater cost in dollars and lives. But they’re politically afraid. Their own constituents have lost interest in Ukraine and are instead obsessed with migrants crossing the Mexican border.
The chaos at the border is indeed another, if entirely separate, problem which President Joe Biden wants to solve. For that and for tactical reasons, the White House has bundled stricter migration policies and additional funding for border security with aid to Ukraine, alongside support for Israel and Taiwan. This supplemental package – worth $110.5 billion, of which over half is meant for Ukraine – is what Biden sent to Congress. Withholding this additional aid to Kyiv, the White House has warned Congress, could “kneecap” Ukraine on the battlefield.
That hasn’t stopped Republicans in the House from escalating their demands in an effort to blackmail the White House into agreeing to the MAGA wing’s most extreme policy proposals against migrants. They include curtailing the right to asylum in ways that would fail both domestic and international law. Absurdly, some Republicans have even proposed metering aid to Ukraine according to reductions in U.S. border crossings. The Senate has blocked Biden’s aid bill with a procedural vote. It’s now unclear whether a deal is still possible before the end of the year, or at all.
That explains Zelenskyy’s impromptu visit. He met senators behind closed doors, as well as Mike Johnson, the MAGA Republican speaker of the House, who was apparently unmoved. Zelenskyy ended the day with Biden in the more welcoming setting of the White House.
But some Republicans in Congress still have a sense of proportion and responsibility. Several, like Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now fear that the party may end up on the wrong side of history. With his father’s army uniform from World War II framed beside his desk, he draws analogies to the 1930s, when appeasement failed and Adolf Hitler should have been stopped sooner.
So McCaul and two other Republican committee chairs in the House, Mike Rogers and Michael Turner, have co-authored and circulated that maroon pamphlet among their GOP colleagues. It doesn’t offer an actual “plan for victory in Ukraine.” Instead it seeks to rally Republicans to the righteous cause of backing Ukraine, and thereby maintaining American credibility with allies, and against aggressors, everywhere.
The document is revealing for what it distorts as well as what it gets right. In the first category, it blames everything that has gone wrong in Ukraine on Biden – his alleged “weakness,” which is said to have invited Putin’s aggression in the first place, and the “debilitating hesitation” with which he supplied weapons to Ukraine in 2022, when the authors think Kyiv could have prevailed. Completely missing is Trump’s coddling of Putin, the risk in 2022 that Putin might have escalated to nuclear war, and Biden’s leadership in holding together the West so far.
Where the call to arms resonates is in linking Putin’s warmongering to the threats posed by his de facto partners in Beijing, Tehran, Minsk and Pyongyang. The war in Ukraine, the three chairmen write, is “a bellwether to see if the United States and the rest of the free world can stand up to unprovoked aggression.”
Here’s hoping his GOP colleagues get that message. If Republicans in Congress go wobbly against Putin, so will the US, and if the U.S. does, so will Europe and the world. Too much is at stake for the GOP to fail at this turning point in history.
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