Biden Give Ukraine F-16’s, for Christ’s Sake
This morning as soon as I saw it, I had immediately to open the notification of an article in the New York Times, “The Latest Flashpoint Among Ukraine’s Allies is Whether to Send F-16’s.”
I read that the US besides still refusing to give Ukraine the necessary weapons it needs to mount a devastating counteroffensive against an embattled Russia in retreat, we are also failing to permit our European allies not only to send Ukraine F-16’s, but even to allow Europe to train Ukrainean airforcemen to fly them.
Here’s our exceedingly pathetic excuse, the Times reports,
“a senior U.S. official said the Biden administration was still reluctant to send Ukraine its own F-16s, in part because the plane’s multimillion-dollar price tag would absorb too much of an already-dwindling pot of war funding. Instead, the U.S. official said, the administration is more concerned with speeding other American weapons to Ukraine in time for a counteroffensive against Russia, and that in any case the jets would not reach the battlefield for months at least — presumably, long after that battle had begun.”
The fighters would “drain” our Ukraine budget?
WHAT?
We are spending zero point fucking nothing percent of GDP funding this war, and if we have to open a new budget then we will. 14 Democratic and Republican lawmakers in this Times article, have united to petition the Biden administration to release the F-16’s. And Kevin Mccarthy who was once so distasteful and stupid as to say the GOP wasn’t committed to any “blank check” for Ukraine, in Poland a couple weeks reportedly went out of his way to express his party’s total commitment to the Ukrainean cause. Apparently even Ron Desantis has walked back his comments reducing the war to a “territorial dispute” that wasn’t in the national interest. Only one ridiculous man intends actually to appease Putin—the inglorious clinically insane self-aggrandizing sociopath and likely Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, and his enablers, such as Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr, or the intellectual Ukraine-skeptic Republican senator Mike Lee.
Ukraine is doing fucking phenomenal to repel Russia’s advances, thanks to NATO and particularly US support, not to mention the awesome moral resolve of a noble people. It is without question moreover that Ukraine would be doing even better if we gave them more. But half of the problem with this conflict is we are not giving Ukraine all the weapons they need at a fast enough clip. And we’re only so slow, because we have a dumb tendency conceive of the conflict in the very short term.
We spend all this time vacillating on sending munitions, and then prevaricating when asked why we weren’t giving them HIMARS, or the M1 Abrams tanks, not really because of time constraints, but the irrational dumb fear of escalating the conflict, so our short-termism is self-imposed. Our mentality is like, okay let’s send them this, and wait and see what that does. Let’s send them a little more. No wait. Yeah send more. See what that does. Meanwhile Russia just conscripts more and more troops whenever they feel like it, and they acquire Iranian kamikaze drones, and use long range missiles to bomb the bejeezus out of the power grid and murder countless civilians while we don’t give Ukraine the fighter jets they need to defend their skies. And we must understand the only way Ukraine can succeed in this counteroffensive and hope to win the war is: if we give them the superior weapons not just so they can defend themselves too, but take the battle to the enemy and finish the war.
However, the Biden Administration has not made the case at all, preferring just to run his reelection campaign everywhere he goes, because he’s a career politician who strictly follows his own electoral interest and obediently submits to whatever his party wills. You wouldn’t know how important the war in Ukraine is unless you follow it and read the best scholarship on it pouring out of Foreign Affairs magazine particularly. The Economist is also really pro-Ukraine. The whole free world should be super pro-Ukraine though, not just bloggers like me reading newsletters from the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Here thankfully is an article in the more mainstream Atlantic making the case. “America’s Unconvincing Reasons for Denying F-16’s to Ukraine.” Phillips Payson O’Brien and Edward Stringer—
“Having F-16s would broaden Ukraine’s ability to shoot down incoming Russian missiles and drones. During last year’s campaigns, the Russians relied on a wide range of attack platforms: relatively simple and inexpensive Iranian Shahed drones, repurposed S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, more advanced Kalibr cruise missiles, and even Russia’s latest Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. To shoot down just some of this weapony, the Ukrainians had to rely overwhelmingly on ground-based anti-air systems—to such a degree that rumors spread that Ukraine was or would soon be running short. Without an airborne defense—something F-16s would help provide—Ukraine is, to use a sports metaphor, defending on its own goal line. Instead of a systematic defense of its skies, the Ukrainians are fending off attacks on targeted infrastructure point by point. Any defense that relies on last-ditch saves is a notably poor one.”
And it is no excuse to withhold F-16s because they will take months to arrive when the war may take years. The momentum is already on their side. They held onto Bakhmut. Wagner’s forces are humilitated. The counteroffensive is just beginning. If Ukraine does well, and we have very good reason to expect they will, then the F-16’s delivered months from now can be pivotal to driving Russia out of the Donbas and out of Crimea too.
And we cannot afford to be afraid of escalation. Putin has threatened to use nukes over and over, and he hasn’t. And anyway it’s ridiculous to allow his threats to cow us into submission. NATO also has nukes. The US has nukes. Everyone has nukes. And Putin’s allies in the Kremlin, Asia and the Middle East, all on whom he depends, won’t let him nuke Ukraine. His alliance with China particularly is more tenuous than we imagine. And it’s ridiculous the conservatives and progressives who pretentiously want to end the war to stop the loss of Ukrainean lives. Ukraine obviously would rather fight regardless of the cost, than negotiate peace with the 21st century Hitler that Putin is. That’s why they fight. 90% of Ukraineans strongly support the war in spite of all the cost.
“Peace” is not an option
Negotiating with Putin and giving him the land he annexed is not an option. It’s exactly what he wants if he can’t take Kyiv. It would give him the time to rest and resupply and continue to take all Ukraine in the coming decades. People don’t understand this. Putin will keep expanding.
Foreign policy “realists” like John Mearsheimer or Jack Matlock argue that NATO expansion provoked this war, and Ukraine trying to join the EU. But that’s absurd when according to everyone close to Putin, he sees himself as Peter the Great. And also if you factor in the grandiose insanity of his speeches, like “denazification.” That’s all about conjuring the glory of Stalingrad in the second world war to justify his colonial expansion in the 21st century. His ambition is to break NATO and rebuild the territory of the former USSR. It will not stop in Ukraine. He is not defending Russia from the West. He is trying to build an empire.
Because if he can defeat western support for Ukraine, there’s no doubt that he will go for Lithuania or Estonia. Because if we submitted to his nuclear saber rattling in Ukraine, why should we defend the Baltic states? And then why not invade Poland? And he’ll just keep going and going. We should take very seriously that he identifies himself with Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Stalin. A man who identifies with imperialists is an imperialist.
For all the right wing isolationists who want peace, and accelerationist screwballs like Elon Musk, and Trump who would broker a deal in “24 hours,” for all their foreign policy “realism,” are actually not being realistic. Without a doubt what Trump would try and do is what he meant to do in the Middle East with the flawed, “Abraham Accords.” Trump thinks he can run the world like a big vulgar business and all the US has to do is broker deals with autocrats for world peace. But the Abraham Accords has just hardened the Iranian regime, and it left the issue of who runs the Middle East among states that all hate each other an open question. Biden made it much much worse, but Trump started it. We can’t let something like the Art-of-the-Deal replace good old-fashioned NATO-led, Washington-driven deterrence! This is the strongest argument in my view for why Donald Trump must not become president.
But if Biden is to remain president, and lest someone else like Trump does, we need to get serious about Ukraine, prepare for a long war, but accelerate a Ukrainean victory. Give them F-16’s, or let Europe give them F-16’s. Let Ukraine strike inside Russian territory.
There is no alternative. An international rules-based democratic order that Washington does not lead would cease to be a democratic order.
Reuters Johanna Geron
— Jay