Ukraine’s fight against Russia is in large part bankrolled by the United States.
The data bear this out:
the United States has pledged 27.6 billion Euros in military aid thus far.
The United Kingdom is the second largest donor but comes in at just 3.7 billion Euros.
For its part, Ukraine agrees and would describe the aid as pivotal to the war effort.
But all that might change on November 8, the date of U.S. midterm legislative elections.
All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs,
and 35 or the 100 senators will be elected as well.
As we have discussed before,
the point of military aid is to shift the balance of power in favor of Ukraine,
either giving Kyiv better leverage on the battlefield or in negotiations.
But whether you personally would want to move the line here
or back here
or all the way over to the pre-2014 borders depends on a number of factors.
These include how much you care about government expenditures in general and the national debt,
your personal preferences for isolation and whether you care about East-West relations,
whatever Ukraine can deliver personal benefits to you, something that was central to the
controversy leading to the first impeachment of President Trump over a phone call to Zelensky,
and even whether Putin and Russian agents might have personally compromised you.
So if the 2022 midterms lead to major changes in Congress, it appears that there could be
corresponding movement on aid disbursements to Ukraine.
On the Congressional side, a change in alignment is likely.
Midterm elections almost always result in the president’s party losing seats.
Since World War II, the average outcome is a loss of
26 seats in the House and
four seats in the Senate.
Why that happens is still debated.
Part of it is a “coattails” effect.
A popular presidential candidate during presidential election years also encourages down ballot
voting along party lines.
Ronald Reagan’s blowout victory in 1980, for example, added 12 Republican seats to
the Senate and the party’s first majority since 1954.
The coattails effect goes double in an era of intense political polarization, where split
ticket voting—
say, voting for a Democrat for president but a Republican for Senate—is rare.
Here, that means that Biden in 2020 pushed Congress to be bluer than it would be otherwise.
There is also the issue that presidential approval ratings tend to go down over time.
Biden began his presidency at 53% approval but has dropped to 42%.
More generally, Americans may prefer having a counterbalance to the president.
If they know Democrats will control the executive branch for the next two years,
then they would prefer to have Republicans to control Congress.
But regardless of the cause, the 26 House seat and four Senate seat average loss would
be devastating for current ruling party.
Heading into the election,
Democrats only have an eight-seat edge in the House
and are dead even in the Senate,
with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tiebreaker.
At the time of writing, FiveThirtyEight estimates an
85% chance of winning control over the House and a
55% chance of taking the Senate,
with races in Arizona, Georgia,
Nevada, and Pennsylvania being key to determining
the outcome.
Meanwhile, betting markets give Republicans an even more favorable outlook.
Basically, it’s looking bad for the Democrats.
So how might the U.S. policy toward Ukraine change after the election?
Let’s start with the unlikely outcome where Democrats win.
Here, we can expect a continuation of the status quo, even if there are major Democratic
gains.
The only indication otherwise was a letter penned by the progressive caucus that came
out on October 24.
It called for President Biden to redouble efforts to seek a realistic framework for
a ceasefire.
To be clear, it is true that complete military defeat of either side appears unlikely at
this point.
Russia showed an inability to take Kyiv in the early days of the war, and the events
since then have only reinforced that perception.
The Ukrainian army, meanwhile, will not be marching into Moscow.
Ukraine is too small, Russia is too large,
Moscow is too far away, the U.S. would not support that,
and never mind the existence of Russian nuclear weapons.
However, as we have discussed before, a settlement is not feasible right now
given the current military situation in Ukraine and political situation in Russia.
At the very least, Ukraine’s counterattack will need to exhaust itself.
It is slowing, but it is not quite over.
The public response to the progressive letter was … negative to say the least,
and the progressive caucus withdrew it the next day, saying it was drafted in May and
released by staff without further edits.
That whole experience indicates that the Democratic party as a whole is aligned with the current
status quo support to Ukraine.
Instead, the real question is what will happen if the Republicans win,
especially in a landslide.
Most of the intrigue stems from an October 18 quote from House Minority Leader—and
perhaps future Majority Leader—Kevin McCarthy, who said that
“people are going to be sitting in a recession and they are not going to write a blank check
to Ukraine.”
That suggests that McCarthy may be willing to move the line in Ukraine’s favor,
but maybe not as much as what has been the case during the war thus far.
How worried should Ukraine be about this possibility?
And alternatively, how excited should Russia be about this?
The answer to both questions is: not much.
The status quo is likely to mostly persist for four reasons.
First is the structure of the U.S. government.
The executive is the commander-in-chief and broadly sets U.S. foreign policy, not Congress.
Biden chooses the Secretaries of State and Defense and picks his own National Security
Advisor.
That means if Biden wants to support Ukraine, he can.
That said, Congress has the ability to create checks and balances over the executive with
its power of the purse.
This is where Republicans could kill the aid programs: by simply failing to pass any more
aid packages.
Biden still has access to whatever has been spent, though.
And if Democrats anticipate the worst, there is still something they can do.
A lame duck period would arise between November 8 when the election results begin coming in
and the January 3, 2023 swearing in.
Democrats could use that time to rush through one more massive aid package.
Eventually, Republicans would take control of Congress.
The counterplay they would then have is to fail to pass legislation to raise the debt
ceiling.
That’s the cap that prevents the federal government from steamrolling past its current
31 trillion dollar debt and thereby stops the government from operating.
Congress has used debt ceiling expansion as a hostage in the game of federal spending
chicken in the recent past.
Under the Trump administration, Democrats refused to fund a border wall, leading to
a record 35-day government shutdown between 2018 and 2019.
And under the Obama administration, Republicans refused to fund the Affordable Care Act,
leading to a 16-day shutdown in 2013.
In the near future, the new Republican majority could do the same, this time with Ukraine
funding being the catalyst.
Second, for the time being, only a minority of Republicans have raised issues with current
spending amounts.
Even as the House minority leader criticized Biden’s copious spending,
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell took the exact opposite stance, arguing that
“The Biden administration and our allies need to do more to supply the tools Ukraine
needs to thwart Russian aggression.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence also took a firm stance in response to McCarthy’s
reservations, stating that
“There can be no room in the conservative movement for apologists to Putin.”
In short, McCarthy does not speak for the entire party, and a lot of the conversation
has pivoted toward adding oversight to the spending rather than removing it.
More broadly, the main spending bill from May 10 had a supermajority of support from
Republicans,
with 149 yeas and only 57 nays.
That’s a narrower result than the 219-0 vote from Democrats, but it is still a very
comfortable margin.
The wide-ranging Republican support is likely in part due to our third and fourth factors.
To begin, there is where the money goes.
Military aid to Ukraine is not a direct cash transfer from Washington to Kyiv.
Rather, it is reserve supplies of military goods heading across the Atlantic, combined
with whatever else needs immediate manufacture.
Obviously, defense contractors are excited about the prospects of new goods coming off
the assembly lines.
That’s a direct payment into their pockets.
But even the drawdown of reserve supplies is good news because the military will eventually
need to refill those.
These there represent future direct payments, again into their pockets.
That matters for voting purposes because defense contractors spend enormous sums of money on
lobbying and campaign donations.
Many Republicans are beneficiaries of those donations.
In other words, the military-industrial complex that
President Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address is alive and well.
And as long as it is kicking, Ukraine will benefit.
Finally, aid to Ukraine is just plain popular.
Back in August, a survey questioned the American public about their support for
“sending additional arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government.”
72% responded affirmatively.
You might think that this policy is more popular among Democrats, and you’d be right: 79%
of them support it.
But the policy actually has plenty of bipartisan appeal: 68% of Republicans support it as well.
Going further, the survey also asked whether Americans were willing to keep up the pressure
“as long as it takes”.
And they are.
58% of all Americans, or a nice 69% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans agreed.
Those are remarkably high numbers given that the question negatively primed respondents
by warning them of the costs it will impose on the United States.
Heck, when surveyed about sending U.S. troops into Ukraine, 38% of Americans, or 42% of
Democrats and 34% of Republicans were still supportive.
I suspect that these respondents are not fully aware of what the consequences of such a move
would be.
Nevertheless, it underscores how the average American is hawkish when it comes to the conflict.
Republicans want to win the White House in 2024, and adopting policies with such broad
support is a good way to work toward that goal.
Truth be told, Ukraine really should worry more about 2024 and less about 2022.
It is not as clear what round two of President Trump would do once elected,
or what Ron DeSantis would do once elected,
or who knows what other candidate might come out of the Republican primaries.
As mentioned earlier, presidents control Washington’s foreign policy agenda, and so a Ukraine-skeptic
president would have a much bigger effect on the war than whatever is going on in Congress.
Who do you think is going win the midterm elections?
And how will it affect Ukrainian aid spending?
Let me know in the comments.
If you want to know more about the war, you will love my book that explains the causes
of it.
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