One of the surprising outcomes of the war in Ukraine is that Republicans have become less hawkish while Democrats are more supportive of military intervention. This shift is partly due to partisanship and Biden’s stance on the conflict, but also reflects deeper convictions.
According to a Pew Research survey conducted in January 2021, 63% of Democrats thought that US support for Ukraine was either “about right” or “not enough,” while only 15% thought it was too much. On the other hand, just 41% of Republicans believed that Washington’s support for Ukraine was adequate or insufficient, while 40% thought it was too much.
Republicans tend to favor increased military spending, despite their claim of budgetary restraint. Perhaps there is a good argument for greater military spending, given that US military spending as a share of the GDP (around 3.5%) is at a historical low despite a growing military threat from Russia and China.
However, if Republicans are isolated from the world and view the war in Ukraine as a remote territorial dispute that does not concern their vital national interests, then why would they respond differently to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? It is unclear why the US should spend $840 billion a year on its military to behave like a superpower if it is not interested in being a superpower in the first place.
On the other hand, liberals and progressives tend to be skeptical of military spending and wary of the military-industrial complex. Nonetheless, they are the main proponents of US support for Ukraine. Fight against aggressive tyrants requires weapons and tools of war such as Javelin and Stinger missiles, M777 howitzers and HIMARS rocket launchers, Bradley fighting vehicles, Abrams tanks, and millions of artillery shells, which are all creations of the military-industrial complex.
However, liberals have yet to provide the means to achieve their own ends. The Biden administration boasts of its $842 billion budget request, but such a claim fails to consider inflation, prolonged personnel salaries, and weapons procurement. If the administration’s plans progress, the Navy’s fleet will continue to shrink even as China’s navy grows. The US defense industry struggles to supply Ukraine with the necessary weapons and ammunition. This raises concerns over what might happen in the event of a Taiwanese invasion.
This is a strategically unserious approach and ideologically unnecessary. The military epitomizes big government, providing egalitarian wages, socialized medicine, and the highest quality of government-run childcare in the country. Defense spending also provides thousands of good-paying, high-skilled manufacturing jobs, making it as pure an application of domestic industrial policy as any other high-tech industry.
Liberals often regarded the military with hostility, assuming it had a right-wing bias. However, the argument is now harder to make since the right is claiming the military is now too “woke.” Those who spend time around senior military officers understand that they are rarely trigger-happy. In the first two years of the Trump administration, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a former Marine general, was the most stabilizing force and was referred to by Trump as “sort of a Democrat.”
The world has become increasingly hostile to liberal values over the past few years, and no regimes have done more to promote the new illiberalism than Moscow and Beijing. They cannot be made to behave better with moralistic rebukes, much less be hindered from their ambitions through diplomatic condemnation. A liberalism that recognizes its value and fragility must be willing to pay a premium to defend itself and its most vulnerable allies.
