Peace or no peace, America can and should arm Ukraine

Excerpt

We may be on the verge of peace in Ukraine — or not. Either way, the United States will need to continue providing Kyiv weapons. That’s because, despite significant progress, Europe still lacks the military-industrial might to replace the United States and meet Ukraine’s and NATO’s deterrent requirements.

A failure to arm Ukraine will increase the chances that the Kremlin will come back for even more Ukrainian territory in the future. The good news is that the United States can afford to provide Ukraine security assistance and has the means to do so without materially delaying the provision of weapons to Taiwan.

This assertion may surprise some, but consider some facts.

The United States has provided about $67 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Feb 24, 2022, when Putin launched his massive, unprovoked re-invasion. That may sound like an enormous sum, but it actually equates to less than 3 percent of what Washington spent on the Pentagon over the same time period.

Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ryan Brobst is a senior research analyst.