Investments we'd rather not need to make, but should anyway
On the Cold War, the imperfect present, and why some perspective on military aid spending is in order
75 cents won't even buy an order of hash browns at McDonald's. But it's the per-capita amount that Americans are spending on the final authorized drawdown of weapons aid going to Ukraine. $250 million, 335 million Americans, 75¢ per person.
■ At every turn, the choices made by the Kremlin in the war it plainly started have been wasteful and indefensible. 315,000 of its own soldiers have been killed or wounded, not to mention the military and civilian casualties it has inflicted on Ukraine. The human toll is appalling, and the budgetary consequences are huge, too.
■ In the Cold War, the United States was willing to spend, at times, nearly three times as much of our national income on the military as we do today -- all in the hope of choking out the Soviet Union in a giant cycle of mutually-reinforcing behavior. Ultimately, our adversary tapped out.
■ Today's Russia isn't yesterday's Soviet Union, but it has at least some designs on trying to get back there. Even if our contributions to Ukraine's defense weren't justified by the moral case for helping a young democracy secure its freedom from a revanchist neighbor, it would still make fiscal sense for the United States to invest in neutralizing an adversarial military force at such an incredibly low cost. Supposing that we have spent as much as $46 billion on military aid over the last two years, that's still less than $150 per person to set back a major threat by 18 years from when it began a war.
■ Nobody should doubt that in an ideal world, no such spending would be necessary at all. But we don't live in that world, and we're stuck with facing certain costs to make the world more secure for ourselves and our allies, either now or later. The more conclusively we demonstrate the conviction to see things through in backing the right side in the current conflict, the less likely we are to have to spend vastly more later on.