Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) would like to see President Biden make an Oval Office speech explaining why the United States must continue to supply Ukraine with the weapons it needs to repel Russia’s barbarous invasion.
Sullivan fully supports providing Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to liberate its people. But, as he told me in a Thursday radio interview, Sullivan knows that when the United States is beset by migrant chaos at the southern border; skyrocketing interest rates for home, car and credit card borrowing; and the inflation that is a hallmark of the Biden years, Americans’ support for aid to Ukraine is not open-ended.
Last month, an ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 41 percent of Americans think the United States is doing too much to help Ukraine; that’s an increase from 33 percent last February and 14 percent in April 2022. With support inexorably slipping as the war continues, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has clearly adopted a strategy of wearing out Ukraine and waiting out the United States. Hence Sullivan’s sense of urgency about the need for Biden to shore up Americans’ support.
What does Putin want? The familiar answer: restoration of the Soviet Union. But that dream looks increasingly absurd as Moscow struggles against Ukraine; those who still credit it should think again. A young U.S. Marine field-grade officer I spoke with in the past week schooled me a bit about Putin’s current aims. If Russia can persevere despite the horrendous losses inflicted by the Ukrainian military on Putin’s conscripts and often hapless front-line soldiers, he will reap the tangible assets he seeks for waging future non-kinetic warfare against his enemies, real or imagined: Ukraine’s prodigious production of wheat and other agricultural products.
We hear about Ukrainian grain shipments being blocked, or Ukraine’s use of rail and roads instead, but not enough “big picture” attention is given to the staggering leverage Putin would have if he held an iron grip on Ukraine’s foodstuff exports.
The good news is that in recent weeks Ukraine has regained some of its ability to use its seaports for grain shipments — an option hugely preferable to the more limited overground methods. Russia’s Black Sea fleet has pulled back from its Crimean ports after taking significant losses from Ukrainian drone and cruise missile attacks. Seaborne grain shipments have resumed, through what Ukraine calls a “humanitarian corridor.” Those exports had essentially stopped in July, after Putin pulled out of a grain deal struck earlier in the war amid outcries about a potential global food crisis if Ukraine’s exports were cut off.
Those alarms must have only confirmed in Putin’s mind that, if he can seize Ukraine’s agricultural production or deprive everyone else of its exports, he can blackmail the world.
Before Russia’s February 2022 invasion, according to the European Commission, Ukraine accounted for 15 percent of the global corn market, 13 percent of the barley market and 10 percent of the wheat market. Ukraine dominated world trade in sunflower oil, with 50 percent of the market.
Global grain prices “hit an all-time high in March 2022 in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported in September. “The impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on global food security were immediate and stark.”
The CSIS report’s grim conclusion: “So long as Russia can manipulate Ukrainian agricultural exports, it can threaten Ukraine’s economy and global food security in order to achieve its political aims.”
The White House should also heed a warning on Wednesday from the British Foreign Office: Russia is laying sea mines to target cargo ships laden with Ukrainian grain, and Putin plans to blame Ukraine for the attacks.
Putin must realize that with a stymied military, unable to mount a serious threat to world order short of employing nuclear arms, he must weaponize what he already has — oil and natural gas — and what he can seize by force: food.
The United States should, of course, care about food security across the globe. To repeat for the 100th time, the world is one market, for every product. Price surges in a commodity overseas will eventually, and often immediately, impact U.S. consumers.
The out-of-control immigration surge across an essentially nonexistent U.S. southern border is being driven in good part by economic desperation; the price of food is part of that calculation. Russia’s aggression impacts the southern border as surely as it does your shopping cart at Safeway or Trader Joe’s.
But that is only one reason Putin must be stopped. Other vital reasons include avoiding a costly U.S. defense of NATO from a Russia newly extended to Ukraine’s borders, as well as sending a message about U.S. resolve to tyrannical regimes in China, Iran and North Korea.
What Sullivan asks for — strong presidential leadership — might not be possible, given Biden’s evident infirmities. But even as some unserious commentators and politicians rail against U.S. aid for Ukraine, the White House should heed the message from serious Republicans, including Sullivan, Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (Wis.), who frame support for Ukraine as being in the self-interest of all Americans — those concerned with their own pocketbooks, their own borders, their own children’s future.
Source: Washington Post
