Is supporting Ukraine an investment for the West?
A common argument in the West is that supporting Ukraine is an investment. On the surface the argument seems reasonable, if we pay the Ukrainians enough that they can defeat Russia on the battlefield then Russia probably won’t have the strength to push further into Europe. But it also sounds alarmingly similar to domino theory to me; stop the commies in Vietnam so they won’t push further into Asia/Africa. There is also an important location angle to these arguments, they are more reasonable in the US than in Europe. As much as I think the Ukrainians are just in their struggle against Putin’s armies I don’t think foreign policy is an area where morality outweighs practicality. And ‘investment’ implies a much more certain and more direct relationship between benefits and costs than the realities of supporting one side in a war can provide.
It is a sign of the times to hear the language of finance crop up somewhere as unlikely as foreign policy. The theory that a state like Sweden or the US can or indeed should see supporting Ukraine as an ‘investment’ I think misunderstands what an investment is, and more fundamentally what the goals and methods of foreign policy are. In finance an investment is tying up resources in the reasonable expectation that you will be financially rewarded at a later time. That is certainly not going to be the case with supporting Ukraine. Even if, and as I have written about at length about why I don’t think it will, Ukraine wins the war it will not be in a place economically or socially where it will be able to repay its benefactors. It will need billions of Euros to reconstruct and it will take years to come to terms with the human cost and tragedy the war caused. It is a uniquely bad ‘investment’ if the best-case scenario still sees you losing all your invested money.
You might object that the term investment here is metaphorical, that supporting Ukraine will provide benefits which while not financial are still valuable. The most common argument I have seen for this is that it is an unqualified good to stop Russia from invading Ukraine, which often implicitly assumes that losing in Ukraine would prevent Putin from waging future wars. Foreign policy is guided by a state’s interests; or it is when done right. The states which have a strong interest in seeing Ukraine win the war are Ukraine’s neighbours, the Baltic states, and Finland. I would argue that aside from Ukraine itself the state with the strongest interest in seeing Ukraine win is Poland, as it is a rising minor power which would be threatened by Russia moving closer to its borders. Many other European states, even though they are core to the EU and thoroughly Western, don’t have a strong interest in seeing Ukraine win as there are many states and hundreds of kilometres between them and Russia.
The US meanwhile has a weak interest in the war, and to be as clear as possible: the US has an interest in seeing Russia lose, not in seeing Ukraine win. Who controls some muddy and by now thoroughly mined fields in Donbass has practically zero impact on the daily lives of Americans. But America has a vested interest in seeing its great power rival struggle. The thing about great powers though is that they are powerful enough to be able to waste some resources just to spite their rivals. A small European country like Sweden needs to protect an interest or get a real return on its ‘investments’ and ideally both.
I also don’t believe that the return this ‘investment’ is supposed to bring i.e. stopping future Russian aggression would ever materialise. The fact that the US didn’t outright win in Korea or that it lost in Vietnam did not mean that it couldn’t go to war in the Middle East, and the Russians losing in Afghanistan didn’t mean that they couldn’t go to war in Georgia or support the regime in the Syrian civil war. If Putin can’t conquer Kiev that doesn’t mean that he would also fail to conquer Riga.
There are clear and obvious moral reasons to support Ukraine, and for some states it is also in the national interest. Mixing morals and interests is recipe for failed foreign policy, and motivating foreign policy with speculative returns is a recipe for disaster.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about the war in Ukraine here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by William Larsen from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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