It’s always nice when your political opponents make your arguments for you. And in the recent dustup over the $60 billion Ukraine subsidy bill — which in late April passed the House and Senate — that’s precisely what foreign policy hawks have done.
As many beltway wonks have observed, increasing debate in the United States over funding the two-year-old war in Ukraine — not to mention our myriad other military commitments around the globe — has led many U.S. allies to reconsider their own defense spending.
In other words, just the fact that there is no longer a consensus about America’s “policeman of the world” post-Cold War security strategy among the American people and their representatives is persuading our allies to meet the various military commitments we have been demanding of them since Ronald Reagan was president. That should be designated a strategic win, but, as interpreted by our blinkered foreign policy establishment — who have unswervingly endorsed the growing number of U.S. military disasters this century — it is somehow a loss.
Max Boot: Exhibit A in the Incompetent Internationalists Museum
Leading the charge of incoherence in service of our discredited conventional foreign policy is Washington Post columnist and “former neoconservative” Max Boot. In an April 29 op-ed, Boot argues the recent scuttlebutt over the Ukraine funding bill “should give U.S. allies pause about whether they can still count on the United States.”
He notes that “U.S. allies will have to make contingency plans on the assumption
