Some Republicans are asking what the American taxpayer gets for blocking Russia in eastern Ukraine. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, is predicting, in an interview with Punchbowl News, that “people are going to be sitting in a recession — and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.”

The portion of polled Republicans who think Washington is giving “too much” aid to Ukraine, according to Pew Research,  jumped to 32 percent last month from 9 percent in May. Voting has started in the midterm elections. Polls indicate that Republicans could win back the House of Representatives.

Aside from protecting a democracy from invasion by a totalitarian neighbor, here are dollars and cents reasons for helping Ukraine. They start with the West’s inglorious response to the outbreak of World War II, which shows that containment pays. It counsels moving fast to help Ukraine block Russia.

We’ve already seen that aid from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is radically reducing the chances of having to fight later on to defend five NATO members:  Poland, Slovakia, and the Baltic nations. In speeches last year, President Putin indicated that his goal is to restore the borders of the Russian Empire.

A political theorist sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin,” Aleksandr Dugin, has called for a Moscow-centered empire stretching from Vladivostok to Dublin. Mr. Putin’s expansionism has prompted a doubling of NATO countries pledging to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP.

This year, 11 new countries made the pledge, including three heavyweights — Germany, Italy, and Spain.  Of the NATO 30, only America and nine other countries met that level. Mr. Putin achieved what every American President since Jimmy Carter could not — getting Europeans to pay more for their defense.

Mr. Putin’s war shocked Scandinavia. Norway is detecting Russian drones near offshore oil platforms. Finland and Sweden are abandoning long-cherished neutrality and joining NATO. Finns are well aware that until 1917, Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire.

Thanks to Putin, the Baltic Sea is about to become a NATO sea. According to the latest Ukraine Defense Ministry numbers, Russia has lost in Ukraine some 243 helicopters, 269 fixed-wing aircraft, 1,311 drones, 2,018 artillery pieces, 2,569 tanks, 4,005 fuel and supply trucks, and 5,255 armored personnel carriers.

Plus, Russia has lost 66,650 soldiers and officers — almost five times the number lost by the Soviets during a decade in Afghanistan. All this has been pushed off Eurasia’s chessboard, greatly easing Russia’s military threat to NATO’s eastern wing. Post war, America and NATO will not have to spend heavily to face Russia. 

Even if Mr. Putin, now 70 and in political trouble, gets his mojo back, it will take years to rebuild his army. Plans are underway for rebuilding Ukraine after Russia’s devastation. Unlike the 1948-1951 Marshall Plan for Western Europe, this would not be funded primarily by American taxpayers.

Instead, legal work is underway to create a Western-supervised rebuilding plan funded by $350 billion in Russian government accounts frozen in America, Britain, Switzerland, and the European Union. GE, Bechtel, and other American corporations are expected to go to the head of the line for rebuilding Ukraine’s power plants, highways, bridges, and airports.

America, the world’s largest arms exporter, will gain market share from Russia, the world’s second largest arms exporter. For the countries of the former Warsaw pact, today’s war is completing a 30-year process of replacing Soviet-era weapons with NATO standard weapons. 

Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are sending their Soviet-made tanks, jets, and artillery pieces east to Ukraine. They are being replaced by NATO equipment, largely Made in the USA. Elsewhere, the poor performance of Russian equipment is expected to cut Russian weapons exports.

It is a little-known fact that between 2014 and 2021, American  military officers quietly visited Ukraine’s front line to study Russian tactics and weaponry. Now, the Pentagon is learning daily about the weak points and strong points of Russian strategy and equipment — without one American life lost.

During the first half of this year, America became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas. For years, Chancellor Merkel politely brushed off American proposals to build LNG landing terminals on Germany’s Baltic seacoast. German officials quietly insinuated that Texas politicians were trying to peddle their wares. 

Instead, Chancellor Merkel moved ahead with the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. Germany’s dependence on Russian pipeline gas rose last year to 55 percent of its imports. Few people were rude enough to note that the two Russia-Germany pipelines made landfall in the Baltic constituency that Ms. Merkel represented between 1990 and 2021, Vorpommern-Rügen – Vorpommern-Greifswald I.

Since the war broke out, Chancellor Scholz has ordered construction of five LNG landing terminals up and down Germany’s sea coast. Temporary, floating versions of these terminals are to be working by December. One lasting legacy of today’s war is expected to be a sharp reduction of EU dependence on imports of Russian gas. 

The United States now has more than 140 LNG processing plants and ports. The EU will become a big market for gas from the red states of Texas and Louisiana. Republicans who focus on votes today will remember that Americans of Eastern European origin were key pillars of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.”