While President Biden is calling for combining into a single package aid to Israel and Ukraine, Congress is poised to advance a funding bill this week to support Israel exclusively. It’s a move that follows the skepticism of Republican politicians and scholars, whose demands are growing louder for “America-first” solutions to looming threats overseas.

“There are lots of things going on around the world that we have to address, and we will,” Speaker Johnson said Sunday on Fox News. “But right now, what’s happening in Israel takes the immediate attention, and I think we’ve got to separate that and get it through.” 

Mr. Johnson heeded the advice of Senate Republicans who have argued that requests for Israeli aid will have a better chance of succeeding in the House if separated from the debate over aid to Ukraine. This move also aligns the outlook on international relations favored by the realist school, which recommends that Washington carefully calculate how much it should be involved in competing foreign conflicts — and whether American engagement will really help resolve them.

“Vital for America’s national security”: This is how Mr. Biden described his proposed package of $106 billion in aid. Some $10 billion in humanitarian relief would be divided among Israel, Ukraine, and Gaza, with Israel receiving an additional $14 billion in military assistance. Ukraine would receive more than $60 billion to aid its war effort against Russia. The remaining funds would support the Indo-Pacific region and immigration enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. 

To realists, though, Mr. Biden’s funding roll-up is outside of the interests of “America’s national security.” The policy director at the think tank Defense Priorities, Benjamin Friedman, tells the Sun that “aid packages should be treated differently and separately.” He says that the bill makes it seem that Israel and Ukraine are on the front lines of a global war between democracy and autocracy, but “that’s fundamentally false.” 

Washington should “stop confusing charitable impulses with U.S. national security interests and seeing our own security on the line in every conflict in the world,” Mr. Friedman advises. Such idealistic thinking, he says, “has this tendency to compel us to be a kind of global empire.” He argues that Israel’s war with Hamas and Ukraine’s war with Russia are both local conflicts, and positioning them as part of “a global ideological conflict” simply serves as a “sales pitch to justify support.”

Mr. Biden’s calculus thus appears to be political: Aid for Israel draws bipartisan support, and aid to Ukraine does not. Combining the two makes the latter goal more likely to succeed. The “sales pitch” of national a security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attacks on Israel present a “global inflection point,” as he put it to reporters Friday. “This budget request is critical to advancing America’s national security and ensuring the safety of the American people,” he said.

The battle over the aid bill will hit the House floor this week. Senator Scott is already in high dudgeon. “Americans should be disgusted that President Biden and Washington’s ruling class continue to use crisis after crisis to push massive spending packages for issues that have no business being voted on together,” the Florida Republican said in a statement. 

Beyond the partisan debates, though, lie broader questions about the utility of foreign aid. “There’s an obvious case to be made for both aid to Israel and aid to Ukraine,” a professor of international relations at Harvard University, Stephen Walt, a self-described realist, tells the Sun. “But misgivings arise when people start asking, ‘Exactly where is this taking us?’”

In the case of Ukraine, the realist faction tends to advise against further military assistance for an offensive that appears likely to end in a stalemate. These allocations are “largely charitable,” Mr. Friedman says, as “our national security interest does not depend on them winning back all their territory.” Thus, “the Biden administration,” he asserts, “owes it to the American taxpayers to be frank about what Ukraine can reasonably achieve.”

Rather than continuing this so-called charity, “we’ve got to be thinking about an exit ramp in Ukraine,” another realist, Michael Desch, a professor of international relations at Notre Dame, urges. He also questions whether American financial commitments will best serve Israel, the nation’s military and intelligence ally. 

“We’re giving them more money to engage in policies that have also failed there,” Mr. Desch tells the Sun. If America encourages Prime Minister Netanyahu’s policy of maintaining Gaza as “an open-air prison,” he claims, “it will leave Israel worse off strategically than a two-state solution would” by further isolating Israel in the Middle East. In that sense, “America first would also put Israel first.”

Some Senate Republicans, while concerned about the well-being of civilians at Gaza, are also worried about billions of dollars in American humanitarian aid falling into the wrong hands. “If I could wave a magic wand and give aid to the Palestinian children, I will,” Senator Vance told “Face The Nation” on Sunday. “But given the realities on the ground, I think if we divert resources to Gaza, it’s going to fall in the wrong hands.”

As debates ensue over the benefits of aid, the realist and restraint framework suggests that the best path forward — for America, the Middle East, and the world — is one that elevates the chances of diplomacy. 

A hardball American policy toward Israel, Mr. Desch says, would allocate funds for a limited period of time on the condition that they achieve substantial progress on a two-state solution or, in the case of Ukraine, a negotiation settlement. Mr. Walt agrees. “Any aid to both Ukraine and Israel,” he suggests, “should be tied to the exploration of the diplomatic process to bring the war to an end, however difficult it might be.” 

Limiting aid might seem politically and morally untenable in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attacks at southern Israel. Mr. Walt, though, contends that realism, at heart, is a theory of constraints. “In an uncertain world, states have to provide their own security, and they have to be very careful how they allocate resources and prioritize threats and commitments,” he says. 

Mr. Walt adds that “neither realists nor restrainers are genuine isolationists,” and they don’t seek a return to a “Fortress America” free of international trade and crucial bilateral ties. Realists do, though, argue that America, even with its wealth and security, must operate according to the pressures of the global order, which requires reducing its commitments overseas. 

“Realism has been largely marginalized over the last 30 years,” Mr. Walt explains. As foreign conflicts beg for large-scale American intervention, though, he reckons, “it’s starting to come back.”