It is disturbing to note the amount of misplaced skepticism in intelligent Republican circles — which could normally be expected to know better — that has greeted the administration’s commendable move to authorize up to $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. Otherwise generally sensible commentators such as Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson have assaulted this proposal in the unwelcome vocabulary of paleoconservative know-nothings. 

They sound like Pat Buchanan, who didn’t want to admit Poland to NATO. In one of his flamboyant opening editorials last week, Mr. Carlson inflicted upon us the particularly poorly invoked metaphor of children on Christmas Day receiving no presents from their parents who had showered the children in other homes along their street with gifts. 

Because the United States government, with bipartisan congressional support, was proposing to send this assistance to Ukraine, a friendly country struggling in good faith to establish a proper functioning democracy where none existed before, and seeking to escape from under the dead hand of the Kremlin into the sunlit uplands of the Western world, the entire American population of one-third-of-a-billion people were left like bitter little waifs with empty Christmas stockings while their parents showered munificence is on the other children of the neighborhood. In a phrase of Margaret Thatcher’s, I wondered if my ears were deceiving me.

Ms. Ingraham has spared her viewers such three-hanky tear-jerkers, but has uttered similar complaints at what they both and some others regard as the squandering of excessive amounts of money overseas when there is great need for costly and radical improvements to the lives of millions of Americans in country. No sane person would dispute the very unsatisfactory conditions of the American public. But this is not a zero-sum game and the strategic interests of the United States have not suddenly ceased to be worthy of account. 

Both these commentators and others are absolutely right to contrast the administration’s belated enthusiasm for a war that they initially resignedly believed would be a military day at the beach for the Russian army as it devoured Ukraine and its population of more than 40 million, with the shambles in practically every area of public policy in the United States: the southern border, inflation, Covid, the supply chain, and the senescence and buffoonery of most of the administration’s senior officials.

Such an immense and now almost uncontrolled spending machine as the U.S. government can certainly afford the proposed outlay to Ukraine by squeezing the projected $40 billion from some of the ludicrous woke and green boondoggles that have been piled onto the back of American taxpayers, such as the proposed $5 billion allocated for more bicycle paths in American cities. Relatively few Americans can emulate the transport secretary and current chief administration expert on baby formula, Pete Buttigieg, in being transported with his bicycle in an SUV 90 percent of the distance from his home to his office and then cycling in the last hundred yards in a daily photo-op. 

Apart from being offended at the cost of the proposed initiative, the commentators mentioned and some others reflect the understandable and widespread skepticism about any requests emanating from the Pentagon. The credibility of the egregious chairman of the joint oafs of staff, General Mark Milley, will never recover from his betrayal of President Trump over the walk to St. John’s Church in the summer of 2020 and the horrifying and dishonorable fiasco of the departure from Afghanistan. He maintained the consistency of his record as a reassuringly prescient guardian of U.S. national security when he told a congressional committee in February that Russia would occupy Kiev within three days and overrun all Ukraine within three weeks.              

Nothing could be more understandable than that all sensible observers would treat any requests for additional funding from the defense department and the intelligence agencies with profound caution. But what we are dealing with here is not just a brave struggle by a nation that we have encouraged and which we have enticed with the intimations that it could be admitted to NATO, and which is inspiring the entire world with its courage and resolution in the face of brute force by the corrupt and almost totalitarian regime in the Kremlin. We must not forget that Russia has an ancient claim on at least part of Ukraine and that there are approximately 7 million Russian-speaking Ukrainians who probably gravitate more to Russia than to the new state of Ukraine. Any settlement of the present conflict must reflect these facts. 

Yet what Russia is attempting is not only illegal and barbarous, it is also attempting to reverse the results of the West’s overwhelming and almost bloodless victory in the Cold War, which resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of international communism. Vladimir Putin has declared his intention to do just that and to reassemble the Russian federation on close to its former, Soviet, lines.

U.S. policy-makers have effectively three choices: they may feed in enough assistance to hold the administration harmless from the charge of turning its back on a friendly nation’s heroic fight for its democratic right to exist, or it may wash its hands of the whole business and do nothing to bring a war that is largely being borne by the civil population of Ukraine and is killing thousands of people each week to an end. Or it can provide assistance on a basis that will enhance the chances of Ukraine being sufficiently successful to negotiate a compromise outcome of the conflict that will respect Russia’s historic and legitimate fraternal interest in Ukraine while permanently establishing the indisputable rights and legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent country. 

It would achieve that status after this heroic struggle that will confer upon Ukraine the ultimate legitimacy of having fought bravely for and won its right to exist as an independent democracy. Most Americans identify with that ambition and the dissent of people like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson from assisting the process is perverse, bizarre, and unworthy.      

A special caution must be offered to the Trumps, father and son. The former president should walk back his over-generous reflections on Mr. Putin as “a genius” in any respect. What we are witnessing is the greatest debacle produced by any great power since the insane Anglo-French intrusion at Suez in 1956, and it is not at all clear that Mr. Putin will be able to sustain himself in office in the aftermath of it. 

Nikita Khrushchev was dismissed by the Politburo after the Cuban missile crisis, even though he succeeded in gaining the withdrawal of American intermediate range missiles from Italy and Turkey and won a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba. President Trump should make it clear that he supports Ukraine and aid to Ukraine, and while he is at it he should admonish Donald Trump Jr. never to refer to the Ukraine war as a “clown-show” again. None of these critics should suggest that America is itself at war and they should stop lamenting the money being spent in this fine cause. 

America made tremendous sacrifices over 40 years in the Cold War and $40 billion is a pittance to pay for disabusing Russia of the notion that it is still a superpower and effectively dismissing it as a serious nuisance to the American national interest and to the cause of freedom throughout the world.