Opinion | Josh Hawley Is Wrong About Israel and Ukraine

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley wants to redirect funding from Ukraine to Israel. Which raises the question: Why does the senator care about Israel’s borders more than our own?

At least that would be the rejoinder if the premises of populist opponents of Ukraine funding like Hawley himself were turned against him.

There is near-universal support for aiding Israel in the Republican Party, while support for aiding Ukraine is eroding. But the same isolationist-tinged arguments that have been used, unconvincingly, against Ukraine could just as easily be used against Israel.

This is not to say that there aren’t legitimate reasons to want to limit our commitment to Ukraine, or to favor bolstering our most important ally in the Middle East — and a reliable ally for roughly 50 years — over other strategic priorities.

Yet support for Israel, too, would fail by the demagogic standards that have been set for Ukraine funding by certain Republicans.

First of all, elements of the right have presented a false choice between favoring the sovereign borders of Ukraine and favoring border security in the United States. Of course, it is perfectly possible to want both, and to secure the border here at home — a matter of enforcing the rules as much as anything — while aiding a country fighting off a brutish assault by one of our adversaries.

Why is a restoration of, say, the Remain in Mexico policy impossible as long as we are providing artillery shells to Ukraine?

Did Republicans fail to fund the border wall when they had unified control of government in 2017 and 2018 because of a full-on Russian invasion of Ukraine that didn’t happen until 2022?

It’s preposterous. But so embedded is this trope in the Republican conventional wisdom that in the last Republican debate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took a question about Ukraine and made it entirely about enforcing the U.S. border. Ordinarily, this would have been considered a head-spinning non sequitur, but everyone knew what he was getting at.

Hawley and others have gone further and suggested caring about Ukraine means not caring about Americans.

“I would just say to Republicans,” Hawley remarked back in February, “Listen, you can either be the party of Ukraine and the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country. But it’s time to say to the Europeans, no more welfare for Europeans. Let the Europeans take the lead on Europe. It is time to put the working people of this country first, to make those folks strong again, and to make this country strong again.”

East Palestine, of course, is a reference to the small Ohio town that was the site of a freight-train derailment earlier this year. Again, if giving High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems to Ukraine means the railways in the United States will be less safe, or we become incapable of providing disaster assistance to our own communities, it’s not obvious why continued, high-level support for Israel wouldn’t have the same effect.

Does all military and foreign aid have these direct, deleterious consequences for the working people in America? Or, coincidentally, does it happen just to be military and foreign aid that is increasingly unpopular with the Republican base?

Hawley has made many other arguments against Ukraine that quickly fall flat. He’s said there’s no end in sight to our aid. Well, we’ve been supporting Israel for decades.

He’s maintained that support to Ukraine has been ineffective because Kyiv is still fighting Russians on its territory. OK, but we’ve backed Israel for half a century and it’s still surrounded by terrorist enemies.

On the other hand, he’s dismissed the idea that the Russian military can sweep through Ukraine and threaten NATO countries. True, but Hamas isn’t strong enough to conquer Israel, either.

Finally, he’s argued that Ukraine is a distraction from the imperative to prepare for a conflict with China over Taiwan. By his lights, Israel should constitute another such diversion.

It’s not really fair to hold Hawley to any of this since he’s been making kitchen-sink arguments of convenience against Ukraine for a while — not to delineate a worldview or enunciate consistent principles.

If Ukraine and Israel are different places facing different threats, there’s much about both of them that should call on our sympathy and support. They both have been brutalized by a wholly unjustified invasion. They both have been the victims of hideous war crimes — their civilians rocketed, raped and kidnapped. They both are battling forces that hate the United States and the West and that receive backing from Iran. Finally, they both are blamed for acts of aggression against them while supposedly not doing enough to placate their implacable enemies.

There are differences, too. Israel is a well-established, stable democracy. The level of support required by Ukraine, which has been invaded by a much larger country and is now engaged in a large-scale, grinding war of attrition, is much higher. And the Ukraine conflict, involving a nuclear-armed Russia willing to make threats to try to stay the West’s hand, ultimately holds more dangers.

That said, we should and can support both Ukraine and Israel. In the near term, Ukraine needs weapons, while Israel, for the most part, needs diplomatic support, especially in the coming days and weeks when the initial wave of international sympathy for its cause begins to wear off. If the war in Gaza drags on, or there’s a second front in Lebanon, Israel may need more munitions. But much of what is most useful to Israel — materiel for its air force, Iron Dome interceptors — doesn’t directly overlap with Ukraine’s needs.

Where the populist critics of Ukraine are correct is that there’s a growing threat from China that is potentially more dire than the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the scale of support we are providing Ukraine is a major strain on our stocks of weapons. The solution isn’t to dump Ukraine and hope for the best, but to make it an emergency priority to revitalize our defense industrial base. It should be on a footing commensurate with the changing nature of the international environment and the need to supply our allies and ourselves.

If nothing else, the past year or so shows that artillery shells are just as necessary today as they were in 1914 or 1943.

Recent international events also should expose the folly of the notion that what the United States does around the world to maintain its leadership and advance peace and security is inherently wasteful and makes us weaker at home. To the contrary, the threats abroad are real, and our allies on the front lines, whether Ukraine or Israel, are fighting forces hostile to the United States that we don’t want to have to engage directly ourselves and that we don’t want to become more powerful.

That’s an investment worth making, and it doesn’t prevent us from pursuing whatever priorities we want here at home — yes, even securing the border.