The American Right Must Rediscover Its Soul Through Ukraine

If one were to think back a generation ago, the face of American conservatism was completely different. It was an orthodoxy built on muscular, interventionist strength. In the aftermath of 9/11, to be a true Republican was to be right alongside the commander in chief, waving the flag and fully behind the global War on Terror, the march into Iraq. The various nation-building exercises from the Hindu Kush to the deserts of the Middle East. For generations of public and private sector citizens, American primacy was a moral imperative.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Today, that certainty is gone, replaced by an intense, often passionate embrace of populist isolationism. How did millions of Americans come to make that seismic shift? For the international community to best understand that evolution is to recognize a political movement that has lost all faith in its own establishment. The long shadow of the Pax Americana It all starts with the profound sense of letdown that followed the post-9/11 conflicts. The grand pronouncements that justified the 2001 start of the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – the establishment of Western-style democracy, the removal of weapons of mass destruction, the creation of a stable and prosperous “New Middle East” – were completely at odds with what actually transpired. From Iraq and Syria; Afghanistan to Pakistan; to the Horn of Africa and Maghreb, the American public saw more than $8 trillion (about $25,000 per person in the US) squandered in a series of protracted insurgencies and counter-interventions. Thousands of young service members come home in flag-draped coffins. Over time, the public came to see those foreign adventures as colossal mistakes, the products of arrogant elite Washington thinking. Other Topics of Interest ‘Pressure Putin, Not Me’ – Zelensky Urges Trump to Increase Pressure Zelensky urges Trump to pressure Putin rather than Ukraine, warning that Russia could threaten NATO countries if Kyiv is not strengthened. There is also a more corrosive dynamic at play. In the decades following the Vietnam War, the nation engaged in a painful public reckoning over how and why its strategic ambitions had gone so terribly wrong in Indochina. But after the United States’ humbling withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 and chaotic retreat from Afghanistan a decade later, no such national conversation ever took place. The political and military architects of those two decades walked away largely unquestioned, leaving the public – particularly those who had once passionately supported or even participated in the War on Terror – feeling ignored and without vindication. For many of those former true believers, Donald Trump’s deliberate lack of empathy, his open hostility toward traditional foreign alliances, his blunt, transactional bullying of burgeoning democracies like Ukraine do not register as defects. Instead, they feel like a long-overdue validation – a harsh, unvarnished rebuke to an internationalist consensus that they believe abandoned them while quietly glossing over its own catastrophic failures. As the middle class began to feel the pinch of mounting national debt and the country’s manufacturing base was systematically eroded as a result of China’s membership in the World Trade Organization, much of the American public began looking at foreign aid and the endless parade of military and democracy-building operations that it was engaged in overseas with a different set of eyes. The question was no longer “What is our moral duty to the world?” It was “What are they doing for us back here at home?” Trump didn’t just modify the platform that Reagan established to win the Cold War; he gleefully destroyed it. United by grievanceEnter reality-TV star Donald J. Trump in early 2016. With a crude rawness that flouted generations of American political orthodoxy, he claimed, without evidence, that the post-World War II foreign policy establishment had drained the country of its resources. The “Great Sell-Out,” as he would frame it. Trump didn’t just modify the platform that Ronald Reagan established to win the Cold War; he gleefully destroyed it. And the MAGA movement – which is culturally and morally ambivalent, as well as increasingly unschooled, about the legacy of America’s monumental victory over Soviet Communism – has cheered him on at every turn.For people already deeply suspicious of Washington, the media, policy experts, the military, and the intelligence establishment, Trump’s bomb-thrower message struck a raw nerve. He has presented international alliances not as bulwarks of freedom, liberal democracy, and capitalism, but as rigged arrangements where American taxpayers are being hoodwinked.Yet if one looks at Trumpist populism more closely, an interesting contradiction emerges. It would be easy to conclude that his voters have ideologically turned against war. But when Trump calls for an operation or intervention, whether in Venezuela or other smaller skirmishes, the view of his base shifts overnight.Why is Ukraine treated so differently?The answer dates to July 2019, when Trump called the then-newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, immediately after Washington froze $400 million in aid to Kyiv. That call triggered Trump’s first impeachment in the lower chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives. Though he was later acquitted by a sympathetic Senate, for Trump and his supporters, Ukraine was never an isolated issue or a simple foreign policy challenge. It was, and remains, a matter of personal grievance.Ukraine’s defense became a major rallying point of Joe Biden’s Washington only hours after the Russian Federation launched its invasion of the country in February 2022.Trump’s supporters emerged with equal speed in open opposition and unthinking skepticism about any support for Kyiv. When Zelensky traveled to the White House shortly after Trump was sworn in for his second term, the personal grievance stemming from that 2019 phone call returned to the forefront. At a now-infamous Oval Office meeting, Vice President JD Vance scolded Zelensky and demanded that he publicly kowtow to Trump, who then warned Zelensky that unless he showed the White House the proper respect, he was playing with the possibility of a Third World War. MAGA RealpolitikSadly, the current situation paints an even more troubling picture of how things stand between Donald Trump’s transactional approach to foreign relations and Ukraine’s fight for its very existence: a Russian diesel tanker is right now crossing the Atlantic, headed for the US East Coast, under a personal energy deal Trump signed with Putin, much to Kyiv’s dismay and surprise.The Armed Forces of Ukrainian recently lost their vital satellite links when MAGA-aligned tech tycoon Elon Musk’s Starlink service was throttled, crippling the operational capabilities of the drones Kyiv uses to counter Russian aerial attacks. Trump has since admitted that he unsuccessfully pressured the Ukrainian leadership into not striking Russian refineries in the hope that this would bring down high gas and diesel prices. Having failed to force Kyiv into complying with his demands, Trump unilaterally lifted recently passed bipartisan congressional sanctions to allow Russia to export its energy resources to the American market. For Trump, Ukraine was never a simple foreign policy challenge. It was, and remains, a matter of personal grievance. Perhaps the most devastating manifestation of this cold-blooded strategy is the administration’s deliberate moves to block the delivery of Patriot interceptor missiles that NATO allies have already paid to the US government to protect Ukrainian cities. It is a maneuver of extraordinary cruelty: using the defense of human lives to gain leverage in a game of political score settling.The humanitarian consequences of leaving Ukraine’s urban centers unprotected are immediate. They guarantee that Russian ballistic missiles will continue to strike high-rise apartment complexes, destabilize power grids during the coldest winter months, and destroy civilian medical centers.Within the administration, as well as among its Capitol Hill allies. Across the wider MAGA media sphere, there is a profound, chilling indifference to the suffering of Ukrainian civilians. To Trump’s core base and his congressional enablers, Ukrainian civilians are not real people enduring an unprovoked invasion of immense terror, but abstract numbers in a distant war. They are, at best, collateral damage in a broader domestic crusade to burn down the internationalist establishment. In their view, if Ukraine’s people must suffer to force Zelensky into capitulating to the White House’s terms, it is not a tragedy. It is the price of doing business.Bitter arguments over billionsAt the heart of this animosity is a very bitter public argument about money. Trump has repeatedly asserted that American aid to Kyiv was $350 billion (about $1,100 per person for each US taxpayer), whereas Europe gave much less.The fact-checkers have shown that Trump’s figure is completely inflated. Congress has approved $183 billion ($560 per head for each resident) – most of which was spent domestically on restocking the US’s own arsenals and paying its own factories. Europe has, in fact, contributed well over €211 billion ($235 billion).Despite this fact, Trump’s positions still get regurgitated by the MAGA faithful: Ukraine is neither a partner nor an ally, nor is it a defender of Western democracy. Rather, some other man’s corrupt war that is not important to American national security interests. What lies ahead will be a significant confrontation as to whether foreign policy will be judged by the democratic principles that have been the bedrock of American soft power for more than 80 years or by the price of a transaction named by an ethically bereft elected public official.At the mercy of a transactional presidentFor Ukraine, the Starlink episode and Musk’s public admission that he acted on his own in limiting the Ukrainian military’s access to Starlink, Putin’s subsequent praise for the South African-born tech tycoon, and Trump’s one-way energy concessions to the Kremlin have been a stark reminder of just how much of the country’s very existence is at the mercy of private executives and the caprices of a unpredictably transactional American president.The danger, though, is not confined solely to Ukraine. To align with Moscow, to excuse its aggression, and to fracture the transatlantic front would be to invite the catastrophic disintegration of an international order led by the world’s leading democracies.If America – the ultimate guarantor of Western security – turns its back on democracy and acquiesces to the cynical, spheres-of-influence approach demanded by the Kremlin, it is a signal to all dictators that borders can simply be wiped off the map by force. It leaves Europe in pieces, the United States utterly isolated and morally bankrupt, and Putin’s Russia in a position to redraw the world to its advantage.That is not an “America First” victory. It is a step towards a much darker, infinitely more dangerous world. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.