Will the United States renew its resources for Ukraine's defensive war against Russia? Congress is struggling to find an answer to that question as Republicans still insist on withholding their consent until President Biden agrees to increase security at the U.S.-Mexico border. As political support for Ukraine falters, the White House is nervous – and rightly so.
To convince lawmakers of the need to arm Ukraine, President Biden last year emphasized the economic benefits for communities across the United States. The intuition behind this strategy was that many voters might mistakenly assume that “helping Ukraine” means transferring huge sums of money to bank accounts in Kyiv.
In fact, much of American military aid comes in the form of in-kind contributions, such as weapons and ammunition from existing US stockpiles. If Congress votes to fund more aid to Ukraine, the lion's share of those funds will go to domestic companies tasked with replenishing the Pentagon's own weapons stockpiles.
Against this background, aid to Ukraine appears much more attractive to people who pursue a narrow definition of the national interest. Who could object to US-based companies and their employees receiving billions of dollars?
But while there are many good reasons for pouring U.S. resources into Ukraine's war effort, increasing the economic prosperity of ordinary Americans is one of the weakest reasons.
Most obviously, it is completely misleading to describe the money spent on arming Ukraine – at least $68 billion so far – as a windfall. Listening to President Biden, you might think that military spending was free money available to U.S. manufacturers if only Congress would get out of the way.
In reality, of course, this is Americans' own tax dollars – money taken out of ordinary people's pockets, not money given to them. It is always true that Congress can appropriate funds for wealth redistribution. Aid to Ukraine is nothing special in this regard.
However, one peculiarity of military spending is how unequally defense spending is distributed. This is because defense sector companies are not evenly distributed across the United States. They focus on specific areas – for example, Tarrant County in Texas, Fairfax County in Virginia and El Paso County in Colorado.
Military spending only ever flows to those parts of the country where weapons manufacturers, aerospace companies, and the like are located—a disjointed region of the United States that some scholars have dubbed the “Gunbelt” because of its economic dependence on militarism.
In contrast, the Pentagon's liberalism rarely has a direct impact on the local economy, which is focused on other industries. In short, increasing military spending simply means that communities already accustomed to receiving large amounts of defense funding will receive even more than usual.
For this reason, as the Defense Department's own maps show, over a dozen states have not received a major influx of funds due to aid to Ukraine.
So it is true that aid to Ukraine could strengthen the economic situation of selected parts of the country. But why should taxpayers across America cheer the flow of federal money to just a few cities? This question is not asked nearly enough.
To be clear, states that are part of America's gun belt already receive tens of billions of dollars in federal spending each year. There is nothing unusual about this; It is a banal economic consequence of the United States' large defense budget. This money has to be spent somewhere.
But giving billions more to these communities is neither progressive nor community-minded. In fact, it is borderline repulsive to expect popular gratitude in return for a completely unfair redistribution of wealth.
A possible response to this argument is that military spending should not be equitable, so no one should be outraged when money spent to support Ukraine benefits some Americans more than others. After all, the Pentagon distributes cash to fund strong national defense, not to increase the wealth of specific geographic locations or populations.
But that is precisely the point: military spending is not a social program and should not be justified as such. If there are Americans who benefit economically from U.S. foreign and defense policies such as support for Ukraine—and of course there are—then this should be recognized as an accidental outcome, not a goal that maximizes as a result of skillful and deliberate public policy becomes .
For anyone interested in improving the well-being of ordinary Americans, military spending should not be the tool of choice. Defense spending is a form of wealth redistribution, but only in a regressive sense – hardly something to celebrate.
President Biden has made no secret of his belief that the war in Ukraine affects core U.S. national interests. He should continue to make this case convincingly. Arguments that draw attention to the economic impact of aid to Ukraine at the local level are not among his strengths.
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