OPINION:
The great Jonathan Martin recently wrote a story that lays bare all the pathologies of the Republican Party and the chasm that exists between its “leaders” and the voters.
Ostensibly, the article is about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in twilight, and his quest to send more cash, an endless amount of cash, to Ukraine before wrapping up his Senate career. In reality, however, the article is about the distance between what representatives want and what voters want.
Perhaps the most illuminating quote came from Mr. McConnell, explaining the need to bring freshman Republican senators to hear directly from Europeans: “These were people who just faced the voters, heard plenty of arguments to the contrary [with respect to shipping cash to Ukraine] and needed to hear it from someone else other than just the people who sent them here.”
In other words, the Kentucky Republican wanted to make sure that senators heard the arguments for why we need to perpetuate European dependency on American taxpayers, indefinitely apparently, from Europeans themselves. American voters can be, you know, so parochial.
For those keeping score, those parochial Americans, whose opinions Mr. McConnell felt a need to counterbalance, have sent more money and resources to Ukraine than all of the nations of Europe combined.
No other action quite so neatly captures the dismissiveness of the political elites to average Americans as does sending the United States to Ukraine one dollar at a time.
The middle class has spent the last three years, or the last three decades for that matter, losing ground in all areas of their lives that matter — their kids’ education, their personal economy, their safety, housing and energy prices, the deterioration of their families, neighborhoods, hometowns, bridges, highways, you name it.
In response, the political class gives us lectures on how we’re not spending enough on defense or Ukraine. Then they propose sending $25 billion more to Ukraine.
How much is enough? When will we know that we have given enough?
At what point will the gyrations of the Europeans — which have been going on for 1,500 years and will go on long after this latest kerfuffle is resolved and which George Washington himself warned us about — cease to cause certain Americans to dive headfirst into the nonsense?
The last two American presidencies have been consumed by relationships with a tiny, breakaway province of the now-defunct Soviet Union for no apparent reason.
Americans are well within their rights to ask why their leaders of both parties seem to care more about 40 million Ukrainians than 330 million Americans.
To those of a certain age, the world will always be about the long war between the United States and Russia. But we won that war. It is time to move on and recognize that the next thing we need to win is our looming conflict with a much more fearsome and difficult China.
The Europeans have lived under the umbrella of American military protection for almost 80 years. That’s long enough. It is time for them to move out of the house and start paying rent.
What American voters see when they look at the Europeans are wealthy children who seem unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives, their own economy (the war in Ukraine has exposed the weakness of their approach to energy), and their own defense (only Poland and Britain spend the NATO-required 2% of their gross domestic product on national security).
How can anyone justify the U.S. subsidizing the Europeans?
They can’t, so they don’t try. Instead, we are subject to endless harangues by aging elites about how the Russians are the real threat to the United States and the world order.
That’s equal parts sad and comical. The Russians can’t even bring the smaller and poorer Ukrainians to heel, yet somehow, we are supposed to imagine that they can project enough force to threaten world peace.
At the same time, there has been bipartisan failure to take any meaningful action against the Chinese, who are busy building nuclear weapons and rockets to deliver them to places like Des Moines, Iowa, and Chicago in numbers that dwarf our nuclear forces. The same Congress that wants to send more cash to Ukraine can’t even ban TikTok.
We are led by people who confuse nostalgia with strategic thought and who have less concern for Americans than they should. At some point in the not-too-distant future, that is going to be a problem.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House. He can be reached at mike@mwrstrat.com.
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