Haley: Funding Ukraine More Bolsters US Security

There's not enough funding for Ukraine in the freshly passed stopgap funding bill; Ukraine is vital to U.S. "national security" interests, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said during an interview on "Fox News Sunday."

Responding to a quote from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who voiced hard-line opposition to funding the Eastern European state, Haley said that funding Ukraine amounts to only a paltry sum of the military budget.

"The reality," Haley said, "is Republicans and Democrats — all of them — have been spending taxpayer dollars in a ridiculous way. They just take a budget from last year, add more to it, and keep going. So the false narrative of 'we can either pay for certain things or Ukraine' is wrong. What Ukraine is, is national security."

"Now, I will put the blame," she continued, "on Joe Biden. ... The president is always supposed to show leadership on why things are funded.

"The fact that this is actually going to prevent war, the fact that this is only ... 3.5% of our national defense budget ... But what is this going to? It's going to weapons; it's going to replenish our stockpile. It's going to make sure Ukraine has what they need. And it's going to make sure that if they win, this is not another win for Russia or China, but it's preventing war so that it doesn't go into Poland and other NATO countries."

Nowhere did the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations describe during her appearance what a "win" looks like.

But regarding a possible "endgame" for the war, Chicago University professor and expert on Russian geopolitics John Mearsheimer leaves open the question of a "win."

Framing the question of a win in terms of geopolitical existential threats from a Russian perspective, Mearsheimer said Russia views NATO's continued eastward expansion since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 — and now Ukraine's role as a de facto NATO member — as an existential threat and not as Russia moving west.

"On the nuclear coercion point," Mearsheimer said, "I know the literature the international relations literature on nuclear coercion. I believe there's not a single example in history since nuclear weapons were invented in 1945 ... of a country succeeding at nuclear coercion.

"And, in fact, it's hardly ever even been tried, because coercion is where you threaten to use nuclear weapons to get someone to change their behavior. What [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing is not nuclear coercion; it's nuclear deterrence, right? When he brandishes the nuclear sword in subtle ways, or his lieutenants do that in subtle ways, they're just trying to deter the West and deter Ukraine from crossing certain red lines. That's not coercion, right? But coercion has become part of the lexicon when we talk about the Russians."

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