Rifts in both parties as Congress weighs aid to Ukraine, Israel

Rep. Jared Golden knows firsthand the toll of war. The Maine Democrat fought as a Marine infantryman in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Now he’s in the midst of a different battle, a political one. Congress is preparing to vote on sending U.S. aid to allies facing America’s three most powerful adversaries: Russia, Iran, and China. 

Like many lawmakers, Representative Golden is getting pressure from constituents on how he should vote. They call his office upset that he’s not doing more to advance aid to Ukraine, which is locked in a stalemate with the Russian military and running out of ammunition. Some of the same people are also angry that he is supporting Israel as it retaliates against an Oct. 7 attack by Iranian proxy Hamas, and the Gaza death toll climbs to nearly 35,000. 

A Senate bill to help both allies, along with Taiwan, passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. But similar efforts have foundered in the House, where the battle lines are drawn not only between parties but also within them. Speaker Mike Johnson has broken the foreign aid package into several parts in a bid to get them through with as little damage to his speakership and the razor-thin Republican majority as possible. The votes are expected Saturday, but it’s unclear whether they will succeed.

Often lost amid the politics is a serious bipartisan policy debate over what are America’s real interests abroad, and what the costs of upholding them – or not – would be.

“War is terrible, and sometimes necessary. So what I think is difficult is watching our politics lose sight of that,” Mr. Golden says. “The political debate here is lacking in real-world experience, and therefore lacks consistency.”

“It’s all gotten way too partisan” – and too wrapped up in presidential campaign politics, adds Mr. Golden, noting a “rapid change” in Democrats’ position on Israel and a Republican about-face on Ukraine. Ten years ago, GOP lawmakers lambasted the Obama administration for a weak response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. 

Though there have always been outliers on the left and right on foreign policy, for decades there was a strong bipartisan core that supported defending U.S. interests and allies abroad with robust aid, including military aid. But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on, and eventually ended – without clear victories and at a cost of thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars – that political support started to erode.

Democratic politics, driven in part by the rapid rise of the racial justice movement in 2020, started gravitating more toward championing downtrodden minorities – including Palestinians. And Republicans, animated by former President Donald Trump’s “America First” populism, have grown wary of intervening abroad.

Israel remains an exception on the right. Meanwhile, persistent concerns on the left that Mr. Trump is sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin have perhaps added to the Democratic enthusiasm for rallying around Ukraine.

Republican divide over Ukraine

GOP Rep. Michael McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says he has to explain the national security interest to colleagues, some of whom were born after the Cold War era. Their war memories are dominated by pointless stalemates in the Middle East more than victory in Europe or decades spent defending that victory against an expansionist Soviet Union. 

“We can stop Putin here by letting Ukraine fight their own war” – with the help of U.S. weapons, says Representative McCaul, whose father fought in the D-Day invasion of 1944 to repel the Nazi forces, something that he says wouldn’t have been necessary if Hitler had been stopped earlier. Aiding Ukraine now would mean “saving a lot of blood and treasure down the road.” 

But other Republicans don’t see a path to victory in Ukraine. They – and their constituents – don’t want to send any more “blank checks” to fund the effort, especially given record U.S. debt and concerns about securing America’s own borders amid a migrant influx.

“I don’t think we ought to be borrowing money we don’t have to send it to Ukraine with no plan and no limit to U.S. involvement,” says Rep. Bob Good, head of the right-wing Freedom Caucus that has been a thorn in the side of Speaker Johnson’s efforts to pass a foreign aid package over the past six months. He professed himself unmoved by a Trump-inspired tweak to make some of the Ukraine aid a loan, expressing doubt it would ever be paid back.

Even GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz, a Ukrainian American congresswoman from Indiana who understands better than most what is at stake, says she has reservations about sending Ukraine aid. She’s frustrated with the Biden administration’s lack of accountability for funds already sent and the inefficacy of his strategy so far, including the slow-walking of aid early on, which she says emboldened Mr. Putin and gave him time to regroup. “You do not deal with Putin ‘as long as it takes,’” she says, quoting the president’s 2022 vow. “You deal with him as fast as you can.” 

Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker, who served under the George W. Bush administration, points out that when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, that GOP administration sprang into action – in concert with its European allies. But unlike Mr. Bush, President Joe Biden has been reticent to use force, calling instead for de-escalation in hopes of preventing wider conflagration between both Israel and Iran, and Ukraine and Russia.

“In my view, the problem with that is it produces the opposite result,” says Mr. Volker. “It basically gives an assurance to the aggressors that nothing is going to happen to them, so they keep going.” 

Democratic shift on Israel

On Israel, the GOP has been in lockstep on aid, but Democrats have yo-yoed. Many rallied around it after the Oct. 7 attack, as well as after last weekend’s barrage of missiles and drones from Iran – the first direct Iranian attack on Israeli soil. But overall, wariness about U.S. support for Israel has grown amid a cloud of concerns. The Gaza death toll has mounted. The International Court of Justice has called on Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza and to enable urgently needed humanitarian assistance. And Mr. Biden has come under pressure from the progressive left, young voters, and Arab Americans in Michigan – a key swing state.

Hadar Susskind, president of Peace Now, says when he and his organization called three years ago for conditioning aid to Israel, not a single member of Congress publicly supported that position. Now, the idea has entered the mainstream.

“This isn’t ‘the Squad’ or a handful of far-left members,” he says, citing recent supportive statements by House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “We’re talking about the establishment of the establishment Democrats saying what we’ve been saying for a long time – U.S. aid to Israel is important, but it needs to align with American values.”

Majority Leader Schumer gave a bracing speech last month that was widely interpreted as not only warning Israel but also addressing progressives’ frustration with Mr. Biden in an election year. He acknowledged the difficulty of fighting a foe that hides behind civilians and is still holding hostage 130 individuals, including some of his New York constituents. But, adding that the United States has an obligation to help its ally toward lasting peace and security, he also called on Israel to address the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza and lay the groundwork for a two-state solution. 

“We should not be forced into a position of unequivocally supporting the actions of an Israeli government that includes bigots who reject the idea of a Palestinian state.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the few Muslim members of Congress, a longtime critic of Israel, and one of the four progressive women originally dubbed the Squad, says there’s a shift in Congress toward recognizing the humanity of Palestinians but adds that there’s “still a long way” to go for people to see them as being worthy of dignity and safety. 

As for the president, she acknowledges that there’s been a shift in rhetoric. “But I think people want to see action that follows that.”