| 2022 | 2025 | |
| GDP | $161 billion | $189 billion |
| Growth rate | -29.7% | 2.5% |
| Inflation | 20.2% | 9.2% |
| Unemployment | 24.5% | 12.7% |
* International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook database October 2024
WHAT THEY MEAN:
As President Zelenskyy returns to Kyiv, some thoughts on Russia’s war, the Ukrainian cause, the White House’s revival of isolationism and appeasement, and the dangers it poses for America and America’s friends:
Three years ago this week, we noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was one of very few attempts since World War II — arguably only the second, together with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 — by one UN member to attack another and attempt to wipe it off the map. From this point of departure, we made three points about the event and the appropriate American and Allied response to it. Here they are, shortened a bit for space:
(1) The post-World War II ban on wars of conquest is the foundation of international order, whether one’s point of reference is international law and the UN Charter, or the logic of peace and security. Respect for it is essential to international achievement in any field, from peaceful settlement of disputes among countries, to scientific and medical progress, environmental protection, economic policy, and international security.
(2) Russia’s violation of this ban in the attack on Ukraine was then, and remains now, especially dangerous as the action not of the rogue dictator of an isolated minor power, but of a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Should it succeed, we can expect more such events and a much more dangerous world. Should it fail, conversely, the taboo on wars of conquest will be stronger and future imitators more effectively deterred.
(3) The Biden administration and allies from Australia, Korea, and Japan to Canada, the EU, and the UK were right to respond with economic and military aid for Ukraine, and extensive sanctions on Russia. Hindsight from 2025 can dispute some of their specific choices, especially on weapons provision. But whether from the moral or the national-interest perspective, their decision to stand with Ukraine was correct.
It remains so now. Ukraine has used its support well. Its army defeated Russia’s initial attack on Kyiv in 2022 and holds the line in the east. Its very modest navy — mainly a collection of small boats armed with ingenious home-built naval drones — defeated Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in 2023, sinking a third of its capital ships and forcing the rest to shelter in port ever since. And on the home front, as the IMF data above show, Ukraine’s economy has grown by about 20% since the low of 2022, with unemployment and inflation both cut by half; its start-up tech community has created ex nihilo an internationally competitive high-tech defense industry; and its Black Sea victory has reconnected Ukraine’s agricultural heartland to customers in Europe and the United States. More basically, Ukraine’s public is not about to buckle, its government is stable, and its defense is a just cause. Americans have no reason to reassess our commitment.
The Trump administration, to our great dismay, has taken a different approach, vividly displayed in Friday’s White House meeting. In the past month it has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion, opened direct talks with Russia without the presence of Ukrainians or European allies, and now has made an open attempt — including stopping military aid — to coerce Ukraine itself. This is full of risk — above all for Ukrainians, next for U.S. allies such as the Baltic states and Poland, and finally for Americans too.
The administration’s recycling of the term “America First” for its approach is evocative and instructive. The first group to use this name, the “America First Committee,” was an organization created in September 1940 – that is, during the Battle of Britain — with a specific goal: to prevent Franklin Roosevelt from aiding the U.K. with ships, planes, industrial supplies, and food through the “Lend-Lease” program. Its roughly 800,000 members varied — some were sincere pacifists, others convinced isolationists and worried college students, and some admired dictators as “strong” and “decisive” personalities and considered fascism the energetic “wave of the future.” All of them were wrong, and some of them were bad. Their failure in 1940 was good for the world and America alike.
Eight decades later, Friday’s White House meeting – as well as the administration’s extraordinary decision to oppose the UN’s February resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of its neighbor – recall the ugliest part of this earlier America First movement. The February meeting by the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia — likely about Ukrainian land among other things and, we repeat, without Ukrainians present — echoes the naivete of the Committee’s pacifist/isolationist members: won’t a few concessions appease an aggressive power? Could it hurt to try? The obvious point of reference is the 1938 Munich Agreement, where the leaders of the two big European democracies — the U.K.’s Chamberlain and France’s Daladier — conceded Czech land to an aggressor in the hope of avoiding conflict. Here’s the classic in-the-moment verdict from an opposition MP:
“[Our people] should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’
“And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
Churchill was speaking of a fait accompli. By contrast, Mr. Trump’s venture has so far not succeeded. Americans of both parties who have a greater sense of realism, who appreciate the danger of appeasement and isolationism, and who are more willing to be guided by right and wrong, may be able to prevent a second such outcome. They need to try.
PPI on Ukraine:
Tamar Jacoby leads PPI’s Kyiv-based New Ukraine Project.
… and recent pieces on Friday’s White House meeting and the February UN vote as an warning of the possible end of U.S. global leadership.
PPI President Will Marshall (July 2024) on Ukraine and NATO.
Ben Ritz on the modest budget impact of aid to Ukraine, and the very high cost failure might bring.
And Ed Gresser on economic trends and the impact of Ukraine’s Black Sea naval victory, with a point of departure in Ukraine’s large society of beekeepers and their 11-tons-of-honey-a-day American market.
Primary sources:
The UN Charter. Core sentence: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
President Zelenskyy’s Victory Plan, October 2024.
Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya at the UN Security Council, February 2022.
The Ukrainian Embassy has updates on home events and U.S.-Ukraine relations.
The State Department’s release on Rubio goals for Russia talks.
… Rubio/Waltz do their best to explain in Riyadh.
And a look back:
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library remembers Lend-Lease.
Historian Susan Dunn on Roosevelt, Willkie, Lindbergh, the America First Committee, and the 1940 presidential election.
Churchill on the Munich Agreement, 1938.
And from an earlier generation, British historian A. L. Rowse recalls the 1930s in Appeasement: A Study in Political Decline. Two apposite quotes:
“The fundamental reason for the Second World War was the withdrawal of the United States out of the world-system: that, more than anything else, allowed the aggressors to get away with things. Not all the mistakes this country [i.e. the UK] was responsible for in the 1920s and 1930s equaled the one enormous and irreparable error the United States made in contracting out of responsibility.”
“Whatever concessions were justifiable to Weimar Germany, no concessions should ever be made to Hitler. That this was the right line to adhere to all the evidence now proves: hold the ring around Hitler’s Germany, and the break will come inside.”
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
