It took far too long to get it done, but Germany and the U.S. have finally seen fit to supply the beleaguered Ukrainians with the top-end tanks they begged for for weeks. The whole tank drama was a spectacle that illustrated disunity within NATO, the inability of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to aptly handle the divisions within his coalition government, and an embarrassing weakness on the part of the U.S.

Scholz, caving to pressure from the left wing of his own Social Democratic Party, resisted pleas from Kyiv to supply them Leopard-2 main battle tanks, desperately needed hardware to help ward off an expected Russian offensive as the invasion enters its second year, and ultimately to push the Russian army back across its borders. And that wasn’t enough – he also forbade any of the European countries which had purchased Leopard 2s (like Poland, which has a fairly existential interest in seeing Russia not prevail) from sending them any of theirs. His stipulation was the U.S. had to send Kyiv M1 Abrams tanks first. An odd request, since the United Kingdom had already shipped a dozen or so of their equally formidable Challenger MBTs, so Germany was already positioning itself as an isolated pacifist anomaly within NATO – but that’s an odd little government they’ve got going on over there.

Anyway, the reaction of President Joe Biden should have been fairly swift, obvious and decisive – call Scholz’s bluff, immediately roll a bunch of M1s onto Eastern Europe bound C-17s, turn to Scholz and say “your turn.” The Biden administration, naturally, dithered for an inexcusable amount of time, finally agreeing this week to send a battalion’s worth of M1s, prompting Scholz to reverse course and send in the Leopards and issue the requisite permits to Poland to do the same, hopefully in time. Of course the U.S. administration, not finished buggering this up, decided instead of loading up a bunch of battle-ready M1s gathered from, say, the several hundred being de-commissioned by the Marine Corps, they would supply them via the tortuous procurement process, delaying actual delivery for months.

Meanwhile, rather than offer a unified, legitimate criticism of the often-disjointed fumbling by the Biden administration in their approach to the Ukraine situation, which is largely owed to a long-standing deficit in coherent foreign policy among the Democratic Party, the Republicans instead are contending with a small, but annoyingly loud, isolationist contingent. It lamentably draws in one or two mainstream, conservative Republicans from time to time, but is led by the GOP’s own populist “squad.”

Colorado U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert is one of them, and she was quoted recently criticizing U.S. support for Ukraine, making arguments very similar to those made by her cohorts on the far-left for more than half-a-century: that spending money on countering a military threat overseas could be better used domestically. Details on what that windfall should be spent on differ considerably, of course, but the “guns-for-butter” argument resonates equally from either pole.

It also illustrates a confusion as to the proper role of a national government, which has been so aggrandized by liberal thought over the past century that its strained reach has become axiomatic even for some Republicans. “An unfortunate effect of the reformist attitude,” Roger Scruton wrote, “is that it turns political activity away from international affairs towards domestic issues, which become exaggerated out of all proportion to their real significance. But it is in international affairs that the reality of government is most clear.”

The isolationism that has historically appealed to a segment of the American right (and more recently to a segment of the American left which could not concede that life under Ho Chi Minh or the Soviet politburo was objectively worse than life here) is a form of diplomatic Ludditism, a beckoning to a past that has been as fully supplanted by the advent of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles as the telegraph has by the cell phone.

Conservatives are right to demand accountability for the costs associated with supporting Ukraine, but must also remember the costs of a Russian victory; not only the very real strategic costs and the threat of further war, war which NATO would be drawn fully into, but also the moral cost, to what William F. Buckley once termed “those ideals to which we profess allegiance every time we meditate on the Declaration of Independence.”

Biden deserves criticism of his confused handling of the Ukraine situation, from a Republican opposition that has first sorted out its own confusions. 

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.