When I was reporting from Ukraine this fall, I learned to sleep through the air raid sirens. The local authorities sounded them every time any kind of munition was headed remotely in our direction, even though most often the Russian drones and missiles veered off to targets elsewhere before impact.
When Russian forces eventually did massively bomb Lviv, the sound that woke me in the early morning hours was not what I expected. It was nearby machine gun fire.
Groggily, I rubbed my eyes, and wondered if I was still dreaming. We were a long way from the front. Could the Russian army have pushed through hundreds of kilometers overnight? Lviv was well within range for bombardment from the air, but in my exhausted state I couldn’t puzzle out what there would have been to shoot at with machine guns during an air attack.
Shorty after the automatic weapons rattled to life, periodic explosions started sounding in every direction. Later, my cousin Evan would explain to me how Ukrainian forces had figured out a number of ways to more inexpensively dispatch a cheap Iranian-designed Shahed drone than to hit it with a multimillion-dollar Patriot missile. That explained the gunfire.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine, almost all of the so-called experts predicted the much-smaller country would fall within days. More than four years later, Ukraine is still holding its own. The Ukrainians proved far more resourceful than almost anyone gave them credit for.
Ukraine has received a great deal of financial and material assistance from the United States and other allies. This is not a giveaway, but a tremendous investment that has already paid dividends for America. This investment will continue to pay off handsomely well into the future.
To their great credit, while still facing their own dire threats, Ukrainians have offered to share the technology they have developed and the talent they have curated over nearly half a decade of war to help their friends abroad. Ukraine’s military has already sent teams of experts armed with the latest in inexpensive defensive technology to assist Gulf nations in protecting themselves from Iran’s clouds of Shahed drones.
“We are ready to help those who help us,” said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky.
Yet, because the United States of America is run by a 79-year-old toddler, the country that needlessly started this war in Iran has rejected Zelensky’s attempt to help the U.S. defend its troops more easily and efficiently. Going back on his promise of just a week prior to take help in Iran from “any country” willing to provide it, President Donald Trump most recently said the “last person we need help from is Zelensky.” The American president made these comments as part of an unhinged rant about how he still wishes to hand over large swathes of Ukraine to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
The United States military is spending, at a minimum, a billion dollars a day on this war in Iran. That does not account for the knock-on effects of the war on the global economy. In some instances, the financial bloodletting includes igniting a U.S. Patriot missile that can cost the U.S. Army as much as $4 million, or a THAAD interceptor that costs more like $15.5 million, to destroy a Shahed drone produced by Iran for as little as $20,000.
Meanwhile, the national debt sits at a record-high $39 trillion. With Trump’s policy portfolio undeniably set to keep the U.S. budget deficit growing indefinitely, it appears our national leadership has no interest in addressing America’s spending decadence anytime soon.
Our president is wasting billions he doesn’t have to fight a war he didn’t have to fight. Rejecting help now from a proven friend to not only rein in costs but to better protect American lives is compounding recklessness with insanity.
Ukraine has proven itself a true friend to the United States. For Trump to sneer at its generous offer of needed military assistance only demonstrates his inability to meaningfully engage in a genuine friendship. It is a tragedy that the American taxpayer will continue to lose billions, and that the American military will continue to sacrifice lives, to pay for Trump’s petulance.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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