Does MAGA Want Russia to Win the War Against Ukraine?

Since the beginning of the Ukraine War, there has been a curious, pro-Putin undertow in Western right-wing commentary. Leftist and progressive criticism of Western involvement in the war was expected. The left has long suspected NATO to be a tool of American ‘empire,’ and rejected the liberal international order as exploitative neoliberalism. Mixed leftist feelings about Russia as an opponent of US-led structures date back to the Cold War.

But conservative sympathy for Russia and its President Vladimir Putin is something new. The Soviet Union and its Russian successor have long been a major challenge to US power in Europe, and Western conservative parties have long opposed it. NATO, famously, was to keep the Russians out and the Americans in (Europe). As recently as 2012, US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney claimed that Russia was America’s biggest geopolitical opponent.

MAGA’s Russian Sympathies

But since Donald Trump’s arrival on the American political scene, the Western hard right – particularly Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement – has pivoted sharply in Russia’s direction.

This is most evident in the Ukraine war where MAGA’s strategic commentary regularly shift its premises but always ends up recommending the same policy action: American abandonment of Ukraine. This strongly suggests motivated reasoning – that MAGA pundits are trying to find any defensible, strategic reason to advance their real goal: a Russian victory. 

MAGA has suggested five broad strategic rationales, all of which are hotly debatable:

The US Is Overstretched in Ukraine

Trump’s point man for the war recently suggested this. But this inverts our typical understanding of a quagmire or ‘forever war.’ Russia is the one overstretched in Ukraine. It is fighting; the US is not.

The paradigmatic case of US overstretch is the Vietnam war: a small war which exploded into a big one (for the US); a tenacious foe (Vietnam) who refused to give up; outside support (from the Soviet Union and China) for that foe which protracted the conflict; spiraling costs for low stakes; bigger geopolitical interests in jeopardy for an unwinnable quagmire.

If we apply this model to the Ukraine War, Russia is the US; Ukraine is Vietnam; and the West is the USSR and China – providing support to help Ukraine at low cost without direct involvement. The US is not overstretched.

America is Depleting Its Military

 Vice President JD Vance has often made this argument. And there is some truth here. It is now widely accepted that Western defense industrial bases are too small and too slow to rev up when demand spikes. Similarly, Western stockpiles of ammunition, especially artillery shells, are too low.

But this is not a hard constraint for very wealthy societies like the West. The US, Germany, France, and Britain have a combined GDP approaching 50 trillion dollars. The money is there to ramp up defense spending, and three years of war has been more than enough time to have made the decision to massively expend defense supply. If the West is ‘depleted’ today, it is because it has politically refused to allocate the resources necessary.

The US cannot Afford to Help Ukraine

This is another common claim: because the US has a large debt and deficit, Ukraine aid is luxury. But US aid to Ukraine has only totaled 100 billion dollars over three years. In that time, the total US GDP has exceeded 80 trillion dollars. US national security spending is approximately one trillion dollars a year. Ukraine aid is a drop in the bucket. And these Trumpian concerns are belied by the President Trump’s desire to cut taxes enormously this year.

The World is Multipolar/America is in Decline

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat often makes this argument. The implication is that ‘realism’ dictates US retrenchment and abandonment of Ukraine. Except that empirically, this claim is inaccurate. The world is bipolar (between the US and China). Russia’s GDP is smaller than Italy’s. Putin’s recklessness does make Russia a great power. And the US is not in decline – or at least it was not until Trump took over. Former US President Joe Biden handed Trump an extraordinarily high performing economy.

World War III is Imminent

President Trump made this argument to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a few weeks ago in their widely-seen public spat in the White House. The implication here is that Russia might use nuclear weapons, or that the war might somehow spin out of control.

While that is always possible, it is, after 37 months of combat, highly unlikely. Russia has very strong incentives not to use nuclear weapons: its partners would abandon it; the West’s response is unknowable; there is no military target in Ukraine worth that much explosive force. 

Similarly, the war has not expanded. Partners are helping both sides, but this is not WWI, where alliances are ‘chain-ganging’ more and more states into a widening conflict. If nukes and chain-gangs were going to expand the war, this likely would have happened already.

President-elect of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2024 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

All of these arguments are at least defensible, but none are ironclad. All can be contested, and most notably, the bad consequences they keep predicting from US involvement have not come true. That MAGA switches from one to another, as needed, strongly suggests a bad-faith argument – that its real goal is what it has always looked like: a Russian victory.

About the Author: Dr. Robert E. Kelly 

Dr. Robert E. Kelly is a professor of political science at Pusan National University. Kelly is also a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor. You can find him on X: @Robert_E_Kelly.