As tensions mount in Eastern Europe amid questions about whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will order an invasion of Ukraine, a new poll has found that Americans don’t have much of an appetite to go to war to defend the former Soviet Republic, with a vast majority saying U.S. leaders should focus their attention on domestic issues.
According to a survey conducted by YouGov in conjunction with the Charles Koch Institute that was released on Friday, a plurality of Americans (48 percent) said they either strongly or somewhat oppose “going to war with Russia to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity” should Russia invade. Just 27 percent favored such a move while 24 percent said they didn’t know.
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Meanwhile, 73 percent agreed that the United States “should prioritize domestic issues over foreign policy issues,” and just 7 percent agreed that foreign policy should take precedence.
The poll also found little enthusiasm for increasing the U.S. military presence around the world, with 40 percent saying the United States should be less engaged, while 32 percent said it should remain about the same.
Ben Armbruster is the Managing Editor of Responsible Statecraft. He has more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of politics, foreign policy, and media. Ben previously held senior editorial and management positions at Media Matters, ThinkProgress, ReThink Media, and Win Without War.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
Top photo credit: U.S. Marines with 7th Engineer Support Battalion, Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force 7, place concertina wire at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in California on Nov. 11, 2018. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Rubin J. Tan)
“Guys and gals of my generation have spent decades in foreign countries guarding other people's borders. It's about time we secure our own,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said during his first trip to the southern border earlier this month. “This needs to be and will be a focus of this department,” he reiterated at a Pentagon town hall days later.
Most servicemembers deploying to the southern border today never fought in the post-9/11 wars, but Hegseth is right that their commanders and civilian bosses have plenty of experience to draw on from two decades spent “securing” and “stabilizing” Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, while it’s still early days, so far, the Pentagon doesn’t seem to be making use of those hard-won lessons. Instead, Department of Defense (DoD) leaders appear to be repeating the mistakes of their predecessors with open-ended missions attached to unclear objectives and more attention to appearance and signaling than results. Active-duty forces may have a role to play in President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, but those in charge can do much more to set this mission up for success while minimizing impacts on an already overstretched military force and budget.
The use of active-duty forces on the southern border is not new to the second Trump administration. He also turned to active-duty units during his first term, sending 1,000 troops to the border in 2018 and 3,000 in 2019. President Joe Biden, too, relied on active-duty forces to support border operations throughout his presidency, though in smaller numbers. This time, however, Trump may be planning to push active-duty presence at the border to more than 7,000 personnel according to some reports.
There are two reasons why Trump might use active-duty soldiers and marines to achieve his border security campaign promises. First, the active-duty military’s size and ability to mobilize rapidly makes it an easy and appealing option, allowing for a quick win. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is understaffed and recruiting more personnel will take time and money.
National guard forces are another alternative. Indeed, many national guard units are already working along the southern border. But mobilizing national guard personnel takes longer than moving active-duty forces. Second and more importantly, Trump may relish the appearance and signaling benefits that come with the use of heavily armed and elite military personnel at the U.S.-Mexico border, seeing it as a marker of U.S. strength that can deter migrants and make neighbors take U.S. warnings seriously.
Even if there are reasons to use active-duty military forces to support border security, however, the Pentagon’s approach so far is short-sighted. First, Secretary Hegseth has assigned newly deployed military forces the unrealistic goal of achieving “100% operational control” of the U.S. border. This objective — which would effectively require sealing all 2,000 miles to eliminate unauthorized entries — is not an outcome that is within reach for a few thousand military forces without supporting political legislation and legal regimes.
This is especially true if they are restricted to surveilling and monitoring checkpoints and building barriers, like today’s active-duty soldiers. As a result, new arrivals at the southern border face a daunting mission without clear benchmarks or a fixed endpoint, conditions likely to quickly drain morale.
Second, as it plans and executes its border deployments, the Pentagon has largely ignored opportunity costs, prioritizing near-term speed over sustainability and the long-term health of the force. In its rush to respond quickly, the DoD has chosen to deploy personnel from some of the most experienced and highest readiness elite units in the Army. Specifically, five hundred soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division and 1,500 from 18th Airborne Corps have already been sent to the border and the 82nd Airborne Division could be tapped as well.
These units serve special functions within the active-duty force and already have high operational tempo. The 18th Airborne Corps, for instance, is known as “America’s contingency corps” because it is kept ready to respond on short notice to crises that threaten U.S. interests around the globe. For its part, since 2002, the 10th Mountain Division has been deployed more than any other active-duty Army unit — notably two of its brigade combat teams are currently overseas or returning from deployment, one in Europe and the other in the Middle East.
Sending these units to conduct what amounts to law enforcement operations on the U.S.-Mexico border adds burdens to their already heavy load, leaves them immediately unavailable for crises overseas, and interferes with their training, reducing their preparation over the long-term.
Critics of an historically interventionist U.S. military may welcome anything that keeps Washington from sending these servicemembers to contingencies overseas. But the relatively small deployments to the border won’t force the Pentagon to cut back on foreign activities, merely slow down and complicate U.S. responses, assuming unnecessary risk in today’s unpredictable threat environment.
Finally, as it militarizes immigration enforcement at the southern border and beyond, the Trump administration has prioritized the performative over the effective at a high cost to taxpayers. Active-duty military personnel may look formidable as they man border checkpoints or conduct aerial surveillance, but it is not clear that their unique skills and competencies are needed, especially as unauthorized crossings fall sharply. If anything, they are less well-prepared for these tasks than CBP personnel.
Similarly, the use of expensive military hardware — aircraft and armored combat vehicles for instance—may intimidate unarmed migrants, but are largely unnecessary for border security operations, and could be replaced by much cheaper, civilian alternatives or even inexpensive drones and remote sensors.
The same is true of employing military aircraft for deportation flights. Using a C-17 for deportation can cost as much as five times more per migrant as a first-class ticket on a commercial jet — quite an expensive signal of resolve.
Without changes to the mission’s goals, tactics, and execution, the use of active-duty forces at the southern border may harm U.S. national security more than help. First, active-duty forces assigned to the border should have narrow and specific objectives with realistic benchmarks — numbers of unauthorized border crossings per week or miles of border surveilled and secured.
Their deployment should be time-limited and viewed as a stop-gap measure, a bridge until national guard forces can be brought in or, even better, more CBP personnel hired. Not only are national guard and CBP personnel better suited to a border security mission, but they also have additional legal authorities that allow them to contribute more directly to Trump’s immigration mission.
Second, the Pentagon should sacrifice some deployment speed to reduce the use of high-readiness units and frequent deployers relying instead on less critical units. This will increase the timeline to get the needed active-duty forces in place, but it will be worth the wait if it means protecting scarce military assets from overuse.
Finally, the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security should work together to prioritize cost-effectiveness even where this means replacing the showiest elements of the border campaign so far with cheaper alternatives and leveraging remote and autonomous technology when possible. With Elon Musk pushing to cut costs across the government, it only makes sense that wasteful spending should be on the chopping block at the border as well.
Hegseth has described his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan as an advantage in his new job. On the southern border, he has a chance to put what he learned to use.
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Top image credit: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy meet at Trump Tower in New York City, U.S., September 27, 2024. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo
Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelensky has agreed to hand over to the U.S. $500 billion worth of his country’s rare earth minerals. On the back of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s comments ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine, this looks like a dreadful deal on the surface. But it may be the best one available.
During his visit to Kyiv on February 12, Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent spoke to the press, beside Zelensky, about a proposed agreement on U.S. access to rare earths. It was a day, in fact, of geopolitical earthquakes in Europe. At a NATO Ukraine Contact Group meeting in Brussels, Hegseth was bluntly ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine or a return to its pre-2014 borders. The latter may be an elegant form of words suggesting scope to negotiate on border changes since 2022.
But the announcement on rare earths and Secretary Hegseth’s comments are part of a bigger jigsaw of geopolitical choreography that President Trump appears to be orchestrating right now. Secretary Bessent said during his presser that rare earths were part of a “larger peace deal that Trump has in mind.”
What might Ukraine gain from giving away its rare earth minerals? Beyond unspecified military support including weapons supplies, the obvious answer is investment in post-war reconstruction. A year ago, the United Nations had assessed the cost of war damages in Ukraine to have been almost — you guessed it — $500 billion. That figure will have risen after another year of destructive war.
Following President Trump’s announcement about turning Gaza into a strip of prime real estate, it is hard to imagine that he does not see huge scope for U.S. contractors to benefit from rebuilding Ukraine. That leaves the separate question of who will pay.
Europe has so far only committed to fund a modest percentage of the reconstruction cost. This revives the question of Russia’s frozen assets. If President Trump is going to take a hard line on forcing Ukraine to accept the borders as they stand when the cannon fire stops, what concession will he drive out of Russia?
As I have argued before, the obvious solution is for Russia to give up its $300 billion in frozen assets in the real estate deal of the century. This would be on the basis that the U.S. would not support Ukrainian efforts to retake occupied territory by force, rendering it a frozen conflict along the lines of Cyprus. But it would give Ukraine the Russian money it has long sought, allowing Presidents Zelensky and Putin both to declare some victory from the deal.
In the geopolitical waltz that is happening right now, Secretary Hegseth’s statements have merely focused attention on a reality that many Western leaders have privately recognized but refused to confront for too long.
American politicians from across the divide have been careful to point out from the beginning the desire to prevent any direct American military involvement in Ukraine. Even under the previous Biden administration, America was at best lukewarm on Ukraine’s NATO aspiration, while successive European leaders insisted on its irreversibility. All progress on peace talks in Ukraine have been held hostage by the NATO issue.
With that now in the parking lot, it’s time to focus on the practicalities of ending the war in terms that strengthen Ukraine for the future.
The issue of Ukrainian rare earths is not new, having bubbled to the surface by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Rare earths appear to be a core strategic priority for President Trump, seen also in the context of his statements on Greenland and Canada, both countries rich in mineral resources.
At over $11 trillion, the value of Ukraine’s minerals is significant and $500 billion appears a relatively small percentage of the whole. But it is in fact a huge sum for a small, hugely indebted country like Ukraine. To put that number into context, it equates to more than two and a half times the size of Ukraine’s economy, and almost three times the value of American military and financial aid to Ukraine since the war started.
Ukraine exported a meagre $4.2 billion in metals in 2023, so it would take almost 120 years to pay back America, losing a vital source of export revenue in the process, which it cannot afford. So this deal is more likely about offering concessions to large U.S. companies to exploit certain fields over the longer term. But around one half of Ukraine’s minerals have also been swallowed up by Russia’s armed forces since 2014, and as they have ground westward over the past year.
Deep into the final act of this tragedy, Ukraine is now scrambling to hold on to every last mine that it can and, indeed, retake key mines back from Russia. In recent days, the Ukrainian army has launched a fierce counter-attack around Pishchane in Donetsk, the site of its most important mine for coking coal, vital for its ailing steel industry. The clock is ticking down on Russian efforts to reach the settlement of Shevchenko, where around one-third of Ukraine’s so-far untapped lithium is located. Where will key pockets of Ukrainian rare earths sit before a ceasefire line is finally, and mercifully, drawn?
In the big and ugly scheme of things, we are now at the stage of fighting over dollars and cents. Inevitably, President Zelensky is being nudged towards making a bad deal on terms less favourable than those available to him in late March 2022 at a huge cost to his country’s wealth. I suspect that history will record February 12, 2025 as being the beginning of the end of this act in his stoic political career.
For President Trump, however, if a ceasefire does indeed break out in the coming weeks, he may simultaneously have brokered peace and secured valuable assets for the United States. European leaders will not, I suspect, be cheering from the rafters.
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Top photo credit: Ursula von der Leyen speaks to the Munich Security Conference, 2/15/25 (MSC/Lennart Preiss)
MUNICH, GERMANY — Last year, the Munich Security Conference was dominated by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. This time around, the Gaza War has remained a notable absence in Munich, at least on the confab’s main stage.
This was confirmed on Sunday, the last day of the conference, which was light on headlines amid the snowy Munich outside. The big news story Sunday didn't even originate from the conference, but in reports suggesting U.S. and Russian officials will meet in Saudi Arabia next week for talks to end the Ukraine War without the participation of Ukraine or other European countries.
There was no mention of the Gaza War, nor the broader situation in the Middle East, in the speeches by Vice-President J.D. Vance, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, or (less surprisingly) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Yet one year ago, the conference was convened against the backdrop of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement that Israeli troops would march into Rafah in search of “total victory.” At that time, at least 28,985 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, when 1,200 Israelis were killed and over 250 hostages were taken during a Hamas attack against Israel.
In the 2024 Munich Security Conference, then-EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell used his speech on the main stage to note that peace in the Middle East required “a prospect for the Palestinian people” and warned that Russia could exploit double standards’ accusations against Europe for its behavior vis-a-vis Ukraine and Gaza. One year afterwards, the official figure for casualties among the Gazan population stands at 46,707 (the real death toll is probably higher).
Borrell’s successor Kaja Kallas did not have a slot of her own for a speech at the conference. It was von der Leyen, contrary to last year, who provided on Friday an address to the audience for the European Union. Kallas, more aligned with von der Leyen than Borrell, has been far less outspoken about Gaza, focusing most of her attention on Ukraine. Her key message ahead of the Munich meeting was that the U.S. strategy towards Ukraine is one of “appeasement.” Once in Bavaria, she drew on the shopworn analogy to the 1938 Munich agreement to establish parallels between the Czech Republic back then and Ukraine nowadays. She said that “it is for us to support them [Ukraine] so that there would not be any World War.”
Meanwhile, a fragile ceasefire holds in Gaza, with three Israeli hostages exchanged for 369 Palestinian prisoners on Saturday. Still, it remains unclear whether the current pause in fighting will continue in the near future.
As Washington resumes the delivery of heavy MK-84 bombs to the Israeli army, the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Netanyahu today. Referring to the U.S., Netanyahu stated that "we have a common strategy" but "we can't always share the details of this strategy with the public, including when the gates of hell will be opened, as they surely will if all our hostages are not released until the last one of them."
Rubio was expected to advocate for President Donald Trump’s proposal to take control of the Gaza Strip and relocate its more than two million residents — in what would represent a further step in Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign.
Although Trump’s exact intentions for Gaza are somewhat uncertain, Netanyahu has previously signaled approval for the president’s ideas. Prior to Rubio’s meeting with Netanyahu, the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he hoped to see the relocation of the Palestinian population out of Gaza starting in the coming weeks.
In an event reserved to the press on Friday at the Munich Security Conference, relatives of the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza explained they want the ceasefire to move to phase two. According to the plan, this second phase should see the release of the remaining hostages and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
Also on Friday, in a conversation during the conference, the Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar said that those who supported Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005 should be modest enough not to criticize Trump’s recent ideas about the future of Gaza, which he described as “new” and “original.” He added that “it is time to think differently from all the things that failed in the past.”
On Saturday, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Commissioner-General of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini expressed his relief about the ceasefire continuing to hold in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages that day. Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency dedicated to supporting Palestinian refugees, denounced Israel’s anti-UNRWA campaign which has included billboards and commercial ads seeking to de-legitimize the agency’s work.
Lazzarini, speaking only meters away from where U.S. Senator and UNRWA opponent Lindsey Graham was standing after participating in a panel on NATO and the U.S., added that the agency is “a casualty of this war.” In January 2025, two laws approved by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, entered into force banning UNRWA from operating in Israeli-occupied territories and prohibiting Israeli authorities from contacting UNRWA. Lazzarini noted the measures impact UNRWA’s work but do not prevent its activities.
The Munich Security Conference leaves European officials asking themselves what future relations with the U.S. will actually look like. In few countries are these doubts so obvious as in the host of the conference, Germany, only one week before national elections on February 23 that are likely to see Chancellor Olaf Scholz replaced by the centre-right contender Friedrich Merz.
In remarks likely welcomed by the demonstrators at the Odeonsplatz in central Munich demanding that Germany deliver Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, Merz announced in a panel discussion that he would support providing these weapons to Ukraine in consultation with Germany’s European partners. According to a recent poll, 60% of Germans oppose delivering Taurus and this had been Scholz’s position on the matter.
In a comment that served as a recap of the Munich Security Conference, the conservative German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungnoted that U.S. officials brought “devastating news for Germany and Europe this week.”
In the wake of that, Germany “seemed paralyzed.” This year’s conference will have something akin to an epilogue tomorrow, when French President Emmanuel Macron convenes the main European leaders in Paris in what the BBC describes as “an emergency summit on the war in Ukraine.”