As expected, the Biden administration submitted a $40 billion emergency supplemental request to Congress Thursday that included $25 billion in additional military and other aid to Ukraine.
The military assistance to Ukraine included in the request totaled over $13 billion – $1.5 billion to support U.S. troops in the European theater; and $11.4 billion for weapons procurement, including $4.5 billion to replenish weapons supplied to Ukraine from U.S. stocks and $5 billion for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which can be tapped by Kyiv to buy weapons from U.S. arms makers.
The $13 billion in military aid for Ukraine is a substantial sum by any measure, but the overall supplemental excludes two major items that had been discussed as possible components of the package: military aid for Taiwan and additional money for the Pentagon above the $886 billion in spending for national defense contained in the agreement that was reached to raise the debt ceiling. The Taiwan aid will likely be dealt with separately by the administration.
Meanwhile the issue of adding money for the Pentagon will most likely be debated when Congress considers the supplemental. Hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) have pledged to use the supplemental as an opportunity to add billions — or possibly even tens of billions — in Pentagon spending unrelated to supporting Ukraine. On the other side of the matter, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has spoken out against using an emergency package as a vehicle for boosting Pentagon outlays.
One question is how moderate and progressive Democrats will fit into the debate over spending more on a department that is already slated to receive near record levels of resources, even as it cannot pass an audit and is routinely overcharged for basic items.
The Ukraine military aid request itself will no doubt generate a series of amendments, possibly ranging from a total cutoff to proposals to condition the assistance on everything from the submission of a detailed diplomatic roadmap for ending the war to stricter vetting of the aid pipeline to prevent diversion of the aid to unintended recipients.
It’s important for Washington to continue to supply Ukraine with the aid it needs to fend off the Russian invasion, but it is also crucial that this aid be supplied in the context of a diplomatic strategy for ending the war. The parties to the conflict may not be ready for such a move just yet, but that could change — and even change rapidly — as the war drags on.
It remains to be seen whether the debate over the aid package will serve as a useful vehicle for promoting diplomacy with respect to the Ukraine conflict. But a vigorous discussion of how to establish a viable diplomatic track needs to occur, and the sooner the better.
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget.
Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) have co-written a letter to the White House, demanding to know the administration’s strategy behind the now-18 days of airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen.
The letter calls into question the supposed intent of these strikes “to establish deterrence,” acknowledging that neither the Biden administration’s strikes in October 2023, nor the years-long bombing campaign by Saudi Arabia from 2014 to 2020, were successful in debilitating the military organization's military capabilities.
“Rather, these campaigns only served to embolden the Houthis and rally their recruiting base,” the senators said in the letter. “U.S. military action must have a clear strategy that advances our country’s long-term national security objectives and is compliant with the law of armed conflict.”
In addition, “Congress should be briefed about the recent strikes against the Houthis and the total cost expected to be incurred by this campaign at the American taxpayer’s expense.”
Rand and Merkley also correctly connect the Houthis’ recent attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea with the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire, pointing out that no such Houthi attacks took place while the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas (brokered by the Trump team ahead of the presidential inauguration) had been in place.
Paul and Merkley also questioned the Constitutionality of the strikes, given there has been no Congressional declaration of war on the Houthis. Congress wasn’t even consulted.
“We also recognize that any U.S. military response — especially sustained military engagement — must be conducted within the framework of the Constitution,” the Senators said in a release Tuesday. “Although the Constitution assigns the President the role of commander in chief of the U.S. military, it is Congress that is entrusted with the power to declare war — and Congress has not done so with respect to the Houthis.”
The letter comes amidst an escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran. In a post on Truth Social yesterday, President Trump warned that if the Houthis did not cease shooting at U.S. ships in the Red Sea, the real pain would be “yet to come, for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran.”
Such rhetoric calls into question whether the strikes on the Houthis are to set the stage for war with Iran itself. Recognizing this possibility in their letter, the senators call on the Trump administration to make clear to Congress and the American public if they indeed intend to strike Iran directly. They conclude the letter by warning of the United States “stumbling into another costly and unnecessary war.”
Bipartisan opposition to military escalation in the Middle East is urgently needed, moving beyond the procedural ‘Signalgate' debacle to a more substantive focus on what the strikes on the Houthis are to realistically achieve, and what they portend for greater regional peace and stability.
In intensifying strikes against the Houthis, President Trump appears to be contradicting his own expressed desire to rein in American military action in the Middle East, risking a broader, regional war, while seemingly failing to identify the Houthis’ strategic calculus tied to the war in Gaza.
While President Trump pledged a legacy of peacemaker in his inaugural speech, continuing along his current path in the Middle East threatens to permanently derail this worthy pursuit, particularly if war with Iran were to break out.
Skepticism from across the aisle to avert this outcome is a welcome development.
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Top image credit: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during a press conference regarding legislation that would block offensive U.S. weapons sales to Israel, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., November 19, 2024. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Will Senate vote signal a wider shift away from Israel?
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz have been roundly criticized for the security lapse that put journalist Jeffrey Goldberg into a Signal chat where administration officials discussed bombing Houthi forces in Yemen, to the point where some, like Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) have called for their resignations.
But the focus on the process ignores the content of the conversation, and the far greater crime of continuing to provide weapons that are inflaming conflicts in the Middle East and enabling Israel’s war on Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians.
As Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies noted in an article in The Nation, the real disgrace in “Signalgate” was not the inclusion of a journalist in sensitive conversations, it is the continued bombing of Yemen without congressional authorization, with all the human consequences it entails:
“[T]he biggest threat—that has already resulted in real lives lost—is being ignored. And that is the threat to the lives of Yemeni people—who, how many, how many were children, we still don’t know—being killed by US bombs across the poorest nation in the Arab world.”
It’s important to put the U.S. battle with the Houthis in context. The Houthi campaign to block shipping in the Red Sea is a reaction to Israel’s war on the people of Gaza. Continued U.S. military support for Israel is the fuel that is sustaining conflicts throughout the region, from Yemen to Lebanon, and, if Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has his way, in Iran.
Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff has said the U.S. supports resuming ground operations in Gaza, blaming Hamas from rejecting new conditions for continuing the ceasefire.
Only a minority of members of Congress have taken a stand against U.S. military support for Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza or its escalation of the fighting to other parts of the region. Last November, resolutions brought by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) designed to block parts of a $20 billion arms package to Israel received 19 votes in favor — a long way from a majority, but the first time Congress had taken action on the issue of U.S. provision of arms to Israel.
Now Sanders is bringing new joint resolutions of disapproval to block an $8.56 billion sale of bombs and other munitions to Israel. Sanders said he is doing so in order to “end our complicity in the carnage,” adding that “it would be unconscionable to provide more of the bombs and weapons Israel has used to kill so many civilians and make life unlivable in Gaza.”
More than 50,000 people have died from Israel’s military attacks on Gaza. And a paper by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins for the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that at least an additional 62,000 have died from indirect causes like preventable disease and malnutrition.
The United States gave Israel $17.9 billion in military aid in the first year of the war in Gaza — October 2023 to the end of September of 2024. But arms offers since that time — sales beyond the $17.9 billion in military aid, including items that have yet to be delivered — total over $30 billion. These weapons could enable Israeli aggression for years to come. The current deal is particularly concerning because it consists mostly of bombs and missiles of the kind used in Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza.
While handling of classified information is a real issue, enabling collective punishment and taking military action without congressional approval are far more important with respect to their human consequences abroad and the prospects for restoring democratic input on issues of war and peace at home. The press needs to widen its lens and take on these life and death issues on a more consistent basis.
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Top photo credit: German Prime Minister-in-waiting Friedrich Merz (Shutterstock.Penofoto)
Recent polls show the center right Christian Democrats (CDU-CSU) headed by prospective chancellor Friedrich Merz losing ground against the populist right Alternative for Germany (AfD), even before the new government has been formed.
The obvious explanation is widespread popular dissatisfaction with last month’s vote pressed through the outgoing parliament by the CDU-CSU and presumptive coalition partner the SPD (with the Greens) to allow unlimited increases in defense spending. This entailed disabling the constitutional “debt brake” introduced in 2009 to curb deficits and public debt.
The new parliament, with the AfD as the main opposition party, took its seats last week. The AfD opposes financing rearmament by a massive upsurge in public debt, and supports negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Die Linke (the Left) which substantially improved its position in the February elections, opposes rearmament and favors peaceful conflict resolution. Polls show support for Die Linke has also risen since the elections.
Mainstream consensus on financing rearmament
The aversion to incurring debt to finance public expenditure, including for defense, has been a central policy tenet of the German center-right CDU-CSU. The Zeitenwende (epochal change) declared by Chancellor Scholz in 2022 provided an exceptional $100 billion in funding for defense, allowing Germany to reach the 2% of GDP target set by NATO last year.
However, the latest move by Merz — which can be seen as an intensified Zeitenwende — permits any defense expenditure in excess of 1% of GDP to be exempted from the debt brake’s provisions. The justification given is a potential Russian military threat and the conviction that the U.S. is bent on reducing its commitments to the conventional defense of Europe.
Merz’s CDU is paying the price with its fiscally conservative voters, who oppose incurring new public debt for the defense hike, rather than cutting spending to pay for it. These voters view Merz’s turnaround on fiscal probity as a betrayal of his own election campaign program.
Presumably, the rise in AfD support comes from the defection of some of the CDU-CSU voters. Although Scholz and his cabinet resigned on March 25, they remain as caretakers until the new government under Merz is formed, perhaps as early as Easter.
Public opinion and the mainstream parties’ program
Tension between the mainstream parties’ determination to continue arming Ukraine and a growing preference among much of the public for seeking a negotiated outcome has for some time been evident. The Ebert Foundation’s Security Radar 2025 report documents rising public anxiety in Germany and elsewhere in Europe about possible escalation of the war in Ukraine, with for example, 59% of Germans worried the war might escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, anda majority of (54%) of Germans agreed that defense spending should increase, with 36% opposed.
However, 53% favored a negotiated settlement of the war even if Ukraine has to sacrifice territory. A third of Germans favored NATO membership for Ukraine, a quarter favored supporting Ukraine “until it wins” and only 11% favored deploying German troops to Ukraine.
These findings suggest that the customary German reticence about armed conflict and preference for peaceful conciliation of conflicts has not been overtaken by any martial fervor.
The German public favors increasing defense spending, so long as this is understood as taking responsibility for the conventional defense of Germany itself, rather than giving priority to aiding Ukraine’s defense in the current war. The Security Radar report discerned across Europe a mood expressed by the slogan “my country first.”
How much and how soon will spending increase?
The actual magnitude of a boost to defense spending in the coming few years remains a matter for the coalition’s programmatic document (still being negotiated). The relaxation of defense spending has so far produced an additional 3 billion euros for Ukraine in 2025, to be added to the 4 billion euros already approved for 2025. This includes German made air defense systems which will need two years to be produced. There is no indication yet of the release of a torrent of new money or weapons to Ukraine.
Neither outgoing Chancellor Scholz nor Friedrich Merz has indicated Germany would contribute troops for the “coalition of the willing” peacekeeping effort advanced by UK PM Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron. The question of providing Taurus missiles to Ukraine will likely arise again soon after the new government takes office. Merz has previously advocated sending these, or at least threatening to do so to exact concessions from Russia. Throughout his tenure, Scholz firmly resisted pressure to provide these missiles.
A recent report from the Breugel economic think tank estimates what defense equipment, manpower, and industrial developments would be needed for Europe to assume most or all of Europe’s conventional defense without the United States.
The authors argue that Germany needs to raise its defense spending to 3.5% of GDP within the next three years and had to lift public debt limits to do so. They suggest that Europe would face several serious constraints in attempting to replace in a timely way the American material and technical contributions to the Ukrainians in a continuing war.
Many economists, market analysts, and the DAX stock market index responded positively to the planned increases in defense spending, predicting a recovery of Germany’s weak economy as the plan is implemented. The plan includes a 500-billion-euro fund for infrastructure modernization to be spent over 12 years.
What's ahead?
In essence, the funding of a major increase in German defense spending belongs in the logic of burden-shifting of continental conventional defense from the United States onto NATO’s European members. It rests upon the anticipated continued engagement of the Americans in NATO, in the hope that a new division of labor will convince the Americans of the value of their ongoing engagement in European security.
Moreover, the spending increase will need to be sustainable over years in order for the conventional capability of Germany to compensate for an American drawdown of forces deployed in Europe. Because the rearmament aims to achieve greater “independence” from the U.S., the German and European arms industry stands to benefit.
The European public is seemingly not fully convinced of the necessity to embrace a radically changed security stance for Germany and the European members of NATO. In order to ensure stability and win long-lasting public support, the burden-shifting of conventional defense in Europe should be paired with renewal of diplomatic contacts with Russia, and with an agenda of arms control and mutual confidence building measures.
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