Congress’s budget “hundred-year war”

At the beginning of February, the White House was preparing for another “war” with Congress, and the stumbling blocks were once again military tranches to foreign countries, migration reform and the issue of passing the U.S. budget, which is closely related to these problems. Thus, February 6 was one of the most chaotic days during the current session of Congress. The House of Representatives tried to pass a bill to allocate 17 billion dollars in military tranches to Israel but it was unsuccessful because there were not enough votes to override the veto of Biden, who, having made many electoral mistakes before, started working in the interests of his leftist pro-Palestinian constituents.

Left-wing Democrats have expectedly flatly refused to support Israel, accusing it of genocide. However, right-wing Republicans have been less than favorable to Tel Aviv because it demands cuts in government spending, and there can be no favorites here or else principle will be compromised. That’s why Speaker Mike Johnson, a prominent Israeli lobbyist, has previously suggested giving money to Israel and taking the same amount from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Unfortunately the bill failed to pass in the end, despite the Speaker’s attempts to sneak out of the situation. The right-wing Trumpist Republicans are very tough, and they don’t want to give a dime to Ukraine and Israel.

They have two priorities: to stop the flow of illegals and to solve the situation with the budget deficit of 2 trillion dollars and the national debt. After all, even the Federal Reserve recognizes that the national debt threatens the stability of the U.S. economy but the balance of power between the radical left and the radical right is so stable, and polarization and mutual distrust are so strong, that there have been no shifts in either government spending or migrants for a long time. That’s why the issue of military tranches hangs in the air, and the House of Representatives today can’t pass anything at all in the face of division.

Even the decision to declare impeachment of the head of the Department of Homeland Security, which at first was pedaled by the entire Republican majority in a united gust, failed. But Washington’s dysfunction has one beneficiary, and that’s Donald Trump. It’s easier for him to run a campaign criticizing the diplomatic state, denouncing it as a complete failure. He is now organizing a sweep within the Republican Party, bringing it completely under his control, and hopes that the situation in Washington will only get worse, undermining Biden’s presidency. Against this background, the intransigence of many Trumpists in Congress on budget issues seems no longer empty radicalism or fanatical adherence to their political principles, but a deliberate plan to strengthen their leader’s position.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is running out of money for Ukraine, and not only arms supply programs, but also the training of Ukrainian soldiers are under attack. Thus, in Arizona, four Ukrainian pilots are being hastily trained to work on F-16s, and although the number looks paradoxically small, there is no possibility to recruit more, because there are not enough resources, qualified pilot trainers and European fighter jets, which many EU countries are simply sorry to give away for free. They promise to train four pilots by the end of 2024. However, it is still unclear which countries will give the F-16s. The Netherlands and Belgium were supposed to give the F-16s, but in the former there is a government crisis, and in the latter, Euroskeptics, who are very negative towards any participation in the military conflict in Ukraine, may soon win the elections.

Then there are Denmark and Norway, which are more consistent in their opposition to Russia, but they have literally pulled old F-16s out of museums to give to Kiev, and their technical condition leaves much to be desired. The Pentagon is also not training more pilots because it wants to defiantly blame isolationist Republicans for Ukraine’s problems, demanding that Congress allocate new tranches for Kiev to start working with redoubled vigor.

The situation on the battlefield is also aggravating. U.S. military strategists believe that Ukraine’s stockpile of air defense missiles will run out in the very near future, and in the spring Kiev will lose its ability to launch local counterattacks. By summer, Ukraine may lose the ability to defend the front line against Russian attacks, and the AFU will begin to retreat in many directions at once, which will lead to a cascading effect of the collapse of the Ukrainian front. Of course, such Pentagon assessments are overly gloomy and are an attempt to scare the public in the U.S. and European countries into forcing opponents of aid to Kiev to change their position.

Nonetheless even given that the White House is forcing the Europeans to hand over their remaining weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces, it is clear that they clearly cannot replace the U.S. tranches, and the key “battle for Ukraine” is taking place precisely in Congress, which is under increasing pressure. “Militarists”, lobbyists of the military-industrial complex and Democrats in the Senate tried to push through a bill on tranches of 60 billion dollars and put Speaker Mike Johnson in a difficult position. He was threatened with being thrown out of office by Trump supporters if he brought the tranche bill to a vote. As a result, at the turn of winter and spring, Congress was stuck in a state of paralysis.

In early February, isolationists blocked the Senate for a week, and it wasn’t until the morning of February 12 that they ran out of steam, and then a majority of senators, 70 to 30, voted in favor of a $95 billion military aid package. It was proposed to be spent on Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. 30 billion of them were to go to the Pentagon to replenish the stockpile of weapons, which will take many years, and 14 billion were planned to be given to Ukraine in the form of new tranches until September 2025. That is, they were to pay only 800 million a month, which was already much less than what was given to Kiev in 2022 and early 2023.  The rest of the money was to be used for training Ukrainians and grants to the countries of Eastern Europe, which sent most of their weapons to Ukraine. 8 billion was to be sent in direct tranches to the Ukrainian budget, although they will not be able to plug Ukraine’s budget hole of 40-50 billion.

Another 14 billion was to be given to Israel to strengthen its air defense system, and 9 billion in humanitarian aid to rebuild Gaza to somehow placate Biden’s leftist electorate. And only 8 billion were planned for the most seemingly urgent purposes, such as arms purchases for Taiwan and the Philippines and the construction of new AUKUS submarines within the military bloc. But the key point was that to use all these budgets, they needed the support of the House of Representatives, where the isolationists were stronger and they demanded that Speaker Mike Johnson block the tranches, otherwise threatening him with resignation. Johnson is also under pressure from the tranches’ supporters, so he is in an unenviable position. Congress remained divided, so the tranches had not been approved since September, and there was no guarantee that this would happen in the coming months.

Because of this, the Pentagon found itself in a difficult financial situation, and the U.S. military had to urgently redirect resources from Europe and Africa to continue operations in Ukraine. By early spring, there was no more than 3 billion dollars left, and it was clear that the money would run out by May if Congress did not agree on new tranches. The war in Ukraine is actually forcing the Pentagon to reduce its activity in Africa, where the U.S. influence is already rapidly eroding due to pressure from China and Russia, and the money allocated for Africa is used to continue training 1500 Ukrainians at U.S. bases. But the Pentagon’s budget, though big, is not unlimited and closer to May, they will have to choose between spending on their own army or Ukraine.

The choice will be made, obviously, not in favor of Kiev, especially against the background of the difficult situation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the front and the conflict in the Middle East, where the Hussites are causing a lot of problems directly to the American Navy. Congress was already scheduled to hear an alternative plan by moderate “centrist” lawmakers to allocate 47 billion dollars to Ukraine instead of 60 billion, but it was also opposed by a faction of Trump supporters. Trump himself demanded from the electorate not to re-elect Republicans who would dare to vote for Ukrainian tranches in the House of Representatives.

Against this background, a private meeting between Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson was held in Mar-a-Lago. Formally, they discussed the upcoming elections, but in reality they were probably talking about the strategy of blocking the Ukrainian tranches and the entire budget, which could not satisfy the radical Trumpists. It was Trump who kept it from being passed in Congress with his influence, even though the Democrats used the full power of their political apparatus against him. Nancy Pelosi even accused Trump of having some financial ties to Moscow, so he allegedly prevents America from going to war with Russia, thus blocking the entire national financial system.

Trump, to incriminate him of ties to Russia, has been heavily criticized for refusing to comment on the death of Russian liberal opposition figure Alexeï Navalny. He has responded by claiming an acute crisis within the U.S. with the politicization of justice and an attempt to intimidate it with prosecutorial attacks, which does not give Democrats the moral authority to talk about human rights abuses in faraway Russia, even if they do happen. Because of this, the liberal media began seriously trying to find in Navalny’s emails attacks against Trump to prove that the deceased strongly condemned Trumpism and therefore the former president had a personal interest in ignoring the Russian liberal’s death. It should be noted here that this story is extremely paradoxical because Navalny was a very calculating politician and, unlike his American liberal associates, was focused on Russian problems and did not think about Trump at all.

Zelensky is also trying to motivate Congress to allocate at least some tranches, and at the same time is trying to invite Trump to Kiev for talks. But this is obviously fruitless, because Trump is using the fatigue from the Ukrainian conflict in the United States quite effectively in his campaign against Biden and is earning political points. After all, the Democrats have finally and headlong gone into geopolitics, and are trying to explain to the American public the importance of Ukraine, NATO or Navalny, about whom many in the United States have never heard. Trump, on the other hand, is focusing on real domestic problems, such as migration and crime. It is his agenda that resonates, which shows Trump’s superiority over Biden in the polls, and “torpedoing” both the Ukrainian grants and the entire liberal budget project is his principled position, which he will not abandon.

On February 28, with a week left before another likely shutdown and the deadline for approving the next federal budget, Congress returned from vacation. By March 1, it had to pass a new budget, which was very hard to do in two days, even though otherwise the U.S. was facing serious financial problems. But then there was a real threat that if the budget was not approved by March 8, the entire U.S. government would shut down. The right wing of the Republicans pressured Speaker Mike Johnson to finally pass their budget bill with automatic cuts in government spending by 100 billion dollars. After all, the budget deficit was at a record $2 trillion dollars and the national debt was growing at an alarming rate.

It had to be stabilized somehow, or the U.S. would face a real debt crisis. Foreign policy spending, including all sorts of tranches and grants, including, of course, Ukrainian and Israeli military subsidies, was also supposed to be seriously reduced. The Democrats, for their part, have finally started working on a new agenda, according to which the Republicans and Trump are being blackmailed by Russia with some dirt. That is why, and not based on their political goals and budgetary guidelines, they do not allow to agree on tranches to Kiev.

Unfortunately such desperate rhetoric is no longer working, because most Americans oppose the tranches and are increasingly immersed in domestic politics, which requires them to economize on any “extra” spending item. In this context, former CIA director Robert Gates was forced to admit that Russia had broken the stalemate on the front, seized the initiative and went on the offensive, which was another reason to push the public to sympathize with Kiev and motivate the tranches. But militarist pressure on Congress amid budget wars has so far come to nothing, and hearings on Ukrainian tranches have been smoothly postponed until April, when the Pentagon will run out of the last money for all its Ukrainian programs.

To make matters worse, according to a number of experts, Ukraine had no chance of winning even if the tranches were agreed upon in Congress, and even retired Pentagon and NATO apparatchiks began to share such predictions. They no longer believed in Kiev’s success amid a shortage of weapons, new recruits and problems in the Western military-industrial complex, and added to the Republicans’ arguments that it was useless to pour water into a bottomless well. Even if the new tranches were approved in March-April, it had little effect on the situation on the front. After the era of “liberal technological pacifism” it will take many more years to disperse the military-industrial complex, although in the conditions of erosion of the technological base it may be an impossible task for the U.S., and even more so for the EU.

The example of the Czech Republic, which is hastily trying to find 1.5 billion euros to buy shells from other countries, is illustrative, but no one wants to pay and it is not known where to buy them. After all, even South Korea is already reluctant to spend its reserves by selling them to Europeans, although it can hardly be suspected of disloyalty to the U.S. foreign policy. Zelensky began hastily urging foreigners to sign up to volunteer as privates, sergeants or officers in the AFU for a fee. However, the flow of foreign mercenaries has long been reduced in conditions when more and more reports about Kiev’s defeats and losses of Ukrainians come from the front. After all, mercenaries go to earn money, not to die. Ex-CIA director Robert Gates is already openly talking about the resolution of the stalemate on the front in favor of Russia, which has seized the initiative.

Only 10% of Europeans and 20% of Americans still believe in Kiev’s victory but the elites in the West are talking about it only now, far behind their average citizens, who have long understood everything about the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Having made Ukraine a banner for the adoption of the new U.S. budget, the elites are now in a stalemate, unable to make concessions to the Republicans without losing face before the presidential election. The entire budget of the country from the social sphere to the fight against migration was held hostage because of this. We will take a deeper look into the situation and uncover the topic in future publications.

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ed@mercenaries.media

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