OPINION: Who will we blame for losing Ukraine?

Congressional Republicans once represented a political party that led every campaign stressing its national security credentials. No price was too great, no sacrifice too significant to keep a GOP congressman or senator on top of any debate about protecting American interests around the world.

But that Republican Party is dead and gone, sacrificed on the altar of the last Republican president’s coziness with the former KGB agent who now rules Russia, Vladimir Putin, and disdain for post-World War II security arrangements, including NATO, that have long been the bedrock of American security. Former President Donald Trump transformed the party of Ronald Reagan, turning it into a cult following an isolationist authoritarian, one increasingly anti-free trade and openly hostile to democracy.

There is never a road so long that it doesn’t have a bend, it’s said, and the modern Republican Party has come to that bend. The long, post-war road that defined the GOP brand in national security terms is in real danger of unraveling for good.

As GOP members of Congress fled the capital for their Christmas cheer, the headlines were stark — as in “Who lost Ukraine?” stark.

“With Western aid stalled, Ukrainian troops run low on artillery shells,” said The Washington Post.

“Ukraine hits major Russian warship, but loses ground in the east,” said The New York Times, noting Ukraine had, while destroying a major Russian ship, also pulled back troops to the outskirts of Marinka — a small city reduced to ruins — marking a tactical retreat and a bleak Russian victory.

It seems all too clear that the brutal, nearly two-year-long war has reached an inflection point. Will Ukrainian forces have the stamina and the artillery shells to last through another cold winter or will Putin prevail simply by not losing?

“Our needs are resources,” said Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top military leader, recently. “It’s weapons, it’s ammunition, it’s people. We calculate all of this in formulating our needs — people who we have lost, people who we could lose in the next year.”

The December decision by Republicans to link policy related to the U.S.-Mexican border to approval of essential aid to Ukraine is as shortsighted as it is stupid, but here we are. Just as the Ukrainian weapons stockpile disappears, the GOP insists on a border security solution that has evaded Congress for a generation. It’s almost like Republicans were looking for an excuse to help Putin and they found one just outside of El Paso, Texas.

There is no mystery in the GOP linkage. The party has never sought a real policy solution to immigration or asylum seekers because it could have had one a dozen different ways during the last three presidencies. Republicans like — make that, love — “the border” as a red meat issue to stoke fear and grievance within the GOP base. What’s a little Ukrainian blood and territory as collateral damage to such political cynicism?

And for good measure, add a little demagoguery to this retreat from international leadership, stiffing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who came to Washington, D.C., earlier this month, helmet in hand, to get the tools to keep defending his country and, by direct extension, western Europe and the United States.

By all accounts, the aid the U.S. has sent to Ukraine has caused the greatest degradation of Russian military capability since Adolf Hitler’s Panzers rolled toward Moscow in the summer of 1941. As the Center for European Policy Analysis calculated, “From numerous perspectives, when viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, U.S. and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment.”

For a single-digit percentage of the total American defense budget, according to a declassified U.S. intelligence report, Russia has absorbed “315,000 dead and injured troops, or nearly 90% of the personnel it had when the conflict began.”

Furthermore, the report “assessed that Moscow’s losses in personnel and armored vehicles ... have set back Russia’s military modernization by 18 years.”

But such logic defies a modern Republican backbencher like Idaho’s election-denying Congressman Russ Fulcher.

“We’ve already spent $113 billion in resources to Ukraine,” Fulcher said recently, “and we don’t know what the clear mission is.”

Say what? The mission is to keep Putin from winning and in the process protect western Europe from Putin’s plan to rebuild the old Soviet empire.

Fulcher helps us understand the incoherence of his position by noting that his constituents overwhelmingly oppose more aid. That is precisely the argument made before America’s entry into World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, facing bipartisan opposition as blinkered as Fulcher’s, persuaded Congress to support transferring U.S. supplies to a beleaguered Britain as it hung on against the Nazis.

This is the modern Republican Party, ruled by isolationist, white nationalist reactionaries in Washington, D.C. — and clearly at the grass roots — who have decided to follow Trump and his Hitler-invoking rhetoric along the yellow brick road toward Putin and Moscow.

Fulcher hints at possible support for additional Ukraine aid if President Joe Biden assures “serious reform, serious attention to our southern border.” But he’s joking. He’s the worst kind of congressman, one who claims to represent the will of his people even when doing so requires — assuming Fulcher were capable of such a thing — applying simple common sense.

The biggest clue that the GOP is fixing to abandon Ukraine comes from the junior senator from Idaho, who by virtue of luck and Senate seniority, now sits as the ranking Republican on the once prestigious Foreign Relations Committee. Until December and the party’s pivot to link the Mexican border to the Ukrainian frontline, Sen. Jim Risch was a stout-hearted supporter of American aid, even going to Kyiv for a photo op with Zelenskyy. Now, Risch’s continuing support is conditioned on, as he says, the security issue his right-wing constituents fear most — desperate humans at the border fleeing poverty, crime, corruption and chaos.

“The biggest threat that my constituents feel is not from (Ukraine),” Risch said recently as he pirouetted away from the foreign policy threat of our time, “it’s from our southern border.”

Risch’s lifetime in politics may not feature accomplishment, but he is a survivor, and he can read the polls, including the November Gallup survey that shows 62% of Republicans believe the U.S. is doing too much to aid Ukraine.

Risch, once about as conversant with foreign policy as Trump — the fellow Risch carried water for during that memorable period — is now, thanks to luck and the seniority system, in a position to actually do something for Ukraine, Europe, America and the world. Don’t hold your breath. Given a choice between a moral stand based on genuine principle and the political path of least resistance, Risch always takes the low road to expediency.

The party that zipped its collective lip when Trump embraced Putin, tolerated Trump’s shakedown of Zelenskyy in order to influence domestic politics and remains totally silent as their party leader pushes ever farther toward authoritarianism is no party of principle.

I genuinely hope to be surprised when Congress returns early next year to take up the aid issue again. But expecting Republicans like Risch, even when they have taken a strong pro-Ukrainian positions in the past, to defend a position the least bit unpopular with “the base” is to live in a political fantasy land. And Risch has positioned himself perfectly to be against what he once was for, and he always has Biden to blame.

When we start asking who lost Ukraine, remember the little men from Idaho who talked big and voted small.

Johnson, of Manzanita, Ore., served as chief of staff to the late former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. His new book on the U.S. Senate in the 1960s — “Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate” — has been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.