Slovakia has a government that no longer supports giving aid to Ukraine. The largest party in the Dutch parliament does not support funding Ukraine. Significant portions of the Republican Party don’t want to give any more money to Ukraine and the support that is slipping away from the Democrats (largely African Americans and Hispanics) is composed of people who have no interest in Ukraine. There is increasing talk about how Ukraine needs to negotiate.

These things are not definitive. This trend towards looking for a way out of the Ukraine conflict was going strong on the part of Western Powers until the Kharkiv counteroffensive and subsequent taking back of Kherson city. These events gave the allies of Ukraine hope that just a little more military aid and Ukraine could win this thing. Perhaps a sudden Ukrainian victory will appear out of nowhere and once more the Western Powers will think that if they give the Ukraine just a little more money, this thing could be all over.

But the history of the West post World War II has been a history of half measures and perpetually frozen conflicts that never end. Korea is still sore spot ever since UN forces accepted a draw with the Chinese. Vietnam is resolved but only because the US decisively lost and Vietnam is too worried by China to hold a grudge. The former Yugoslavia is a powder keg held together by the threat of US air power. Iraq still has US troops in it and they are still conducting strikes in country. Syria has US troops in it who are still doing things that occasionally make for small articles hidden away from the front page. Libya is a frozen mess that nobody wants to put back together nor do they want to the wrong people to put it back together and so it is preserved in perpetual disastrous state.

The point is that only a fool would bet on the West having the staying power to see Ukraine through to the end. Ukraine’s only hope is that Russia is such a mess of demographic disaster and institutional dysfunction that maybe they will fail before the West does. But Ukraine’s own demographic disaster and institutional issues prevent them from having much agency in how this plays out. Their only card was that significant amounts of people were willing to fight for a Ukraine that was not under the thumb of Russia. But those people are a finite resource and there are indications that they are running out.

This realization is starting to creep into some Ukrainian channels.

They are talking about how much views and donations have dropped off since the conflict in Gaza kicked off. They are bemoaning the drip feed of aid and how “North Korea is doing more for Russia then the EU is doing for Ukraine.” They are furious about the calls to negotiate a reward for Russia aggression. It sounds like despair is creeping over them. They are increasingly leaving aside arguments of principal and focusing on arguments of self interest. “If you don’t help us, you sons will be fighting Russians in some other country” seems to be the new theme of the pro Ukrainian channels.

But the great and good that run the Western Powers have never really believed this. The original plan was never for Ukraine to have a victory. Rather, the goal was to make sure that Russia paid such a high price for their adventure that both Russians and hopefully the Chinese thought twice about trying to similar things in places that the West actually cared about. Indeed, if it had been left to great and good, Ukraine would never have gotten the level of support that it has now. But the heart strings of the people in the West were moved by pictures of people like them suffering so they pushed their ruling classes farther then they wanted to go.

Now that pendulum is starting to swing the other way and that leaves the ruling classes in the West in a hard spot. Most of them are smart enough to know that the only thing worse than starting a fight is losing one. It has not been forgotten in the Western halls of power that the US withdrawal from Somalia after losing a few helicopters emboldened Osama Bin Laden into thinking it would be easy to drive the US out of the Middle East as a whole. One openly stated fear of the people in power is worries that China might be emboldened by a Russian success in Ukraine. In other words, the ruling class is not really looking for ways to make Ukraine win, but they do want to avoid the perception that the West lost. It appears that they would like to turn it into another frozen conflict to be dealt with by some other generation.

But this is a dangerous course of action. The problem is not so much that Russia might try for the Baltic States after they are done with Ukraine or that China might decide that protestations of support for Taiwan are worth no more than empty promises given to Ukraine. Rather, the risk is that entire edifice of frozen conflicts built up since World War II might collapse on the revelation of Western weakness. The habit of the West of freezing issues instead of resolving issues has lead to a place where it is increasingly likely that the West will suddenly have to deal with all of its problems at once as a result of a failure in one particular place like Ukraine.

To understand this danger, you only need to look at Russian strategy. Russia has been encouraging trouble in the Balkans, giving support to Hamas, selling advanced fighters to Iran, and making some kind of deal with North Korea which is presumably beneficial to both parties. Russia clearly understands how the multitude of froze conflicts that the West has scattered a crossed the globe creates weak points that can be exploited. And if Russia understands this who else understands this? Was Hamas emboldened to make a strike by the thought Ukraine would complicate aid to Israel (if so, they seemed to have misjudged who had priority on US support judging by Ukrainian complaints). Will Iran or China take a failure to resolve Ukraine as encouragement to start additional issues?

The fact that these issues are interconnected is fully understood by the ruling class. This is why you see Japan giving up money to support Ukraine even though they not geographically connected. This is why you see South Korea surreptitiously bailing Ukraine out with artillery shells even though they have deep demographic and security problems of their own. But these things are not understood at a deep level by the average person on the street in the Western countries. They don’t understand why a lot of money has to be sent to some foreign place when there are plenty of problems in their own country.

This divide between the elites and the lower classes is not new. In fact, it has been the norm for just about every conflict the West has been involved in post World War II. If the West is able to win quick sharp victories, everybody is happy for the same reasons they like it when their favorite sports teams win. But when the conflict gets prolonged like the Korean War, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, the lack of buy in from the man on the street becomes an increasing problem. The way the Western elites have dealt with the problem post World War II is with a guns and butter approach. In other words, attempts are made to deal with security problems that the elites perceive while addressing the economic concerns of the man on the street at the same time. This is what Lyndon Johnson tried to do with the expansion of government welfare programs while at the same time increasing US involvement in Vietnam. This is what Ronald Regan did with tax cuts and other economic liberalization measures while at the same time massively increasing the defense budget. Every US president post Lyndon Johnson who has increased military funding in response to some conflict or other has also given significant gifts to the man on the street in the form of tax cuts or new economic programs (and in some cases, both). It could be argued that George Bush Senior was an exception this rule but he also lost the following election.

The need to bribe the population with new economic benefits when addressing perceived security issues is what leads to so many frozen conflicts. Complete victory requires a willingness to pay any price. If you have to bribe your own masses as well as pay the cost of the war, the temptation to be satisfied with a draw becomes overwhelming even if complete victory is in theory possible. Why endanger your own support from your own people attempting to archive a victory if you can archive a draw a much lower costs?

In the past, this system has worked to sustain support for conflicts long past when the majority of Americans would have quit. As Perun pointed out in a recent presentation on support for Ukraine, US military involvement in Vietnam went on at high levels long after the majority of Americans started saying to pollsters that they were done with the war. In the context of Ukraine, the majority of Americans are still saying that they support aid to Ukraine at current levels or greater (greater is a sub-group of the general support). Thus, Perun argues that the long term prospects for US aid to Ukraine look good.

What this analysis misses is that aid to Ukraine is not being held up by the lack of congresses critters willing to vote for aid to Ukraine. Most of congress is still on record as supporting aid to Ukraine. The problem is that American people have become accustom to having money thrown at their domestic issues at the same time money is being thrown around at “security” issues. If you get right down to it, even the blue collars Trump voters are not really outraged by the prospect of Ukraine getting money to kill Russians. But they are absolutely furious that there are billions being spent on Ukraine and no equivalent amounts of money being spent on securing the border.

Traditionally, this problem would be solved by throwing billions of dollars at securing the border and giving billions to Ukraine. But this solution has two problems. The first problem is that there is a sizeable group of Americans who don’t think securing the border is a good idea. The second problem is that money is running out. What is important to understand is that the first problem is both unique to America and in theory solvable if you had a skilled politician like Bill Clinton in charge. But the second problem is fundamental to the entire Western world.

The issue with money and America has already been laid out here. But fundamentally, America is only part of the problem. American is wealthy, but the Western world as whole is wealthier then America if you add up all the other countries that make up the Western world. Other nations should be able to step in and hold the line against a poor and corrupt country like Russia. After all, Russian GDP is smaller than Canada’s to say nothing about Germany or Japan. It should not be that hard to find some spare change to bleed Russia dry as long as Ukraine is willing to keep fighting.

But GDP does not tell the whole story. A nursing home and a car factory both show up the in the GDP figures as a “product” but only one of those things can be repurposed to produce war material. What makes America so critical is that everyone else in the Western World is so much demographically older then America that they no longer have the capacity to do much even if their GDP numbers say otherwise.

To see how this works out in practice, consider the following facts: Germany and France spent close to 15% of GDP on social security payments alone (equivalent for the US is 6%) 2022. Germany’s spending on health care is 12.7% and France is 12.1%. This is better than the US (which was 17.8 of GDP in 2022) but it is not enough to balance out the much higher pension payments. US spending public debt interest is close to 3% and going higher. France is close to 2% and Germany is well under 1%. Now in terms of “defense spending” Germany spent 1.39% of GDP in 2022 on defense. France was spending just about 2%. And the US was coming in at 3.5%. If you add up Social Security, Health Care Costs, and Interest Payments on debt, and military spending, France and Germany both come out to roughly 30% where as America is more like 26%.

The point of this exercise is to show how much aging demographics constrains the options of what on paper should be some of the strongest Western countries. America has a health care system that is either gold plated or seriously defective depending on your perspective, it has a major debt problem, and it spends more than twice what Germany does on defense. And yet because Germany spends so much on pensions, America’s total costs as percentage of GDP are roughly 4% lower then what Germany spends on the same basket of payments.

You can argue about the fairness of this particular basket of expenditures if you are inclined to. But the fundamental fact is that pension costs have to come at the expense of something. When you increase yearly spending on pensions by 4% of GDP in the space of 20 years as South Korea did (from about 3.5% to 7.5% of national GDP) it makes it harder to find that extra 1% or 2% of GDP for military spending that a minor military crisis might require. At the very least, it can’t be done without seriously impacting the quality of life of a key voting demographic (even Putin seems most afraid of the pensioner class for some reason).

The bottom line is that the West is changing from collection of imperial powers to a collection of nation states that run nursing homes and call it GDP. Their ability to handle crisis is declining faster than their relative place in the World’s GDP rankings would indicate. That is why they all look to the US to come up with the extra cash to take care of the Ukraine problem because America is the only one of the western powers that seems to have the spare cash to still make a difference. And that is changing fast as the Baby Boomers age and America runs up against the limits of what it can borrow without paying a steep price.

Of course, if Germany truly felt that the war in Ukraine was existential, they could come up with one or two percentages of GDP and that amount of money would be a significant help for Ukraine. But it would cause serious pain for Germans and require the Germans to truly believe that Ukraine was worth suffering for. Seeing as even Poland (who overall seems more strongly committed) can’t deal with Ukrainian grain or trucking entering their country without throwing a hissy fit, it would seem that the man on the street in Europe is not really willing to make serious sacrifices to ensure victory.

As has been previously noted, this is nothing new. After World War II, guns and butter has always been the demand of people. The only thing that has changed is that the Western world is reaching a point where it is no longer capable of both.

To understand how far the US has fallen, compare what the US was willing to spend to save South Korea with what it is willing to spend to save Ukraine. Remember that at the time of the Korean War, South Korea was a backwater that nobody in America cared about and at the time it was one of the poorest countries on earth with no resources to speak of. But that did not stop the US from spending over 10% of its GDP a year towards war costs and it had a bunch of allies join it in the fight on top of that (such as Turkey). Now America struggles to find what amounts to less than 1% of its GDP to support the destruction of the armed forces of one its geopolitical rivals (total aid from the US to Ukraine between 1/24/22 to 7/31/23 is just under 80 Billon dollars. One percent of US GDP would be roughly 250 billion dollars so the US is not even close to 1% on a yearly basis in terms of aid to Ukraine). In both cases the justification was the same (if we don’t stop this invasion, the bad guys will be emboldened to invade elsewhere) but the ability and willingness to mobilize economic power towards the stated end are completely different.

Given the relative cheapness of enabling Ukraine to hold the line (as opposed to helping them win), it may well be that the West will succeed in adding one more frozen conflict to the list. And to be fair, it does not all depend on the West. A lot also depends on how well Ukrainian morale holds up and the age old contest between Russian resilience and Russian incompetence. If it is like the Russia that fought World War I or the War against Japan, there may yet be hope for Ukraine but if it is more like the Russia that faced Nazi Germany or Napoleon, maybe not.

But even if the US succeeds in bringing the war in Ukraine to a frozen status, it will only add to the burdens that are slowing leading towards a collapse of the Western lead security order. It was long been said by blue collar folks that “the US can’t be the world’s policeman” but for years that was not really true. American was able to be the world’s policeman and even the areas where if failed was more from a lack of will then capability. But as its own population ages and its allies become increasingly unable to do even basic defense related tasks like protect their own air spaces, the US is approaching the point where it truly is unable to preserve the status quo from an economic perspective.

What will happen when the world at large realizes that is anyone’s guess. But judging by historical precedent seen in the collapse of previous security orders, it will not be a peaceful world for a long time to come.