Vladimir Putin is having an easier time wearing down voters in Western democracies than he is wearing down the Ukrainian military.
That was one way to interpret Janet Yellen’s efforts to raise awareness of the ongoing need for economic assistance to the war-torn country and its beleaguered populace, who she described this week as “on the front lines of the free world.”
Yellen on Monday visited Kyiv, where she announced the disbursement of an additional $1.25 billion in US aid.
A major concern going forward is that the combination of isolationist rhetoric from America’s far-right, the inroads Kremlin propaganda has made across Western democracies, generalized ignorance of foreign affairs among voters and, crucially, ever shorter attention spans, will eventually erode support for funding Ukraine’s defense.
The Biden administration seems palpably concerned about that, and if the visual below is any indication, any such concerns are warranted.
According to NewsWhip, which describes its raison d’être as “identifying the stories that the media and public care about using social engagement data,” interest among US readers has effectively gone missing.
Indeed, it looks as though interest waned pretty much immediately following the initial burst of coverage accompanying the invasion.
The majority of US lawmakers still wholeheartedly support aid to Kyiv, and that’s unlikely to change in the near-term. However, depending on who the Republican presidential nominee ends up being, it’s entirely possible that the populist arm of the GOP will eventually look to exploit and leverage public fatigue with an “over there” conflict for domestic political gain.
If that were to galvanize opposition to additional funding, it could have a material adverse impact on Ukraine’s capacity to hold the line. It’s worth noting (again) that fund managers are still very concerned about the conflict.
As a reminder, geopolitics leapfrogged “central banks stay hawkish” and “deep global recession” on BofA’s top tail-risk list in the February vintage of the bank’s Global Fund Manager survey.
The macabre reality is that getting Americans interested in the war again would likely require some new development that throws the human tragedy into even starker relief. Either that, or an escalation which suggests the conflict may not stay “over there” forever.
I suppose that presents the Kremlin with a dilemma. It’s clear that absent an escalatory game-changer, battlefield gains will come at an enormous cost, if they come at all. But an escalation on the scale needed to achieve Putin’s grandest goals risks reviving the Western public’s interest in the war.
While fully acknowledging that today’s Americans most assuredly aren’t the Americans of the 1930s and 40s, the tail risk for Putin (and Xi) is committing an act egregious enough to all at once sew up America’s frayed social fabric and restore the sense of shared purpose the US has been struggling to rediscover.
I personally doubt that anything short of an attack on the homeland would suffice in that regard, but you never know. And not wanting to find out is probably the only thing keeping Putin from pushing the envelope even further. And keeping Xi on his side of the Strait.
