As massive as U.S. expenditures have been in Ukraine, those expenditures will be dwarfed by what it will cost to put Ukraine back together again. From James Bohn at antiwar.com:
America’s twenty-year involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that nation building is often more expensive, prone to failure, and politically unpopular than expected at the outset. The State Department’s Afghan Stabilization Assistance Review acknowledged the difficulties nation building poses and found that there was no appetite in the American public for such ventures in the future. Yet today, less than two years after the Afghan withdrawal, the United States and its European allies are faced with a nation building exercise more expensive and at least as extensive as those of the past two decades.
NATO’s pursuit of the long war risks pushing Ukraine past a tipping point beyond which it’s economy may never recover. Revitalization of the Ukrainian economy would even have been difficult had the war ended in 2022. Continuation of the fighting and the introduction of more destructive and lethal Western arms risks making Ukraine a permanent economic vassal state of the United States and the EU.
Even the hawkish Rand Corporation in their review of the costs and benefits of the long war acknowledged the tradeoff between continued fighting and the additional cost and difficulty to revitalize the Ukrainian economy post-war.
Existing estimates of reconstruction costs are enormous. The National Recovery Plan that Ukraine’s National Recovery Council put forth in July 2022 carried a $750 billion price tag. In January 2023, Ukraine President Zelensky put the cost to rebuild Ukraine at $1 trillion. These estimates are several times that of the $150 billion in all forms of aid that the West has extended to date. They also exceed by a factor of five or more the size of the post-World War II Marshall Plan, $150-160 billion in today’s dollars, and the $145 billion that the U.S. government spent on rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 