Washington will keep bankrolling military aid for Ukraine and putting money into NATO despite ongoing “grumbling”, former UKIP leader Douglas Carswell believes.
And the ex-MP also believes the West should take Donald Trump’s suggestion that he is ready to pull the plug on US funding for longstanding military alliance with a pinch of salt.
Mr Carswell, one of just two people, along with Mark Reckless, ever to be elected to Parliament for UKIP, is now president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
As such, he keeps a close eye on events in Congress, where ongoing support for military funding for Volodymyr Zelensky is far from certain.
The Senate earlier this week approved an aid package totalling £75billion for Ukraine and Israel – but there is no guarantee it will pass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
However, speaking via videolink on Wednesday, Mr Carswell, who won Clacton at a by-election in 2014 and held his seat in the general election a year later, said when push comes to shove, US politicians will keep the cash flowing.
Looking back to the 1980s, he told Express.co.uk: “Put it this way: if you had said to Ronald Reagan roughly for the equivalent of the budget that the US spends on the US Marine Corps, you can basically disable the Russian military, without an American shot being fired, without American lives being lost, he would have thought that would in geopolitical terms be an optimal outcome.
“Although the Cold War has ended, Russia is clearly reverting back to its Tsarist imperial tradition of being aggressive and anti-democratic.
“But the same logic applies: for a relatively small amount of money compared to overall US military spend, giving aid to Ukraine holds Russian back and I think will lead to Ukraine joining the club of civilised Nations.
“I think it’s just too good an outcome to not take now. There will always be grumbling and there are grumblings now, and I know it will cost some US politicians electorally to come out and support Ukraine.
“But I think fundamentally the country of Ronald Reagan will see that the logic geopolitically and morally. I suspect that they will find a way to continue to give Ukraine the support it needs.”
Looking to the future, Mr Carswell suggested Ukraine and Russia would eventually need to sit down for peace negotiations, explaining: “That’s generally how walls tend to end.
“But I think that will happen only when the Russians realise they are not going to get the territory that they want to get.”
Mr Trump, who is red hot favourite to be the Republican candidate in November’s Presidential election, caused significant alarm when he told a rally he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies who failed to comply with the minimum annual defence spending of two percent of GDP.
Mr Carswell said: “I think the thing with Trump is to see that as a throwaway line and I wouldn’t read too much into it.”
However, he continued: “I think there is a broader point, which is that Western European countries need to increase their defence spending and they have been talking about this for a decade or more and they’ve done pretty much nothing.
“And I suspect there’s a bit of frustration on the American side of the Atlantic.
“It’s probably a frustration actually shared by officials in the current administration too. The United States spends an awful lot on defence.
“And I think there’s a frustration that people with living standards similar to The Americans are not doing their bit.”
