UPDATE (July 8, 2025, 8:09 a.m. ET): This piece has been updated to reflect the Pentagon’s statement late Monday night confirming the U.S. will resume sending defensive weapons to Ukraine “at President Trump’s direction.”
Last week the Trump administration abruptly paused deliveries of missiles and munitions to Ukraine, claiming it had concerns that U.S. stockpiles of munitions were low and that it was compelled to make a decision, as a White House spokesperson put it, “to put America’s interests first.”
But there’s reason to think the Trump administration may have exaggerated the consequences of how supplying weapons to Ukraine would affect U.S. stockpiles as a pretext for once again demonstrating that its commitment to Ukraine is up in the air.
Impulsively and unexpectedly freezing aid to Ukraine undermines the country’s ability to defend itself.
According to NBC News, which cited three U.S. officials, “an analysis by senior military officers found that the aid package would not jeopardize the American military’s own ammunition supplies.”
NBC News also reported, based on three congressional aides and a former U.S. official familiar with the matter, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a decision unilaterally to initiate the pause. Hegseth did so after issuing a memo ordering the Pentagon’s Joint Staff to review stockpiles of all munitions — but it apparently didn’t yield the conclusions that the Trump administration has implied it did:
According to three officials familiar with the matter, the assessment found that some stockpiles of high-precision munitions were at lower levels but not yet beyond critical minimums. The Joint Staff concluded that providing continued assistance to Ukraine would not drain U.S. supplies below a required threshold needed to ensure military readiness, the officials said.
The pause of the shipments — which had been approved under the Biden administration — happened so suddenly that some of the munitions deliveries that were called off had already been loaded onto trucks in European countries that were about to head to Ukraine, per NBC News.
Then suddenly on Monday, Trump said that weapons shipments would resume normally again in the future. “We have to,” Trump told reporters about additional weapons deliveries for Ukraine, according to the Associated Press. “They have to be able to defend themselves.”
It is the United States’ prerogative to determine how much it wants to aid another country, and its enormous flow of military aid to Ukraine does have strategic consequences for the United States’ military assets in other regions of the world. For example, as The Associated Press notes, “While the total number of Patriot munitions the U.S. has is unknown, the number of entire Patriot missile defense systems is in such limited supply that providing one to a new location often means taking it from somewhere else.”
But impulsively and unexpectedly freezing aid to Ukraine undermines the country’s ability to defend itself as it struggles to hold its positions in the east against Russia’s relentless invasion. Moreover, it undermines Trump’s ability to help broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Trump complained last week after a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that he was “very disappointed” and that he “didn’t make any progress” with him toward a deal with Ukraine. But Trump’s inconsistency regarding aid to Ukraine is exactly the kind of thing that will embolden Putin to double down and put off serious negotiations — perhaps out of the hope that Trump will eventually throw his hands up and abandon Ukraine entirely before a deal is struck. If Trump were to aid Ukraine consistently and maintain a poker face in talks with Putin over his willingness to fold, Trump and Ukraine would have much more leverage in figuring out a way to peace. But Trump (and his White House) appear to lack the interest in and discipline to do that, and are muddling through as a result.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio.
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