The price of American leadership

(JNS) — “A fool is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Oscar Wilde famously quipped. In Milwaukee last week, the Republican candidates for president—minus one Donald J. Trump—quarreled over both the price and value of American support for Ukraine.

Only Nikki Haley crunched the numbers correctly. From the February 2022 Russian invasion to August of this year, the United States has committed roughly $43 billion to Ukraine. As Haley suggested, that’s just 3.5 percent of U.S. spending on the Defense Department over the same period.

In other words, without American...