It is difficult to make a life when decisions taken elsewhere can overturn whatever you plan. Work, a home, the possibility of bringing up children somewhere safe: these require some confidence that tomorrow will leave room for your efforts. War makes that confidence precarious. Those deciding how to respond to it have a responsibility to remember what their decisions are for.
The BBC reports that Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, has criticised Trump’s restriction of support for Ukraine, warning that the US risks lengthening Russia’s full-scale invasion rather than helping to end it. That is his assessment, not an outcome the report can establish. But it exposes a difficulty worth staying with: stepping back from a conflict does not necessarily reduce our part in what follows.
There is an understandable attraction in withdrawal. Supporting a war carries costs and risks. People are entitled to question whether that support is effective, what it is intended to achieve, and how long it should continue. Concern about escalation cannot simply be dismissed as indifference to those already suffering.
Yet withdrawal needs to face the same scrutiny. It is still a decision, with consequences borne partly by people who have no say in making it. The desire to stop contributing to a war cannot, by itself, tell us whether stopping will make the people living through it safer.
This is a problem well beyond foreign policy. We often treat responsibility as something attached to an action we take, then imagine it loosens when we cease taking that action. Sometimes it does. A commitment can become harmful or impossible to sustain. But where others have come to depend on it, leaving requires an honest account of what we expect to happen next.
That does not establish which policy towards Ukraine is right. It does establish why the argument cannot end with the intentions of the country changing its support.
For the people whose lives are at stake, the question is painfully practical: what will this decision allow them to do tomorrow? Any serious defence of continuing support, restricting it or ending it needs to reach that far.