[ape_key]

hey, I want to interpret this charitably but the language here is pretty bad: “achieving […] dead Slavs […] isn’t […] useful”.

Yeah I know I used a lot of editing but the sentiment and word choice is there. I don’t want the US to be the world police but I don’t want to dismiss that Putin is deeply rotten. And I don’t think whether something is “useful” is the only concern.

Are we helping? Are we making things worse? These are how we should talk about things.

[roenxi]

When Russia invaded in 2022 it looked like they were going to conquer Ukraine. Then they'd have to stop because they would bump into the NATO border.

Then the US intervened. Maybe the European powers too, I dunno what the politics in the NATO war room looked like. Now it looks like the country is levelled, Europe is undergoing an energy crisis because of their response, it is now a realistic possibility that NATO might not be able to coerce Russia, China or even Iran on the outside. My money is still on the US but they're making it look like a struggle.

And the plan for Ukraine recovering seems to involve them being bankrolled by a bankrupt US so I don't see that working out well either. This isn't the 1950s, the US is not in a position to go rebuild Europe. They have enough problems figuring out how to build prosperity in the USA without trying to do it overseas. That is a core complaint of the right wing and a significant part why said right-wingers are trying to vote a wrecking ball into the presidency.

Is the US helping? Maybe. Not a very clear picture yet. Compare this to Iraq or Afghanistan where nobody stood up for them after the US invasion. It was bad for the countries, I don't know if it was worse than what is going on in Ukraine but I suspect we'll discover that US intervention has made things worse.

[ape_key]

I’m not strictly isolationist. I’m also not smart enough to predict what happens when playing Risk with real countries.

It’s definitely possible that sending weapons into a conflict just makes it worse. Especially when soldiers are just people on both ends.

My only dispute with your text is that we definitely have the ability to get our shit together financially in the US. The opposition is purely ideological. “We can’t” becomes “we don’t try” becomes “we can’t”.

[roenxi]

> My only dispute with your text is that we definitely have the ability to get our shit together financially in the US. The opposition is purely ideological. “We can’t” becomes “we don’t try” becomes “we can’t”.

One the one hand yes. On the other that is true of all countries, and most of them are basket cases when it comes to financial governance and they aren't in any position to be putting their finger on the scales in wars half a world away. The US just doesn't have a resource surplus and it is in question whether they can sustain their interventionist foreign policy without first sitting down and getting the house in order.

Where are the resources going to come from? Going back to the thread root, that is the core of the right wing backlash that is brewing on this topic. All this stuff going to Ukraine to get blown up could be going to the US to make life better for people.

[ape_key]

Why does the right insist on a massive military budget, then complain about sending surplus supplies overseas?

You’re debating two things: whether the US should intervene in Ukraine, and whether the US should get its internal affairs in order.

Your points are that war is expensive*, the US has a poor ability to run its internal systems (yes and no, but how does this imply we should sit on our hands with foreign policy), this war isn’t useful.

*The monetary cost of this war (to the US) is just not a legitimate part of the debate. It’s pittance what we’ve supplied.

[roenxi]

> Why does the right insist on a massive military budget, then complain about sending surplus supplies overseas?

Well we're crossing from the point where I can talk about "the right" because the stances I've heard are too mutually incoherent; this is the part where everyone has their own opinions. My argument is if you have an unreasonably large budget, then you donate some stuff, then the budget needs to get bigger again to cover the donations.

Fair summary of the thread so far by the way, not often I get to say that in threads that go beyond 2 posts.

> The monetary cost of this war (to the US) is just not a legitimate part of the debate. It’s pittance what we’ve supplied.

I have a few problems with that line of thought.

Firstly, describing it as a pittance is unreasonable. The resources sent to Ukraine could have been used in the US to achieve good things. It is 10s of billions of dollars; it could get dumped on some random small struggling town in the rural US and no-one there would ever have to work again (across multiple generations if they managed their investments right). There is an opportunity cost to wasting that much money that means the US is worse off.

Secondly, if you add all the "pittances" up that the US wastes on foreign war you get real money. The the war in Afghanistan ended up being around 2 trillion over 20 years which comes to a burn rate in the range of the US spending in Ukraine (~100 billion/yr in Afghanistan vs ~75 billion/yr in Ukraine [0]). These pittances aren't pittances from that perspective either.

And finally US doesn't look like it can afford a pittance. It is like someone with a deep debt problem buying lottery tickets. The financial situation in the US is dire; the threshold has been crossed where the principle on their debt isn't going to be paid back and we're looking for the point where either they stop borrowing or the interest doesn't paid back either. It is unreasonable to be talking about just finding a little surplus to give away - the US exhausted those options years ago. There has to be an answer to the "what is being given up?" question.

Now if the US was getting some sort of payoff or helping the Ukrainians in some way then that cost might be justifiable, but it seems that all the US involvement is doing is transforming Ukrainians into other-countrians and corpses while securing China's geopolitical position. We have established international norms for how theses invasions should play out, they were established in the 2000s by the US's adventurism. They're getting broken here with no obvious upside gained.

[0] https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine... - I just took the number from this article, I'm sure there are big error bars depending on the start & end dates used.

[Gud]

Russia didn’t invade in 2022, the invasion started in 2014.