Kinda feel like comparing the Ukraine war to historic protracted conflicts undersells the difference in scale. The USSR suffered 15k dead in 10 years in Afghanistan before they threw in the towel. Reliable numbers for the current war are hard to come by, but any estimate has Russia suffering far more in a third as much time. The fact nations are historically reluctant to admit defeat in smaller conflicts does not mean they wont due so in larger conflicts.
Obviously no one can credibly predict how long the Russian war economy (or the Ukrainian one for that matter) can last. Ditto for things like national will and morale. But it is not obvious to me that Ukrainian morale break before Russian morale, so long as both sides have the physical means to stay in the fight.
That's a very good point. I'm no expert here, I'm speculating. It just strikes me as very risky to count on a guy like Vladimir Putin having the humility to admit a screw-up, even if failing to do so causes immeasurably more pain. What might change that calculus is if the US withdraws support and Ukraine continues fighting effectively anyway. If he was counting on the US taking its thumb off the scales, and if that ends up not mattering, maybe he reassesses.
Oh I will freely admit that there are no *good* options, at least from the Ukrainian perspective. When your larger, more powerful neighbor decides to attack you, then you kind of have to pick your poison.
I feel obliged to point out that even if hypothetically Putin was close to admitting it would be in his interest to let everyone think he would not do so.
For my personal opinion…if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their country, I am comfortable giving them the means to do so.
Excellent analysis, I really enjoyed this. I don’t have time right now to give a fully thought out response-which this article certainly warrants-but I would like to offer a couple of thoughts. Let me preface these by saying that I’m a cautious supporter of the Trump administration (I’m not a “MAGA”, but i lean towards trumps goals/policies. To be clear, that isn’t intended as a full throated endorsement, just meant to offer perspective on my following thoughts.
1) it seems to me that it was Zelensky who broke the norm of having conversations like that behind closed doors, and the response of Trump and Vance was warranted. No leader should walk into the Oval Office and speak to our president that way in front of the camera, just as our president should never go to their country and do that either. Had Trump not berated him the way he did, his enemies would be talking about how weak he really is and using the “all you have to do is stand up to a bully, see” line. Zelensky was all the way out of line, he is who kept throwing verbal punches, and Trump and Vance sought to de-escalate until it became clear that Zelensky was intentionally being hostile-likely breaking an agreed upon approach to how that photo op was supposed to be staged. I could be wrong about that, and it could be Trump and Vance that set him up, but I find that hard to believe.
2) Regarding your comment about not liking a bully (I don’t either) and characterizing Putin as being the bully, a useful exercise in thinking through that framing is to consider that maybe the US is the bully right now and Putin is finally standing up to us. I’m not necessarily saying that is the case (though I’m not necessarily saying it isn’t the case, either) I’m only proposing it as a thought experiment. Given our terrible track record regarding the use of force since 1989 (though it would be fair to include Vietnam in that record) one could plausibly make the argument it is us being the bully. NATO expansion exploited Russian weakness after the fall of the Soviet Union for short term financial gain at the expense of long term strategic security for everyone involved. Hardly the act of a benevolent peace loving republic. We did all this in spite of promises we made to Russia to explicitly not do such a thing. A more exhaustive clarification is probably warranted, but as I intended this point as a thought experiment and not a defense of said perspective, I’ll leave it at that.
I wish I had more time to respond in further detail, as there is so much in this article that is very clear eyed and realistic about the situation and you are wresting with serious questions (not least the multi-polar question). These are the kinds of reasonable and informed discussions Americans need to be seriously having right now giving the changing nature of the global balance of power. “Orange man bad bully” and “woke war mongers are stupid” serves no one, and is, in fact, a great disservice to the American people. I hope your writing can inspire people of good will on your side of our current divide, and I hope mine can contribute to the same for people on mine, so that Americans can work together to navigate these troubling waters.
Thank you again for this great contribution. Cheers to you, sir.
Thanks so much for reading! Quick response to your points:
1) I didn’t register any real breach of decorum on Zelensky’s part, even when things got heated, but I’m more inclined to be sympathetic to him that to Trump. I think it’s important to remember that his people are watching too. The man still has to lead a country through a war. As much as he needs our help, he can’t just let his people see him groveling, so I’m inclined to cut him some slack there. Part of what I think rankled so many is that Americans genuinely aren’t used to face-to-face confrontation like that. Our political system largely shields our leaders from having to go one-on-one with opponents, so when we see it, it looks aggressive and makes us recoil. I think if we were Brits, used to a rambunctious, confrontational parliamentary system, this wouldn’t have registered as quite so newsworthy.
2) I don’t know how much credence to give this thesis. It’d be silly to pretend that we’re innocents in this, or that our motives are pure. But I think the European consensus is that it’s better to be on the American teat than under the Russian boot. Ukraine has experience with both, so they’re in a position to know. If you’re going to be somebody’s client state either way, I still lean toward thinking that we’re the better Daddy, so to speak.
My real problem with this is that nobody in the arm-Ukraine camp appears to have updated their thinking in the three years this conflict has been raging. What’s the endgame? What does detente look like? If Russia is to get all the way out, who’s going to make them do that? If we’re waiting on a “security guarantee,” what does that mean? We go to war if they cross the line again? Obviously, Trump isn’t going to sign onto that, and I don’t know that anyone should. Nobody seems to really know how to answer these questions, they just want want the on-the-ground realities to be more favorable.
If there was an actual adult sitting on one of those couches he or she at about the ten minute mark would have said something like “Mr. President, I think it’s time to get back in there and get this deal done” even stroking his ego to get back behind closed doors. But that doesn’t change your essential argument. There are three choices. 1) Provide the kind of assistance, which likely means NATO forces, needed for Ukraine to “win”. I think that way lies madness. 2) Find a solution that does give up territory but includes real security guarantees. Since Putin has demonstrated in the past that he takes that to mean he has to bide his time and when he acts again those guarantees will likely be meaningless, at some point in the future you have to actually be prepared to go to number 1. 3) Continue our present course, which as you suggest, means fighting to the last Ukrainian (and let’s not forget Russian conscripts). Not sure any of these are especially appealing. While I never underestimate Trump’s capacity for venality it would be nice to see all those outraged give their view on which of these they support, why, and whichever one it is that they actually commit to it as opposed to wanted a circle squared.
I'm not detecting a lot of clarity or fullness of thought here. Just Ukraine as the 90-min action movie good guy, and Russia as the classic bad guy. Which, to be fair, is exactly how I see things! But this isn't a 90-min action movie. If we keep looking for it to be one, a lot more people are going to get killed before we ultimately fall back on a messier resolution anyway.
Not a single person or government that has criticized Trump’s approach has any other ideas beyond either a) continuing to do what has manifestly not been working (at great expense of both lives and treasure), has no realistic prospect of ever working, and holds out the distinct prospect of eventually failing catastrophically, or b) getting us Americans to intervene directly, thereby kickstarting World War 3. All suggestions that we add Ukraine to NATO, or send peacekeepers, or “backstop” European peacekeepers amount to the same thing - committing us to direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine, which is manifestly not in our national interest.
Screw these people. They want to spend American lives and risk America in a war with a nuclear armed adversary in order to serve their own petty interests and/or delusions of importance. The Ukrainians thinking this way I can forgive, since they’re already in a death match and have nothing to lose, but the rest of the Europeans are the worst kind of grandstanding cream puffs. As Trump put it, “the problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy”. That comment could easily be extended to encompass most of the European ruling class. They’re powerless without us but can’t bring themselves to admit it, let alone take steps to do something about it, so they posture and moralize and pretend that their opinions actually matter - which they absolutely do not. That’s the real source of all their performative outrage.
I'd take issue with "manifestly has not been working." The problem, I think, is that it *has* been working, at least as much as the power players need it to. Is it going to defeat Russia? No. But neither was sending machine guns to the Mujahadeen. It's weakening Russia enough to be good for us, and our defense sector gets a market windfall. And it's an easy sell, both to normie conservatives who hate Russia and to liberals who think that being right is the same as doing the right thing. My heart is with them, tbh, I'm just not seeing an endgame with this strategy that doesn't lead to hundreds of thousands more deaths, at minimum.
I do not think that it is reasonable at this point to argue that it has weakened Russia; quite the opposite actually. The Russian army is now larger, more experienced, and better equipped than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union. Three years ago the idea of them taking on NATO with conventional forces was laughable. Today it’s far less so. Part of the reason is that we’ve actually done to ourselves to some extent what we planned to do to them - we’ve drawn down our weapons stocks to dangerous levels (some European militaries have practically disarmed themselves; the British for example functionally have no field artillery left), while largely failing to solve various production bottlenecks and defense supply chain issues. Meanwhile, Russia has successfully transitioned to a red hot war economy that’s out-producing all of NATO combined in such critical areas as artillery shells, gun barrels, drones and missiles.
Yes, they’ve taken casualties, and their economy is certainly dangerously overheated, but by almost any measure they’re a bigger threat now than they were before the war. Meanwhile we’re the ones who are starting to both look and feel overextended and overcommitted. Europe is in a fiscal straitjacket, caught between rising populism and an expensive welfare state they can neither afford to pay for nor roll back lest they trigger uprisings (which might not be strictly electoral ones), and we’re not much better off with interest payments on the debt soon to cost more than our military does. Frankly we set out to humiliate Russia, and seem to have instead mainly succeeded in humiliating ourselves. The sooner we extricate ourselves from the situation, preferably by ending the war before Russia wins a complete strategic victory, the better off we’ll be.
The US and Europe have a combined GDP 23 times higher than that of Russia. They might be running hot on war industries right now, but the economic realities are going to limit what’s possible in the event of a wider (non-nuclear) conflict. A land war that ventured farther into western Europe would be a game-changer in terms of global sentiment. You’d start to see western economies retooling for war production, and Russia would struggle to match. Putin can still (somewhat credibly) claim that he has no designs on territories that shouldn’t be part of Russia anyway. If he invades Poland, or eastern Germany, that pretense vanishes.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Certainly, Russia is more prepared for war than Europe. And better temperamentally suited to it. Maybe that earns him a speedy knockout punch. But if not, a prolonged land war in Europe would be devastating for Russia, even if it went very well at first. Ideally, I’d prefer we not find out!
I imagine that in the event of a hot war, you are right - we’d go to a war economy and eventually we would most likely outproduce the Russians. But I don’t think Putin has any desire to pick a fight directly with NATO unless he has to. The point was more that if the plan was to weaken Russia with a proxy war, it has backfired spectacularly and in fact we are the ones who’ve been materially weakened relative to Russia. And that’s to say nothing of the opportunity costs and geopolitical repercussions we’ve incurred, in particular driving Russia closer to China, Iran and North Korea - especially China. That has been a catastrophe in terms of what our national interests actually are that far outweighs any benefit we might have gotten from weakening Russia, and we didn’t even manage to actually do that. We’ve done nothing but lose in Ukraine - money, credibility and weapons, plus weakening our geostrategic position relative to China. And there’s nothing at all to show for it. We need to get out of this quagmire and reset our relationship with both Russia and Europe, which has gotten far too comfortable in recent years trying to drag us into strategically questionable quagmires like Libya, Syria and now Ukraine.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that the sort of people who created this situation and appear bent on perpetuating it see things that way. After all, you’re not wrong to observe that the defense industry is winning either way (Eisenhower was only too right to warn about the military-industrial complex).
Anyway I don’t want to come across as overly argumentative here, I just like a good debate. I appreciate the engagement and have been enjoying your writing.
I appreciate your perspective on this. Thanks for commenting. It seems to be a very common problem re American engagement in war (whether direct or indirect): we involve ourselves in conflicts based on a set of premises then refuse to update our thinking despite changing conditions on the ground. Three years ago, it made sense (IMO) to arm Ukraine in the hopes that Putin would take his ball and go home. But if he’s not doing that, don’t we need a new strategy that isn’t just War Forever? Many apparently don’t think so.
Allowing Europe to have free healthcare and other social benefits denied to our citizens because we provide their defense is beyond stupid and is ending no matter what anyone thinks.
Paying for the defense of Europe. Here’s the math. EU’s GDP is $19T. Russia’s is $2T. If the EU spent 3% of GDP on defense that would total $570B. If Russia tried to match that effort it would take 28% of their output. Obviously impossible. Europe can easily defend itself.
The assurance that Jelensky is seeking is that we will send in our troops if Putin breaches the agreement. No American president including Trump and Biden would or could give him that assurance because it’s a de facto NATO membership. People don’t seem to understand what is being negotiated. We have no idea if Putin will stick to any agreement he makes (and he is not to be trusted) so we can’t commit to an armed response by our troops due to his perfidy. We can only say that if it does happen we will continue to supply weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
It is a very difficult time for our nation where most now have no experience of military service and no desire that their children or grandchildren ever have that experience and yet are forced to struggle with our relationship to an ongoing European war. I have nothing but contempt for those who urge us to support a war with no intention to actually ever have to suffer from the consequences of their urging.
Allowing Europe to have free healthcare and other social benefits denied to our citizens because we provide their defense is beyond stupid and is ending no matter what anyone thinks.
Paying for the defense of Europe. Here’s the math. EU’s GDP is $19T. Russia’s is $2T. If the EU spent 3% of GDP on defense that would total $570B. If Russia tried to match that effort it would take 28% of their output. Obviously impossible. Europe can easily defend itself.
The assurance that Jelensky is seeking is that we will send in our troops if Putin breaches the agreement. No American president including Trump and Biden would or could give him that assurance because it’s a de facto NATO membership. People don’t seem to understand what is being negotiated. We have no idea if Putin will stick to any agreement he makes (and he is not to be trusted) so we can’t commit to an armed response by our troops to his perfidy. We can only say that if it does happen we will continue to supply weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
It is a very difficult time for our nation where most now have no experience of military service and no desire that their children or grandchildren ever have that experience and yet are forced to struggle with our relationship to an ongoing European war. I have nothing but contempt for those who urge us to support a war with no intention to actually ever have to suffer from the consequences of their urging.
Kinda feel like comparing the Ukraine war to historic protracted conflicts undersells the difference in scale. The USSR suffered 15k dead in 10 years in Afghanistan before they threw in the towel. Reliable numbers for the current war are hard to come by, but any estimate has Russia suffering far more in a third as much time. The fact nations are historically reluctant to admit defeat in smaller conflicts does not mean they wont due so in larger conflicts.
Obviously no one can credibly predict how long the Russian war economy (or the Ukrainian one for that matter) can last. Ditto for things like national will and morale. But it is not obvious to me that Ukrainian morale break before Russian morale, so long as both sides have the physical means to stay in the fight.
That's a very good point. I'm no expert here, I'm speculating. It just strikes me as very risky to count on a guy like Vladimir Putin having the humility to admit a screw-up, even if failing to do so causes immeasurably more pain. What might change that calculus is if the US withdraws support and Ukraine continues fighting effectively anyway. If he was counting on the US taking its thumb off the scales, and if that ends up not mattering, maybe he reassesses.
Oh I will freely admit that there are no *good* options, at least from the Ukrainian perspective. When your larger, more powerful neighbor decides to attack you, then you kind of have to pick your poison.
I feel obliged to point out that even if hypothetically Putin was close to admitting it would be in his interest to let everyone think he would not do so.
For my personal opinion…if Ukrainians are willing to fight for their country, I am comfortable giving them the means to do so.
Excellent analysis, I really enjoyed this. I don’t have time right now to give a fully thought out response-which this article certainly warrants-but I would like to offer a couple of thoughts. Let me preface these by saying that I’m a cautious supporter of the Trump administration (I’m not a “MAGA”, but i lean towards trumps goals/policies. To be clear, that isn’t intended as a full throated endorsement, just meant to offer perspective on my following thoughts.
1) it seems to me that it was Zelensky who broke the norm of having conversations like that behind closed doors, and the response of Trump and Vance was warranted. No leader should walk into the Oval Office and speak to our president that way in front of the camera, just as our president should never go to their country and do that either. Had Trump not berated him the way he did, his enemies would be talking about how weak he really is and using the “all you have to do is stand up to a bully, see” line. Zelensky was all the way out of line, he is who kept throwing verbal punches, and Trump and Vance sought to de-escalate until it became clear that Zelensky was intentionally being hostile-likely breaking an agreed upon approach to how that photo op was supposed to be staged. I could be wrong about that, and it could be Trump and Vance that set him up, but I find that hard to believe.
2) Regarding your comment about not liking a bully (I don’t either) and characterizing Putin as being the bully, a useful exercise in thinking through that framing is to consider that maybe the US is the bully right now and Putin is finally standing up to us. I’m not necessarily saying that is the case (though I’m not necessarily saying it isn’t the case, either) I’m only proposing it as a thought experiment. Given our terrible track record regarding the use of force since 1989 (though it would be fair to include Vietnam in that record) one could plausibly make the argument it is us being the bully. NATO expansion exploited Russian weakness after the fall of the Soviet Union for short term financial gain at the expense of long term strategic security for everyone involved. Hardly the act of a benevolent peace loving republic. We did all this in spite of promises we made to Russia to explicitly not do such a thing. A more exhaustive clarification is probably warranted, but as I intended this point as a thought experiment and not a defense of said perspective, I’ll leave it at that.
I wish I had more time to respond in further detail, as there is so much in this article that is very clear eyed and realistic about the situation and you are wresting with serious questions (not least the multi-polar question). These are the kinds of reasonable and informed discussions Americans need to be seriously having right now giving the changing nature of the global balance of power. “Orange man bad bully” and “woke war mongers are stupid” serves no one, and is, in fact, a great disservice to the American people. I hope your writing can inspire people of good will on your side of our current divide, and I hope mine can contribute to the same for people on mine, so that Americans can work together to navigate these troubling waters.
Thank you again for this great contribution. Cheers to you, sir.
Thanks so much for reading! Quick response to your points:
1) I didn’t register any real breach of decorum on Zelensky’s part, even when things got heated, but I’m more inclined to be sympathetic to him that to Trump. I think it’s important to remember that his people are watching too. The man still has to lead a country through a war. As much as he needs our help, he can’t just let his people see him groveling, so I’m inclined to cut him some slack there. Part of what I think rankled so many is that Americans genuinely aren’t used to face-to-face confrontation like that. Our political system largely shields our leaders from having to go one-on-one with opponents, so when we see it, it looks aggressive and makes us recoil. I think if we were Brits, used to a rambunctious, confrontational parliamentary system, this wouldn’t have registered as quite so newsworthy.
2) I don’t know how much credence to give this thesis. It’d be silly to pretend that we’re innocents in this, or that our motives are pure. But I think the European consensus is that it’s better to be on the American teat than under the Russian boot. Ukraine has experience with both, so they’re in a position to know. If you’re going to be somebody’s client state either way, I still lean toward thinking that we’re the better Daddy, so to speak.
My real problem with this is that nobody in the arm-Ukraine camp appears to have updated their thinking in the three years this conflict has been raging. What’s the endgame? What does detente look like? If Russia is to get all the way out, who’s going to make them do that? If we’re waiting on a “security guarantee,” what does that mean? We go to war if they cross the line again? Obviously, Trump isn’t going to sign onto that, and I don’t know that anyone should. Nobody seems to really know how to answer these questions, they just want want the on-the-ground realities to be more favorable.
If there was an actual adult sitting on one of those couches he or she at about the ten minute mark would have said something like “Mr. President, I think it’s time to get back in there and get this deal done” even stroking his ego to get back behind closed doors. But that doesn’t change your essential argument. There are three choices. 1) Provide the kind of assistance, which likely means NATO forces, needed for Ukraine to “win”. I think that way lies madness. 2) Find a solution that does give up territory but includes real security guarantees. Since Putin has demonstrated in the past that he takes that to mean he has to bide his time and when he acts again those guarantees will likely be meaningless, at some point in the future you have to actually be prepared to go to number 1. 3) Continue our present course, which as you suggest, means fighting to the last Ukrainian (and let’s not forget Russian conscripts). Not sure any of these are especially appealing. While I never underestimate Trump’s capacity for venality it would be nice to see all those outraged give their view on which of these they support, why, and whichever one it is that they actually commit to it as opposed to wanted a circle squared.
I'm not detecting a lot of clarity or fullness of thought here. Just Ukraine as the 90-min action movie good guy, and Russia as the classic bad guy. Which, to be fair, is exactly how I see things! But this isn't a 90-min action movie. If we keep looking for it to be one, a lot more people are going to get killed before we ultimately fall back on a messier resolution anyway.
Fantastic and I loved it.
Not a single person or government that has criticized Trump’s approach has any other ideas beyond either a) continuing to do what has manifestly not been working (at great expense of both lives and treasure), has no realistic prospect of ever working, and holds out the distinct prospect of eventually failing catastrophically, or b) getting us Americans to intervene directly, thereby kickstarting World War 3. All suggestions that we add Ukraine to NATO, or send peacekeepers, or “backstop” European peacekeepers amount to the same thing - committing us to direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine, which is manifestly not in our national interest.
Screw these people. They want to spend American lives and risk America in a war with a nuclear armed adversary in order to serve their own petty interests and/or delusions of importance. The Ukrainians thinking this way I can forgive, since they’re already in a death match and have nothing to lose, but the rest of the Europeans are the worst kind of grandstanding cream puffs. As Trump put it, “the problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy”. That comment could easily be extended to encompass most of the European ruling class. They’re powerless without us but can’t bring themselves to admit it, let alone take steps to do something about it, so they posture and moralize and pretend that their opinions actually matter - which they absolutely do not. That’s the real source of all their performative outrage.
I'd take issue with "manifestly has not been working." The problem, I think, is that it *has* been working, at least as much as the power players need it to. Is it going to defeat Russia? No. But neither was sending machine guns to the Mujahadeen. It's weakening Russia enough to be good for us, and our defense sector gets a market windfall. And it's an easy sell, both to normie conservatives who hate Russia and to liberals who think that being right is the same as doing the right thing. My heart is with them, tbh, I'm just not seeing an endgame with this strategy that doesn't lead to hundreds of thousands more deaths, at minimum.
I do not think that it is reasonable at this point to argue that it has weakened Russia; quite the opposite actually. The Russian army is now larger, more experienced, and better equipped than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union. Three years ago the idea of them taking on NATO with conventional forces was laughable. Today it’s far less so. Part of the reason is that we’ve actually done to ourselves to some extent what we planned to do to them - we’ve drawn down our weapons stocks to dangerous levels (some European militaries have practically disarmed themselves; the British for example functionally have no field artillery left), while largely failing to solve various production bottlenecks and defense supply chain issues. Meanwhile, Russia has successfully transitioned to a red hot war economy that’s out-producing all of NATO combined in such critical areas as artillery shells, gun barrels, drones and missiles.
Yes, they’ve taken casualties, and their economy is certainly dangerously overheated, but by almost any measure they’re a bigger threat now than they were before the war. Meanwhile we’re the ones who are starting to both look and feel overextended and overcommitted. Europe is in a fiscal straitjacket, caught between rising populism and an expensive welfare state they can neither afford to pay for nor roll back lest they trigger uprisings (which might not be strictly electoral ones), and we’re not much better off with interest payments on the debt soon to cost more than our military does. Frankly we set out to humiliate Russia, and seem to have instead mainly succeeded in humiliating ourselves. The sooner we extricate ourselves from the situation, preferably by ending the war before Russia wins a complete strategic victory, the better off we’ll be.
The US and Europe have a combined GDP 23 times higher than that of Russia. They might be running hot on war industries right now, but the economic realities are going to limit what’s possible in the event of a wider (non-nuclear) conflict. A land war that ventured farther into western Europe would be a game-changer in terms of global sentiment. You’d start to see western economies retooling for war production, and Russia would struggle to match. Putin can still (somewhat credibly) claim that he has no designs on territories that shouldn’t be part of Russia anyway. If he invades Poland, or eastern Germany, that pretense vanishes.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Certainly, Russia is more prepared for war than Europe. And better temperamentally suited to it. Maybe that earns him a speedy knockout punch. But if not, a prolonged land war in Europe would be devastating for Russia, even if it went very well at first. Ideally, I’d prefer we not find out!
I imagine that in the event of a hot war, you are right - we’d go to a war economy and eventually we would most likely outproduce the Russians. But I don’t think Putin has any desire to pick a fight directly with NATO unless he has to. The point was more that if the plan was to weaken Russia with a proxy war, it has backfired spectacularly and in fact we are the ones who’ve been materially weakened relative to Russia. And that’s to say nothing of the opportunity costs and geopolitical repercussions we’ve incurred, in particular driving Russia closer to China, Iran and North Korea - especially China. That has been a catastrophe in terms of what our national interests actually are that far outweighs any benefit we might have gotten from weakening Russia, and we didn’t even manage to actually do that. We’ve done nothing but lose in Ukraine - money, credibility and weapons, plus weakening our geostrategic position relative to China. And there’s nothing at all to show for it. We need to get out of this quagmire and reset our relationship with both Russia and Europe, which has gotten far too comfortable in recent years trying to drag us into strategically questionable quagmires like Libya, Syria and now Ukraine.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that the sort of people who created this situation and appear bent on perpetuating it see things that way. After all, you’re not wrong to observe that the defense industry is winning either way (Eisenhower was only too right to warn about the military-industrial complex).
Anyway I don’t want to come across as overly argumentative here, I just like a good debate. I appreciate the engagement and have been enjoying your writing.
I appreciate your perspective on this. Thanks for commenting. It seems to be a very common problem re American engagement in war (whether direct or indirect): we involve ourselves in conflicts based on a set of premises then refuse to update our thinking despite changing conditions on the ground. Three years ago, it made sense (IMO) to arm Ukraine in the hopes that Putin would take his ball and go home. But if he’s not doing that, don’t we need a new strategy that isn’t just War Forever? Many apparently don’t think so.
Allowing Europe to have free healthcare and other social benefits denied to our citizens because we provide their defense is beyond stupid and is ending no matter what anyone thinks.
Paying for the defense of Europe. Here’s the math. EU’s GDP is $19T. Russia’s is $2T. If the EU spent 3% of GDP on defense that would total $570B. If Russia tried to match that effort it would take 28% of their output. Obviously impossible. Europe can easily defend itself.
The assurance that Jelensky is seeking is that we will send in our troops if Putin breaches the agreement. No American president including Trump and Biden would or could give him that assurance because it’s a de facto NATO membership. People don’t seem to understand what is being negotiated. We have no idea if Putin will stick to any agreement he makes (and he is not to be trusted) so we can’t commit to an armed response by our troops due to his perfidy. We can only say that if it does happen we will continue to supply weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
It is a very difficult time for our nation where most now have no experience of military service and no desire that their children or grandchildren ever have that experience and yet are forced to struggle with our relationship to an ongoing European war. I have nothing but contempt for those who urge us to support a war with no intention to actually ever have to suffer from the consequences of their urging.
Allowing Europe to have free healthcare and other social benefits denied to our citizens because we provide their defense is beyond stupid and is ending no matter what anyone thinks.
Paying for the defense of Europe. Here’s the math. EU’s GDP is $19T. Russia’s is $2T. If the EU spent 3% of GDP on defense that would total $570B. If Russia tried to match that effort it would take 28% of their output. Obviously impossible. Europe can easily defend itself.
The assurance that Jelensky is seeking is that we will send in our troops if Putin breaches the agreement. No American president including Trump and Biden would or could give him that assurance because it’s a de facto NATO membership. People don’t seem to understand what is being negotiated. We have no idea if Putin will stick to any agreement he makes (and he is not to be trusted) so we can’t commit to an armed response by our troops to his perfidy. We can only say that if it does happen we will continue to supply weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
It is a very difficult time for our nation where most now have no experience of military service and no desire that their children or grandchildren ever have that experience and yet are forced to struggle with our relationship to an ongoing European war. I have nothing but contempt for those who urge us to support a war with no intention to actually ever have to suffer from the consequences of their urging.