There is a lot at stake for the west, including the United States, in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And the west has (mostly) responded accordingly, giving assistance to the Ukrainian government to solidify what has, to date, been a valiant defense of its homeland.
This is a pivotal moment in East-West relations, and the failure to stop Russia and Vladimir Putin’s ambitions here will mean they will have to be stopped elsewhere when he likely targets other former Soviet satellites in a quest to reestablish the old USSR empire.
The west must make a stand.
Thus, it’s interesting to see a new — and old — twist develop: An argument has emerged in the U.S. against sending more aid to Ukraine, calling instead to spend that money here at home instead.
Recently, the U.S. House approved a new $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, but it met a hurdle in the Senate thanks to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who argued that the bill “threaten(s) our own national security, and it’s frankly a slap in the face to millions of taxpayers who are struggling to buy gas, groceries and find baby formula.”
Then, the conservative Heritage Foundation surprisingly criticized the measure by saying it “recklessly (sends) our taxpayer dollars to a foreign nation without any accountability. (Also, it’s) fiscally irresponsible and the epitome of everything that is wrong with how Washington works today.”
This vaguely brings to mind the efforts of the isolationist America First Committee, which campaigned to keep the U.S. out of World War II in the two years prior to Pearl Harbor. The comparison isn’t exact by any means, but there are some similarities in spirit.
Prior to America’s 1941 entry into World War II, the America First movement worked to prevent the U.S. from getting into the new European war and to instead focus on building American defenses at home. The movement also opposed material assistance of any kind for Great Britain, which by the summer of 1940 was standing mostly alone against the Axis powers in Europe.
The approach then, much as Paul’s stand now, dismissed the principle of dealing with U.S. security issues abroad before they reached these shores or before they became even more complicated, as they inevitably did. History indicates that isolationism rarely, if ever, works as a long-term strategic security response.
Also, the Heritage Foundation’s fiscal argument that the money being spent on Ukraine should be matched by corresponding cuts in the budget is “disingenuous,” as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) labeled it. It’s a fallback argument to justify opposition to a bill, while such talk never surfaced during President Trump’s $1.8 trillion tax cut four years ago.
As the AEI noted, “The notion that the current price tag for weakening Russia is too high is preposterous. Throughout the decades of the Cold War, U.S. defense spending … hovered in the neighborhood of 10% of GDP. Today, defense spending is close to 4% of GDP — and the House-approved spending bill amounts to perhaps 5% of the Pentagon’s overall budget.”
So much is at stake in Ukraine today, and the U.S. has responded appropriately with aid, weapons and other supplies. Turning our war interest into a dollars-and-cents issue is a losing argument. In so many other ways, the cost of such shortsightedness would be far too high.
kmh
(3) comments
This is the first foreign war we’ve been involved in that’s made any sense since our meaningless fiasco in Vietnam.
Glory to Ukraine and our hopes for a rules-based world order!
It’s quite likely the Republicans will take the House and maybe even the Senate. And then they’ll likely do their best to defund Ukraine.
And I suspect they’ll be ready to change the filibuster to do it.
That’s too bad for Ukraine. And it will put on hold - at least for the time being - any progress toward a rules-based world order. But there is one bright spot for the cynical optimists among us to cling to.
High gas prices are here with us for a long while. Maybe forever.
And fortunately the rise in gas prices really isn’t all Biden’s fault. And just as fortunately, the voters’ likely changing of the guard in both houses of Congress and perhaps even in the White House won’t itself change reality.
I say this isn’t Biden’s fault, not because I’m a “true believer” in Biden. Rather, it’s because. I’m actually glad that gas prices will remain high. But I don’t credit Biden for this.
The fact that gas prices are high around the world is a fairly clear indication that Biden isn’t really responsible for this, and thus he won’t really be able to stop it.
And neither will any Republican. Trumpster or RINO.
This is because the geopolitical energy calculus has changed almost overnight. The need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels is now being driven by a desperate desire of free nations of the world to free themselves from their reliance on our worst enemies.
And eventually the whole world will likely follow to free themselves from reliance on fossil fuels as their alternatives become cheaper than the new cost of petroleum.
As a lifelong Capitolist I’m amused and delighted to see the Market begin to solve a problem that our politicians and their oil baron donors won’t: And that’s the clear and present threat of global warming.
There is long suffering ahead. Especially for the Ukrainians.
But our Planet has new hope…
SoDakD: You are a confused twisted up person with sorry outlook on life. Your facts are always off
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