Quote (Goomshill @ Feb 26 2022 02:26pm)
Has there ever been a cause of misguided jingoism that you didn't support? Did you cheerlead the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen? Gotta support the troops, anyone who criticizes American foreign policy is a traitor, rename them freedom fries and liberty cabbage and ban the spice girls, amirite?
American foreign policy should be self-interested. Being pro-American means being against dumb decisions that don't serve our interests. How does help America in the short or long term to take such a bastardized half-measure as sending lethal arms to Ukraine that won't save the country without actual military intervention, which we refuse to take? When, historically, has flooding a conflict zone with American weaponry actually worked out to our advantage? What happens to those guns and missiles in 20 years? We are not willing to defend Ukraine, Biden said so in advance and declared NATO would not check Russia's aggressive expansion into Ukraine. Biden directly stated he would allow Putin to invade his neighbor and overthrow the """""democratically elected government""""" (aka installed via CIA-backed coup that overthrew the actually democratically elected).
So here we are throwing meaningless sanctions at a sanction-proof economy. We're expending every diplomatic escalation that has no actual impact, only posturing. Then we're going to send weapons which cannot actually stop an invasion, only make it more destructive and costly. Which means far more dead Ukrainians and some dead Russians, which means aggravating our relationship with Russia worse than the most dangerous era of the cold war. Its clearly, obviously, not in the interests of the Ukrainian people. They lived under Russian influence for the vast majority of their existence, only an 8 year stretch saw them aligned with the EU, and now you want them to fight to the bitter end- to the point of openly calling for child soldiers armed with little more than molotov cocktails. Going back to Russian masters for them is like "Tuesday". And for our own interests, it doesn't change our sphere of influence, it doesn't recapture Ukraine from Russia, its going to absolutely wreck EU energy markets and make us pay more at the pump, its going to destabilize global security and bring us closer to war.
The real patriots are the people who call out when their country is making a mistake, not cheer for it to go down the wrong path
The problem with this narrative is that Ukraine's government is democratically elected. Credible polls of Ukrainians back it up. Yanukovych was overthrown because he sold out his country to Russia. Support within Ukraine for Russia overlordship has declined even further since 2014. What Russia is doing today is reflection of military and political reality, but it can't be dressed up as a restoration of democratic governance, because it doesn't reflect the will of the Ukrainian demos.
We can have a discussion on what the right response is, and that response might be to do nothing, but arguments asserting moral equivalence are patently false. In the realm of moral norms, invading your neighbor is not the work of a friend. The Russians aren't there to overthrow Nazis, and they aren't there to effect the will of the Ukrainian people, one which ultimately rejects Russian interference into their internal affairs. The Russians are there because they cannot afford to allow Ukraine to escape from their orbit.
Does arming Ukraine present risks? Absolutely, but we have to weigh that against the risks of doing nothing. Russian success in Ukraine reopens the door to a multipolar world where nation-states resolve disputes with violence. That's a big shift from the world of the last ~30 years, where the United States maintained order with a mostly benevolent neoliberal fist.