Doc Holliday said:
whiterock said:
Doc Holliday said:
whiterock said:
Doc Holliday said:
whiterock said:
Doc Holliday said:
whiterock said:
Doc Holliday said:
whiterock said:
Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin
Taxpayer aid, provided by a collective populace that has over $1.4 trillion in credit card debt compounding.
Maybe it helps us to crush Russia in the long term, but if the long term is to fleece taxpayers and have our government increasingly behave like a cartel, then what the fu c k is the point? Is the end point where the US ironically starts behaving like an eastern country?
As I correctly predicted, this war is going to be another forever war. It's already gone on too long.
Is the west really going to achieve complete world dominance, only to sink their teeth into their own middle class? Are we supposed to cheer that on and be happy about it? The WEF, EU and our politicians blatantly claim that we'll own nothing and be happy about it and they're the biggest cheerleaders of this war.
bad foreign policy decisions will not solve our fiscal problems. it will make them worse.
Nothing is more expensive than getting directly involved in a hot war.
Yeah but that's not what I'm saying. Elite corporate and banking interests are running the country much like oligarchs do in the east.
The difference is, we have a system where ordinary people can organize and speak and push back against oligarchy to elect a guy like Donald Trump. (a lot of people voted for Obama for the same (mistaken) reasons.)
We're prioritizing foreign policy over domestic and have been for quite some time. We'll spend trillions on war and allow the middle class to hollow out.
Well, sorta. Foreign policy on national security is not causing that. Foreign policy on trade is.
Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)
Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.
Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.
Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.
Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.
DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.
If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.
The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.
yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).
If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.
Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.
There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.
I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.
I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.
It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.
Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?
What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?
Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.
The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.
Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......
History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.
You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
I'm not going to surrender a fight that needs fighting because I don't like the general. I'm going to replace the general in order to fight better.
This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.
Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
Trump pandered to anti-war sentiments to win an election. After he won, he immediately pivoted to policy. That's what good leaders do. They do what they have to do to win, because one only gets to govern if one wins.
Ukraine policy critics are understandably frustrated because they ran afoul of an old adage: "never listen to your own propaganda....you might start to believe it." The list of their terribly bad takes is long:
-Russia is not a responsible power which has been wronged.
-Nato/EU is not an expansionist power in the least.
-Neither Nato nor EU sponsored a coup in Ukraine.
-Neither Nato nor Ukraine did anything to provoke Russia to war.
-Russia does not have any right to own any part of Ukraine whatsoever.
-Russia had no casus belli whatsoever to invade any part of Ukraine.
-It would be madness for Nato to take no action to stop Russia in Ukraine.
(I could go on for a bit with this list)
Trump is not going to open his administration with a loss in Ukraine. He's going to try to force Russia to the negotiating table by threatening to escalate against Russia. That is the proper step here. Russia has badly weakened itself. It is mired in a war it cannot win, now fully mobilized and past peak production, having to tap foreign soldiers to try to keep pace with incredible daily losses, now running at or beyond 1500 troops per day. Under the Biden policy, Russia would have at most 18 months left before collapse. There is no reason we should have to wait that long or spend that much money to force a conclusion. We should escalate to force the conclusion sooner. Ukraine is in dire straits, too, but it can last longer than Russia because it has Nato support and Nato has far deeper pockets.
What needs to happen in the war in Ukraine is clear - Russia needs to lose it. Good news is, we are about to be past the Biden futzing around phase. Trump will get on with the business of concluding the war by making Russia come to the peace table to forestall an obvious impending loss.
