At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.Redbrickbear said:Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"whiterock said:Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.Doc Holliday said: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.whiterock said: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.Doc Holliday said:I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.whiterock said: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).Doc Holliday said:Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.whiterock said: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....)Doc Holliday said: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.whiterock said:bad foreign policy decisions will not solve our fiscal problems. it will make them worse.Doc Holliday said:Taxpayer aid, provided by a collective populace that has over $1.4 trillion in credit card debt compounding.whiterock said:
Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump adminand there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S
— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024
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.
Nothing is more expensive than getting directly involved in a hot war.Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.
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.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.
This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.
— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018
Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.
It most certainly is.
Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.
Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.
But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.
I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well
another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.
