Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

Bear8084 said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"

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.....

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic

---

Bear in mind that Whiterock is a professional disinformationist who has drunk way too much of his own kool-aid.

---

ROFL you might want to look in the mirror.

---

he's been silent for a few weeks, so I assumed that Russia had made some cuts in their propaganda budget. Apparently, not. Or at least not enough.

whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion. What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

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

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

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

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea) or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea

(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

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

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation

---

DC and Moscow both escalated in Ukraine....and I have condemned both for bringing us this expensive and bloody disaster

And its laughable and wrong to say the new government in Kyiv came to power in a "constitutional process"

It was a violent street coup that violated the current Ukrainian law at every turn

A former US Ambassador in Moscow describes the Maidan events in Kiev in 2014 as an illegal coup and states that the USA supported this putsch . pic.twitter.com/gf1SlcTKKL

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) May 25, 2022

whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

I keep coming back to the same conclusion. If Russia is really that much of a threat then you already have justification to engage in a direct hot/nuclear war with Russia. Forgot Ukraine vs. Russia when you already have the justification for NATO/US vs. Russia.

Why not advocate for that? It seems worse to consistently have proxy wars and spats every few decades than to just wipe them off the map. Surely you want to see the absolute destruction of Russia right? Is Russia not a big enough threat to warrant US troops on the ground?

Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

If Russia is really that much of a threat then you already have justification to engage in a direct hot/nuclear war with Russia.

Why not advocate for that?

---

Because they know it would make them look absolutely insane to go around telling the American people we need a hot war with nuclear armed Russia

So they dance around the issue and push for proxy wars and coups in the Russian backyard.

But of course make no mistake....neo-cons and Liberal interventionists want war with Russia...or at the very least regime change.

(all the more insane since Russia and its civilization are more compatible with the West than the Middle East or China......Russia could be an ally of the West in the right circumstances...but they would require the West to deal with Russia as it is....and not how we wish it would be)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/19/how-the-west-lost-the-peace-philipp-ther-book-review

Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

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.

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea)......
Irrelevant: on the date of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, RUSSIA controlled Crimea, so it did not need to invade Ukraine to obtain it.

or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea.
(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)
Russian nationals are only 20% of the Ukrainian population. That is hardly a justification for an invasion.

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.
True. A point I've made here myself. But look at Finland: a territory of Sweden or Russia for back & forth thru history. After gaining Finland back (yet again) after losing a war) in 1809, Russia gave it statehood, for the first time in its history, making it a "Grand Dutchy" of Russia (i.e. part of Russian polity). Russia CREATED Finland. Does that not give them a comparable claim to it?

---

So Russia does have, by your own analysis, ample justification for intervening in, or outright owning Finland and Ukraine. And Finland actually poses a far greater geopolitical threat to Russia than Ukraine - its border is only 90mi from St Petersburg, Russias largest commercial port and one of Russia's 4 strategic naval ports. That's LESS than the distance from Sebastopol to the Ukrainian border.

Also: the entire Finnish border parallels the commo lines from Moscow to Murmansk, Russia's most important naval port (both Vladivostok, St Pete, and Sebastopol all have to transit one or more straits to enter the open ocean). For that reason, a hostile Finland is an existential threat to the entirety of Russian naval operations. Loss of Murmansk will, best case (for Russia), force Russian ships into internment at some "neutral" port. And Finland is a threat to the Russian heartland as well. The Finnish border is only 480 miles from Moscow, as compared to Estonia (410mi) and Latvia (380mi). Finland is still a greater threat than the Baltics, given its far more secure lines of supply to Nato and greater strategic depth.

There is no national security calculation to justify a Russian invasion of Ukraine which does not also justify invading Finland..... So why Ukraine first? (Russia thought it could present the West with a fait accompli.)

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

---

So Russia does have, by your own analysis, ample justification for intervening in, or outright owning Finland and Ukraine. And Finland actually poses a far greater geopolitical threat to Russia than Ukraine - its border is only 90mi from St Petersburg,

---

Finland does not have millions of ethnic russians living inside its borders

Finland is not the home of the Russian Black Sea Naval base

Finland is not the historic center of the Russian nation and civilization (Kievan Russ, etc.)

And most importantly Finland was accepted into the EU and now into NATO with no major objections from Moscow

Russia let Finland go and its now firmly in the Western orbit

Russia is fighting like hell for Ukraine

See the difference?

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion. What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.

---

LOL the reflexive recto-cranial inversion.

If Russia wanted a buffer zone, it should not have invaded Ukraine, which was a lesser status than Finland and Sweden = Nato-partners who had already joined the EU (shortly after the fall of the USSR).

Why didn't Russia invade Finland or Sweden for joining the EU while being a Nato partner? If we accept your premise that Ukraine was a threat to Russia, then Finland and Sweden were even more proximate threats to Russia (closer to strategic Russian assets). Why did Russia not invade them, instead?

For that matter, Ukraine obtained its Nato-partner status in 1994. So why did it take nearly 20 years for that to become a pretext for war?

---

Because Russia wasn't opposed to the EU or the Partnership for Peace. They also became NATO partners in 1994 along with those others (in fact Russia was the first to join).

Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea) or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea

(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.

---

So you admit that Russia is Ukraine rather than Ukraine is Russia???

Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

---

So Russia does have, by your own analysis, ample justification for intervening in, or outright owning Finland and Ukraine. And Finland actually poses a far greater geopolitical threat to Russia than Ukraine - its border is only 90mi from St Petersburg,

---

Finland does not have millions of ethnic russians living inside its borders

Finland is not the home of the Russian Black Sea Naval base

Finland is not the historic center of the Russian nation and civilization (Kievan Russ, etc.)

And most importantly Finland was accepted into the EU and now into NATO with no major objections from Moscow

Russia let Finland go and its now firmly in the Western orbit

Russia is fighting like hell for Ukraine

See the difference?

---

Russians aren't the producer of Russian Naval ships at the Russian Black Sea naval base...historically.

Russians weren't the scientists that developed Russian Military technology....writ large

Russia wasn't borne in Russia..

Things going "swimmingly" in Mighty Russia.....

A potentially regime-ending showdown is brewing in the Russian government today as the Russian Duma is trying to stop the Central Bank's proposal to confiscate all funds from every citizen's bank account of any balance over 1.4 million rubles ($13,300).

Popcorn. pic.twitter.com/rQOSVR1T2G

— SPRAVDI — Stratcom Centre (@StratcomCentre) January 14, 2025

😅 In Russia, TV programs have been interrupted and a terrifying message about an alleged coup d'etat is being shown. pic.twitter.com/ZCuljanDpP

— MAKS 24 🇺🇦👀 (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) January 14, 2025

The Russians are once again complaining about trench candles packed with explosives that are being sent to them from Russia. These candles have been found to contain TNT and are filled with bolts. pic.twitter.com/C3mqTtbtSc

— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated) January 14, 2025

trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea) or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea

(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.

---

So you admit that Russia is Ukraine rather than Ukraine is Russia???

---

Settlers from Kyiv founded Moscow

Both States claim historic links to the old Kieven Russ State

The point being that it's of immense importance to Moscow….far more than Finland ever was or could be

It's their Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Valley forge, Gettysburg all rolled into one.

Extremely important for cultural-historic reasons
(Along with economic and strategic reasons)

They were always going to fight for it.

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

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Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

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LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia. We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government. We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe. We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway). We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians. Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move. About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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whiterock said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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and Russia cannot maintain an international presence with its old, rotted out fleet.

Ursa Major cargo ship used by Russian MOD sinks in the Western Med:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/24/europe/russia-cargo-ship-sinks-intl/index.html

Russian Freighter Ursa Major successfully promoted to Submarine. https://t.co/7CM66KNOTf pic.twitter.com/qcQynln5Dt

— C Schmitz (@chrisschmitz) December 24, 2024

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How do these endless stories of Russian military incompetence and equipment, logistics, and command failures square with your sides assertion that Russia is some kind of great military threat that is gonna conquer Poland if we don't stage coups all around their border lands?

Its almost like russia is a rapidly demographically declining nation...with a really corrupt government....with a very weak military

We are as likely to find russian soldiers on the surface of the moon as we are finding them taking over Poland or Germany

They could not even win a war for the Gov. of Syria.....when Iranian forces and Shi'ite militia men were doing 90% of the actual front line fighting.

---

Everything you say about Russian military incompetence is correct. Yet, still, they are destroying trillions of dollars of property, wounding millions people, and killing hundreds of thousands of people in foreign lands, refusing to understand what you are saying about how incompetent they are. They are big enough to win despite being oafishly inefficient in the art of war. Think Chuck Wepner.

When an army invades your country, you have to destroy it. Doing so will cost you a lot of money, a lot of lives, and a lot of destroyed property, no matter how incompetent that army was, no matter how recklessly misguided was their decision to start a war they couldn't win. So you take precautions to deter. You build an army fearsome enough to persuade even the stupid that it's pointless to test you. You build alliances. And, when someone stupid does something stupid, you do not stand back and say "well that was stupid, they are no threat to us." You take such action as is necessary to destroy stupid right where it is, preferably using proxies rather than your own troops.

The one thing you do not do is let stupid advance all they way up next to you. They will probably make more stupid decisions. Indeed, they will likely think that if you are stupid enough to let them advance, you are more stupid than you look, and pick a fight they cannot win, costing you trillions of dollars and millions of lives to demonstrate that you are less stupid than them.

Your views here are very, very dangerous, exactly the kinds of disengagement policies that entice lesser opponents to do things that force you into wars.

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Just to add some things closer to my world . . . Russia will always have oil and gas and far more international influence than most know. It also will have for the foreseeable future vicious leaders many of whom will always dream of reconstituting something like the Soviet Empire (realistic or not)

---

Interesting…possibly right

And if Russia is not going away then why should DC not try to work/get along with Russia in some way?

Vs say trying to pull more counties out of its sphere of influence by any means necessary?

DC seems dead set on a course of conflict with Russia.

And of course this is a very dangerous situation since both countries have nuclear weapons

---

Russia (Putin) doesn't want a stronger relationship and never has

---

and we didn't try "to pull more countries out of its sphere of influence."

Redbrick (along with nearly all Ukraine policy critics) has a very elementary cause-effect error underpinning his argument. We are not dead-set on a course of conflict with Russia; Russia is dead set on a course of conflict with us. We didn't court or swoop in or cajole the former WP and USSR states into NATO. Each and every single one of those countries fled to our sphere of influence the moment they got clear of Russia, because they knew full well what would happen to them if they didn't. In fact, we refrained from building permanent bases in any of those countries in order to signal to Russia that we were not attempting to threaten them. Nato membership for the Baltics & former WP states was merely a "don't tread on me" sign.

There is no lie quite as large as the idea that the west provoked Russia into invading its neighbors. Invading its neighbors is just what Russia does whenever it thinks it can get by with it.

---

Some of these folks truly believe that (1) doing anything opposed to what Russia wants is provoking Russia,

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And some people think provoking Russia by moving bases and military alliance networks right up to their border is good policy

Interesting that very intelligent people thought that policy was essentially insane...and that the US had little geostrategic priorities east of the Bug River

["It is not possible to bring Russia into the international system by conversion," Kissinger told The Atlantic in 2016. "It requires deal-making, but also understanding. It is a unique and complicated society. Russia must be dealt with by closing its military options, but in a way that affords it dignity in terms of its own history."

In a July 2022 interview with Der Spiegel, Kissinger was flummoxed when asked to find an "instructive" historical precedent "for understanding and ending the war in Ukraine."

"Right off the top of my head, I cannot give a direct answer," Kissinger responded. "Because the war in Ukraine is on one level a war about the balance of power. But on another level, it has aspects of a civil war, and it combines a classically European type of international problem with a totally global one. When this war is over, the issue will be whether Russia achieves a coherent relationship with Europe -- which it has always sought -- or whether it will become an outpost of Asia at the border of Europe."]

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Russia cannot control and has no right to control how other European countries defend themselves. Whether other countries are building up their own military or relying in part on the U.S., it doesn't matter.

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If the U.S. is going to stage/sponsor coups in countries on Russia's door step there is going to be conflict

Why do you want conflict with a large nuclear armed State?

When did the American people get consulted on this kind of policy?

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Russia sponsored coups in Cuba, Central America, and South America and all around the rest of the world.

And I dispute we "sponsored" coups in Europe. We've taken the side of freedom and supported the right to express and protest.

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I'll let Whiterock respond to that:

Quote:

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By design, covert non-lethal stuff does not make the news very often. How silly it would be to think the West took no effort to generate and/or assist the various periods of unrest in East Europe. Ya really think Solidarnosc did its thing without any help at all?

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

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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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia. We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government. We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe. We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway). We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians. Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move. About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.

---

Like Whiterock said, propagandists gonna propagandandist.

Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

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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.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

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I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

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The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

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No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion. What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.

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That's a completely illogical reason if that's what's driving the anti-Ukraine side. That's not how a nuclear war is or would be fought. This is about economic power and control. Has been since their puppet Yanukovych was ousted the first time by the people of Ukraine. NATO has just been a convenient ruse for the Russian spin masters.

Sam Lowry said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

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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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

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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.
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.

---

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.

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Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

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Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

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LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia. We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government. We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe. We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway). We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians. Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move. About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.

---

Who is "we"? This has been debunked so many times it's honestly beyond tiresome. You guys think some NGO with pamphlets and a YouTube account is the destruction of Ukraine. Russia showed up with special forces, tanks, and the FSB. And that was before the war was really escalated.

I posted this in the Bear Cave several days ago, and it applies here.

DC didn't stage a coup. The people of Ukraine tried to oust the same Russian puppet…twice. The first time Russia tried to poison his opponent (Yushchenko), then when they got him back to power they gave him (manufactured) the goods on his opponent who their puppet imprisoned (Tymoshenko), then when he was ousted again Russia started a war.

Proximity spheres are irrelevant in an interconnected world with the ability to instantly connect, exchange goods, transact business, and be anywhere in less than a day, not to mention strike militarily within hours anywhere in the world. Influencing peace broadly, and/or addressing conflict is a global not regional concern, especially when it impacts the U.S. or its allies directly. That does equate to a benefit for America and the American people from a security and economic perspective. Alignment matters. Do you know how much military and nuclear might we have in proximity to Beijing, China, or even already in proximity to Moscow? NATO military threat has been the biggest con job by Russian propaganda possibly ever due to the scale of their invasion. It's their Iraq WMD moment.

ATL Bear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia. We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government. We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe. We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway). We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians. Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move. About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.

---

Proximity spheres are irrelevant in an interconnected world with the ability to instantly connect, exchange goods, transact business, and be anywhere in less than a day, .

---

Disagree that spheres of influence have somehow disappeared just because technology has made travel and trade times shorter

They are and will always be a major part of international relations between great powers and regional powers

Moscow is always going to care about it's periphery

Just like Israel is always going to care about the Middle East and America is going to care about the Western Hemisphere

We ignore and dismiss them at our peril

ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia. We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government. We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe. We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway). We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians. Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move. About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.

---

Proximity spheres are irrelevant in an interconnected world with the ability to instantly connect, exchange goods, transact business, and be anywhere in less than a day, .

---

Disagree that spheres of influence have somehow disappeared just because technology has made travel and trade times shorter

They are and will always be a major part of international relations between great powers and regional powers

Moscow is always going to care about it's periphery

Just like Israel is always going to care about the Middle East and America is going to care about the Western Hemisphere

We ignore and dismiss them at our peril

---

I didn't say spheres of influence disappeared. I said proximity of the sphere is irrelevant in the modern world. China is a classic example. A country with a limitation in certain natural resources exerts influence half a globe away to facilitate it, including investing in proxy wars, weaponry, and their special weapon the debt trap.

---

The failure of US interference in Ukraine and Afghanistan are primarily examples of how acting outside your sphere of influence invites failure and overreach

China or Russia might try to act outside their sphere….and they will waste money and resources doing so

Just like America often wastes money and lives when it gets involved in places it has little geo-strategic interests and even less historic significance in

Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia. We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government. We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe. We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway). We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians. Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move. About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.

---

Proximity spheres are irrelevant in an interconnected world with the ability to instantly connect, exchange goods, transact business, and be anywhere in less than a day, .

---

Disagree that spheres of influence have somehow disappeared just because technology has made travel and trade times shorter

They are and will always be a major part of international relations between great powers and regional powers

Moscow is always going to care about it's periphery

Just like Israel is always going to care about the Middle East and America is going to care about the Western Hemisphere

We ignore and dismiss them at our peril

---

I didn't say spheres of influence disappeared. I said proximity of the sphere is irrelevant in the modern world. China is a classic example. A country with a limitation in certain natural resources exerts influence half a globe away to facilitate it, including investing in proxy wars, weaponry, and their special weapon the debt trap.

---

The failure of US interference in Ukraine and Afghanistan are primarily examples of how acting outside your sphere of influence invites failure and overreach

China or Russia might try to act outside their sphere….and they will waste money and resources doing so

Just like America often wastes money and lives when it gets involved in places it has little geo-strategic interests and even less historic significance in

---

Don't confuse a tactical failure for a geo strategic failure. We failed at trying to make Afghanistan into East Jordan. We didn't fail at keeping it from being a terror encampment harbor, which was the original purpose we should have stuck with once achieved.

And I'd clearly say Russia has the geo strategic failure, with Ukraine the unfortunate victim of it.

ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia. We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government. We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe. We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway). We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians. Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move. About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.

---

Proximity spheres are irrelevant in an interconnected world with the ability to instantly connect, exchange goods, transact business, and be anywhere in less than a day, .

---

Disagree that spheres of influence have somehow disappeared just because technology has made travel and trade times shorter

They are and will always be a major part of international relations between great powers and regional powers

Moscow is always going to care about it's periphery

Just like Israel is always going to care about the Middle East and America is going to care about the Western Hemisphere

We ignore and dismiss them at our peril

---

I didn't say spheres of influence disappeared. I said proximity of the sphere is irrelevant in the modern world. China is a classic example. A country with a limitation in certain natural resources exerts influence half a globe away to facilitate it, including investing in proxy wars, weaponry, and their special weapon the debt trap.

---

The failure of US interference in Ukraine and Afghanistan are primarily examples of how acting outside your sphere of influence invites failure and overreach

China or Russia might try to act outside their sphere….and they will waste money and resources doing so

Just like America often wastes money and lives when it gets involved in places it has little geo-strategic interests and even less historic significance in

---

Don't confuse a tactical failure for a geo strategic failure. We failed at trying to make Afghanistan into East Jordan. We didn't fail at keeping it from being a terror encampment harbor, which was the original purpose we should have stuck with once achieved.

---

You do realize that not only are the Taliban back in control of Afghanistan

But Al Qaeda is back as well and restoring its former position there

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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whiterock said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Multiple outlets now reporting what I predicted - US aid to Ukraine will continue under Trump admin

and there it is.... pic.twitter.com/5WX6WNiG5S

— david D. (@secretsqrl123) December 20, 2024

---

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.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

---

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.
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.

---

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.

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
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

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

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.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia. We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government. We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe. We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway). We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians. Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move. About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.

---

Who is "we"? This has been debunked so many times it's honestly beyond tiresome. You guys think some NGO with pamphlets and a YouTube account is the destruction of Ukraine. Russia showed up with special forces, tanks, and the FSB. And that was before the war was really escalated.

I posted this in the Bear Cave several days ago, and it applies here.

DC didn't stage a coup. The people of Ukraine tried to oust the same Russian puppet…twice. The first time Russia tried to poison his opponent (Yushchenko), then when they got him back to power they gave him (manufactured) the goods on his opponent who their puppet imprisoned (Tymoshenko), then when he was ousted again Russia started a war.

Proximity spheres are irrelevant in an interconnected world with the ability to instantly connect, exchange goods, transact business, and be anywhere in less than a day, not to mention strike militarily within hours anywhere in the world. Influencing peace broadly, and/or addressing conflict is a global not regional concern, especially when it impacts the U.S. or its allies directly. That does equate to a benefit for America and the American people from a security and economic perspective. Alignment matters. Do you know how much military and nuclear might we have in proximity to Beijing, China, or even already in proximity to Moscow? NATO military threat has been the biggest con job by Russian propaganda possibly ever due to the scale of their invasion. It's their Iraq WMD moment.

---

You haven't debunked anything. You've bought into a narrative, just like the rest of the sheeple. Just like you did with Iraq WMD.

It's easy to say spheres of influence don't matter when your country has unrivaled ability to project power and you've never lived with a hostile neighbor on your border. Of course you're still all in favor of swallowing up Greenland, Panama, and anything else we can to keep Russia and China out of our hemisphere. Even you don't really believe what you're saying.

We all buy into narratives Sam.

But only our personal narrative is the ' right ' one.

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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and Russia cannot maintain an international presence with its old, rotted out fleet.

Ursa Major cargo ship used by Russian MOD sinks in the Western Med:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/24/europe/russia-cargo-ship-sinks-intl/index.html

Russian Freighter Ursa Major successfully promoted to Submarine. https://t.co/7CM66KNOTf pic.twitter.com/qcQynln5Dt

— C Schmitz (@chrisschmitz) December 24, 2024

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How do these endless stories of Russian military incompetence and equipment, logistics, and command failures square with your sides assertion that Russia is some kind of great military threat that is gonna conquer Poland if we don't stage coups all around their border lands?

Its almost like russia is a rapidly demographically declining nation...with a really corrupt government....with a very weak military

We are as likely to find russian soldiers on the surface of the moon as we are finding them taking over Poland or Germany

They could not even win a war for the Gov. of Syria.....when Iranian forces and Shi'ite militia men were doing 90% of the actual front line fighting.

---

Everything you say about Russian military incompetence is correct. Yet, still, they are destroying trillions of dollars of property, wounding millions people, and killing hundreds of thousands of people in foreign lands, refusing to understand what you are saying about how incompetent they are. They are big enough to win despite being oafishly inefficient in the art of war. Think Chuck Wepner.

When an army invades your country, you have to destroy it. Doing so will cost you a lot of money, a lot of lives, and a lot of destroyed property, no matter how incompetent that army was, no matter how recklessly misguided was their decision to start a war they couldn't win. So you take precautions to deter. You build an army fearsome enough to persuade even the stupid that it's pointless to test you. You build alliances. And, when someone stupid does something stupid, you do not stand back and say "well that was stupid, they are no threat to us." You take such action as is necessary to destroy stupid right where it is, preferably using proxies rather than your own troops.

The one thing you do not do is let stupid advance all they way up next to you. They will probably make more stupid decisions. Indeed, they will likely think that if you are stupid enough to let them advance, you are more stupid than you look, and pick a fight they cannot win, costing you trillions of dollars and millions of lives to demonstrate that you are less stupid than them.

Your views here are very, very dangerous, exactly the kinds of disengagement policies that entice lesser opponents to do things that force you into wars.

---

Just to add some things closer to my world . . . Russia will always have oil and gas and far more international influence than most know. It also will have for the foreseeable future vicious leaders many of whom will always dream of reconstituting something like the Soviet Empire (realistic or not)

---

Interesting…possibly right

And if Russia is not going away then why should DC not try to work/get along with Russia in some way?

Vs say trying to pull more counties out of its sphere of influence by any means necessary?

DC seems dead set on a course of conflict with Russia.

And of course this is a very dangerous situation since both countries have nuclear weapons

---

Russia (Putin) doesn't want a stronger relationship and never has

---

Debatable

But he won't be around forever

And any Russia leader that comes next will have the exact same security concerns about Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan. etc

---

But you and I agree whoever replaces Putin likely will be just as bad.

And I don't say Russia doesn't want a stronger relationship just to be provocative or to take a side. It's just that they can't go along with what it would require - more domestic freedom/liberty; economic/trade liberalization; distancing from certain regimes; other free world norms.

To a large extent I understand, especially given my experience there and with people there. They know they have certain inherent economic problems. They believe their best bet remains being anti-west and working against the west, and that if they joined the west, they'd do worse. I think they are wrong about that, but they truly believe it. I actually believe they don't give themselves enough credit.

---

More wisdom from Whiterock:

Quote:

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News flash: no islamic state anywhere extends first amendment protections to ANY of their citizens. that does not mean we cannot have relationships with them that, on balance, improve our national security. In fact, doing so is the rule rather than the exception.

---

Amazing how pragmatic we can be...as long as we're not talking about Russia, Russia, Russia.

There's ample evidence that Russia has wanted a stronger relationship with us. To claim otherwise is to ignore the whole history of our negotiations at the end of the Cold War. We want the same thing, as long as they agree to oust their government, dismantle their federation, repudiate their religion, and subordinate their economy to the interests of Western corporations. All of which is to say we don't particularly want a relationship, at least not with any Russia that exists in the real world. It would be simpler and more honest just to admit that.