Per wrote: ↑Tue Feb 25, 2025 5:07 am
And yes, many European nations are considering sending troops to Ukraine. Especially now since the USA has decided to take the side of the evil axis of Russia/North Korea/Iran instead of supporting its traditional allies.
The United States is attempting to broker a peace; its decision, near as I can tell, is to stop funding the war. This is neutrality, not "alliance." This decision is made on the following backdrop:
(1) There is no current majority in the United States that affirmatively believes funding levels of the war should have been what they were or higher. (American war funding for Ukraine does not have public support)
(2) 60% of Americans think war funding either does not promote US Security or is hostile to it. (American war funding of the war is not seen by the American public as strategically necessary to the USA)
(3) The war is three years on. With impressive war subsidies to Ukraine from the US and Europe, Ukraine is not in a better position today with respect to maintaining its sovereignty than three years ago. It is probably in a worse position, with much death and destruction in the interim.
(4) Every other time (and there were many) that the war appeared to be a slow attrition, the allies stepped up and surged war funding and greenlit use of more armaments. The result was two ineffective offensives.
(5) Reasonable people would conclude that ever more war funding is not likely to change the landscape of the war. Allied troop involvement on the one hand, peace negotiations on the other, will change the landscape, though either approach comes at a real cost.
(6) Peace at this point means Russia will benefit from its unjust war. There is a fear that down the line, this will only encourage Putin to pick the next target. But it also means an end to the death and destruction, and normalization carries with it a mechanism to curb Russian aggression. No sure thing, to be sure. But if there is aggression in a NATO ally, that changes the involvement of the US and the EU, doesn't it? That line matters -- unless NATO falls apart. And there's no surer way to that end than casting the US as a Russian-Iranian-North Korea ally merely because it is working for peace and has had enough war funding/
(7) Allied troops at this point carries the possibility of an allied victory, but is also likely to manifest that the future "peace" fear now -- the fight will not just be on Ukrainian (and a little bit of Russian) soil. The allies might win, they might lose, they might find themselves in the same stalemate -- but ultimately they bring about the fight they fear from peace RIGHT NOW. Perhaps this is the time, but perhaps that fight is not inevitable but avoidable.
The funding of the Ukraine war was, in my view, an impressive feat of cooperation of the US and Europe in support of a country that they'd both been doing everything in the power to face westward. These same nations did NOT have this response to Russia aggression in Georgia or the last time Russia invaded Ukraine and took the Crimea. There was some reason to believe that arming Ukraine would enable Ukraine to win their territory back, or at least achieve a peace that would not be possible in the absence of striking back hard. But it didn't work.
This isn't a normative evaluation of things, its just describing reality. It is not 2022 anymore. You have to take stock of where things are now. That reality is sober.
