And that's the perspective this should be viewed from.
The US may not have a firm interest in Ukraine. The US has a fairly firm interest in Taiwan. The US has a serious interest in Korea, Japan, and the countries bordering the South China Sea.
You have to strongly and unconditionally support international order re: Ukraine, so that Xi takes away the right message.
Why only "fairly firm"? I've heard arguments that if Taiwan is invaded and TSMC falls under PRC control, then the US faces massive chip shortages for years (possibly leading to riots and a destabilized government), and those seem plausible to me.
People don't want a 'world police' anymore.
I suppose somebody might ask what I would prefer the US State Department say, and I guess I'd personally want more realpolitik: "Putin's a megalomaniacal piece of shit with nationalist historical aspirations that stretch back to Peter the Great; NATO's contributed to all this to the extent that it's been dick swinging in Eastern Europe for the past 20 years; the Ukrainians should probably just surrender since they're all basically (and historically were) Russian anyway, and they stand no chance of actually resisting, and no other country on Earth is going to risk nuclear war over them."
Not exactly feel good material for a bolded NYT headline, but at least it's honest.
Also the US has delivered weapons to Ukraine.
They don't want to engage in a war with Russia, and that decision I think is the right one for now. A couple years down the road, if the sanctions don't succeed in containing Putin's aggression, we might have a different discussion.
Yeah well we tried that back in 2014 when it was the Crimean Penensula. I think its time we have that discussion NOW.
In my opinion, Russia will not have a lot of appetite for further aggression after all those sanctions. Invading NATO members and setting off a huge, unwinnable conflict should be pretty far down the list of priorities in the next few years.
See this report for a brief example: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07...
The US and UK governments have been formally and repeatedly asked for help.
This information is also constantly in the news. The US has provided almost $3 Billion in military aid to Ukraine in the past several years alone. The UK has also provided significant amounts of aid. Ditto for NATO. All of these are not 'forced' on Ukraine!
I also hope that the US will share intelligence information; US's abilities here are far greater than Ukraine's.
If you let that genie out of the bottle, it better be a prelude to a winnable war, or you had better be happy to have all your government officials, diplomats, and their families on permanent lockdown.
Assassinating or targeting political leaders is a war crime. The CIA might have done that - quite a while in the past, mind you - but never against an adversary like Russia. At the very least you would expect a few US politicians to drop dead if there ever were such an attempt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fide...
On the one hand, I feel bad for Ukrainians. On the other hand, the whole world saw it coming, just like we can see China invading Taiwan at some point in the future, and the calculus will be the exact same: Taiwan means more to China than it does to America, and the Ukraine means more to Russia than it does to the West.
It is perilous to fight somebody, whether it's Putin or Xi, with vested emotional interests in the subject matter of the fight when all you've got is ideology.
And so nothing will come of this except 'strong condemnations'. As if any strongman ever gave a fuck.