Pro-Russia or pro-US? The alt-right stance I've been seeing is that the war accomplishes nothing, introduces a lot of needless risks and wastes resources better spent elsewhere. It looks like all the US is achieving is piles of dead Slavs. That isn't wealth generation or strategically useful.
It has been decades since US foreign interventions have done anything useful for the US, the base rate here leans strongly towards pacifism being the most effective strategy. Even in the Russia-Ukraine war, I've been arguing that this gives China opportunities more than anything else. Hopefully the CCP are too inept to seize on them.
Yeah I know I used a lot of editing but the sentiment and word choice is there. I don’t want the US to be the world police but I don’t want to dismiss that Putin is deeply rotten. And I don’t think whether something is “useful” is the only concern.
Are we helping? Are we making things worse? These are how we should talk about things.
Then the US intervened. Maybe the European powers too, I dunno what the politics in the NATO war room looked like. Now it looks like the country is levelled, Europe is undergoing an energy crisis because of their response, it is now a realistic possibility that NATO might not be able to coerce Russia, China or even Iran on the outside. My money is still on the US but they're making it look like a struggle.
And the plan for Ukraine recovering seems to involve them being bankrolled by a bankrupt US so I don't see that working out well either. This isn't the 1950s, the US is not in a position to go rebuild Europe. They have enough problems figuring out how to build prosperity in the USA without trying to do it overseas. That is a core complaint of the right wing and a significant part why said right-wingers are trying to vote a wrecking ball into the presidency.
Is the US helping? Maybe. Not a very clear picture yet. Compare this to Iraq or Afghanistan where nobody stood up for them after the US invasion. It was bad for the countries, I don't know if it was worse than what is going on in Ukraine but I suspect we'll discover that US intervention has made things worse.
It’s definitely possible that sending weapons into a conflict just makes it worse. Especially when soldiers are just people on both ends.
My only dispute with your text is that we definitely have the ability to get our shit together financially in the US. The opposition is purely ideological. “We can’t” becomes “we don’t try” becomes “we can’t”.
One the one hand yes. On the other that is true of all countries, and most of them are basket cases when it comes to financial governance and they aren't in any position to be putting their finger on the scales in wars half a world away. The US just doesn't have a resource surplus and it is in question whether they can sustain their interventionist foreign policy without first sitting down and getting the house in order.
Where are the resources going to come from? Going back to the thread root, that is the core of the right wing backlash that is brewing on this topic. All this stuff going to Ukraine to get blown up could be going to the US to make life better for people.
You’re debating two things: whether the US should intervene in Ukraine, and whether the US should get its internal affairs in order.
Your points are that war is expensive*, the US has a poor ability to run its internal systems (yes and no, but how does this imply we should sit on our hands with foreign policy), this war isn’t useful.
*The monetary cost of this war (to the US) is just not a legitimate part of the debate. It’s pittance what we’ve supplied.
Well we're crossing from the point where I can talk about "the right" because the stances I've heard are too mutually incoherent; this is the part where everyone has their own opinions. My argument is if you have an unreasonably large budget, then you donate some stuff, then the budget needs to get bigger again to cover the donations.
Fair summary of the thread so far by the way, not often I get to say that in threads that go beyond 2 posts.
> The monetary cost of this war (to the US) is just not a legitimate part of the debate. It’s pittance what we’ve supplied.
I have a few problems with that line of thought.
Firstly, describing it as a pittance is unreasonable. The resources sent to Ukraine could have been used in the US to achieve good things. It is 10s of billions of dollars; it could get dumped on some random small struggling town in the rural US and no-one there would ever have to work again (across multiple generations if they managed their investments right). There is an opportunity cost to wasting that much money that means the US is worse off.
Secondly, if you add all the "pittances" up that the US wastes on foreign war you get real money. The the war in Afghanistan ended up being around 2 trillion over 20 years which comes to a burn rate in the range of the US spending in Ukraine (~100 billion/yr in Afghanistan vs ~75 billion/yr in Ukraine [0]). These pittances aren't pittances from that perspective either.
And finally US doesn't look like it can afford a pittance. It is like someone with a deep debt problem buying lottery tickets. The financial situation in the US is dire; the threshold has been crossed where the principle on their debt isn't going to be paid back and we're looking for the point where either they stop borrowing or the interest doesn't paid back either. It is unreasonable to be talking about just finding a little surplus to give away - the US exhausted those options years ago. There has to be an answer to the "what is being given up?" question.
Now if the US was getting some sort of payoff or helping the Ukrainians in some way then that cost might be justifiable, but it seems that all the US involvement is doing is transforming Ukrainians into other-countrians and corpses while securing China's geopolitical position. We have established international norms for how theses invasions should play out, they were established in the 2000s by the US's adventurism. They're getting broken here with no obvious upside gained.
[0] https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-aid-has-us-sent-ukraine... - I just took the number from this article, I'm sure there are big error bars depending on the start & end dates used.
Honestly, that sounds mostly like a troll designed specifically to derange liberals ("own the libs" or whatever). If I remember my 2016 correctly, liberals were freaking out about Russian election interference at the time.
You might liken it to vowing to never voting Republican, even if you agree on some issues
It cleverly uses the hate for democrats to push for the love for Russia. Once you normalize this line of thinking, Russia is seen in a more favourable light by anyone who falls for it.
I'm not sure that's actually successful. Even a lot of conservatives seem put off by Tucker's recent activities, especially with the Navalny news today.
For a MAGA follower (if they ever hear about it and even know who Navalny is) such combinations induce a cognitive dissonance, which translates either into dispair or into open support of Putin after he killed his major critic, either way it would be a win. And the other side of US politics is in dispair wittnessing how the MAGA crowd handles this, which (from Putins point of view) hopefully makes people stresses enough about politics that they just don't want to hear it anymore.
This idea of confusion and despair is how he managed to get the Russians to stay so apolitical after a short optimistic phase in the 90s. Better not think about it — this is the message.
> As far as I know this is kind of the strategy of Russian propaganda. I would not be surprised if killing Navalny was done purposely shortly after the Tucker interview.
Another data point: Putin is now putting down Carlson:
> Speaking with a state television host, Mr. Putin said he was disappointed that Mr. Carlson had not asked “so-called sharp questions” because he wanted the opportunity to “respond sharply” in his own answers.
> “He turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for,” Mr. Putin said. “So, frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview.” ...
> Mr. Putin’s mockery of Mr. Carlson came as the former Fox host was basking in the aftermath of his interview by offering a steady stream of praise for Russia and Mr. Putin, whose leadership he has extolled as superior to Mr. Biden’s.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/business/media/tucker-car...)
On one hand you have a KGB guy, who has for decades promoted himself as loyal-to-the-end, burning documents in East Germany while the wall was falling and Moscow wasn't picking up the phones with his colleagues nowhere to be found. And who has gone to great lengths (like using chemical weapons on UK soil) to punish people he sees as traitors.
And on the other hand you have Tucker, a CIA reject who is now running interference against his own nation's interests, who presents himself as a journalist while knowing less about Putin than Putin knows about him, and who was as intrepid as a wet noodle in that interview.
Putin made him wait for 2 hours before it even started. I think he just enjoys dunking on people.
Of course, he made no mention of how much $100 is to the average Russian's income proportional to the average American's income.
Some of us just panic and react without thinking about why food is getting more expensive or what policies will improve the world for us now and our children in the future.
When people are hangry, they vote for the loudest monkey.
I've seen a few political influencers who reliably follow a pattern of saying something abjectly stupid/offensive which draws mockery and attention for a week or two, and just when this attention is waning, saying something else of more substance which gets widely circulated by the same attention network. If one has a thick skin for hostile criticism, it's a great amplification technique.
I like to browse both far left and far right social media to see what different circles are talking about, and a lot of the far right are coming around to be pro Russia (way more than I would have ever expected given US history).
There's also the conservative house representatives majority who are likely to continue blocking any additional military aid to the Ukraine. So on a whole it seems to me that Russian government has been highly effective at advancing their political agenda within the USA recently.