[delayed]

For the love of god could you engage with a single argument anywhere in this entire thread?

There are no “arguments” being raised here. An argument would be something like “America relies on Ukraine as a key source of XYZ so it would be bad if Russia took it over.” Can you even tell me without looking how much U.S.-Ukraine trade there was before the war?

All these platitudes about “interests” and “soft power” seem to be predicated on an assumption that nobody is willing to articulate. Are we all expected to be Francis Fukuyama cultists here who take it as axiomatic that it’s in america’s interest to defend the borders of european countries? If that’s the argument, then I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. Because I happen to think liberals have actually been right on that issue since the 1970s.

That's shockingly first-order. Even if there was zero bilateral US-Ukraine trade as of 2022 there's:

(a) trade with other EU partners that depend on Ukrainian food imports, gas transshipments, etc., and also on those trade partners. y'know, not being embroiled in trench war on their eastern front.

(b) trade with APAC partners that depends on EU partners that depends on (a). Even the most blatantly obvious ASML -> TSMC -> NVDA -> FAANGetc relationship transits that entire chain.

(c) the entire web of mutually beneficial international trade that benefits from (1) a more or less stable system of borders and laws and (2) again, participants in said system burning the minimum amount of blood and treasure trenches.

So what is it you really think? US involvement is unnecessary to maintain both its current position and the rest of the international system? Or that system unnecessary to maintain the state of the world today, and some alternative arrangement would be preferable? And we can smoothly transition to your preferred system with a belligerent Russia?

I'm being a bit unfair in the preceding paragraph, so I'll ask in all sincerity: what's your alternative policy in 2014? 2022? now? what outcomes do you predict under your policy? Who is (dis)advantaged?

I think Reagan republicans are wrong and i don’t think free trade is all that beneficial.

The argument is that appeasing Putin in Donbas will work about as well as appeasing him in Crimea, creating successively more damaging conflicts in Europe until Article 5 gets tested and either NATO falls apart or we enter a hot war with Russia, and yeah, that's gonna cost money. You know that this is the point of the WWII comparison, which is why you have so studiously ignored the argument, trying to dodge it harder than neo dodging bullets in the first matrix.

Nobody in America knows what a Donbas or a Crimea is. These all sound like Russian places to me. The names of the places alone sound like they are none of America’s business.

And as we all know the only valid assessment of a foreign policy prescription the median American's opinion.

The median american is a lot smarter than the eggheads that have gotten us into pointless war after pointless war over the last 70 years.