Desert. With respect: you guys weren’t dragged into anything by Lend-Lease. The Japanese attacked you, and then Hitler declared war.
These countries have money and need weapons. No need to do anything like vendor-financing or arms-swaps for territory - and no need to send ‘trainers’.
Just sell them weapons and so reduce the unit price of your own stuff. No need to let the Russians supply both sides.
Cordially.
Lend Lease was a defacto joining into the war. It was the updated version of the WWI arsenal of democracy thing, which indeed drew us into WWI. A solid argument can be made that we would have eventually needed to fight WWII, but in WWI we absolutely had no interest. That was solely the result of England begging, cajoling, and scheming to get access to US manpower. In fact, the England defacto declared war on us when we were neutral. They created an explusion zone, and stated intent to sink any US ship that wanted to carry cargo to a German port. They announced what US companies may not sell to Germans and their intent to enforce it on the seas.
This exclusion zone was established *before* the Germans did likewise around the British isles with submarines.
So yes i am very wary of foreigners who are eager to have us fight their wars.
The road to getting dragged in is arming one side. the other side quickly sees you as the enemy.
If someone shows up with hard cold cash, id let them buy something. But not F-22s, (which we destroyed the tooling for i believe) and nobody in their right mind truly facing combat, over water, over long distances, against Sukhois would want to buy an F-35.
But yes, lend lease and other prewar entanglements certainly did draw us in. Even the Japanese attack resulted from prewar trade embargoes on behalf of China.
It’s still not an American fight. For me the equation should be, “will the profits of a few weapons sales be worth antagonizing the largest holder of US debt?”. Say we sell 10 or 20 billion in weapons, (a HUGE sale) but lose a few Trillion when Chine refuses to buy anymore T-bills?
And i hear no mention of Australia. They are right there in the backyard of this. Do they want to go to war over this, or provide weapons to these squabbling asians??