Russia isn’t a den of thievery and corruption? Russia’s corrupting influence does not affect the US?
Ukraine isn’t that important in the big picture. It’s a backwater politically. What’s important is the US/NATO projecting strength and not being bullied with nuclear blackmail. Everybody is watching now. Iran. The Chinese Communist Party. Saudi Arabia. Taiwan. How the US responds will in large part determine their future actions.
If they sense weakness and division, as Putin did, they will make war. If nuclear sabre rattling works they will nuke up, too. Sooner or later somebody will use nukes because they will calculate that the west is weak and won’t respond.
In Ukraine the US can set the security framework for decades and kick Russian corruption out of Europe. Or we can have dishonor now in surrendering to a genocidal mass murderer and have our war later. Hundreds of thousands are already dead due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We must chose wisely. With the Kremlin and it’s imperialist ambitions or against. There is no door number 3 here.
“have our war later”
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This won’t be a nice, little contained war. It will be a far reaching catastrophe of unthinkable proportions that will have serious fallout (pun intended) for decades to come. Once the nukes start flying it will be very difficult to contain their use. All for a corrupt, backwater, undemocratic state that is already largely Russian in many respects. I would prefer not to see parts of the world incinerated over such a place.
We have already missed (or is it really ‘avoided’?) several opportunities to defuse this mess before it got to this point. I have no doubt that Trump would have found a way to prevent such a mess. Unfortunately we have already displayed epic weakness under Biden; look no further than the Afghanistan debacle. And now military recruiting is faltering, which is no surprise.
There are threats everywhere in this world. Some are more consequential than others. We are already burning up an enormous amount of financial resources and drawing down our military stockpiles in this mess, not to mention the worldwide economic impact of sanctions. We are in fact weakening our ability to deal with other more important challenges. That’s not very wise.