Comment Re:Why Are We (the UK) Helping Ukraine? (Score 1) 24
I have opposed US involvement in Ukraine from the beginning. I don't think we should have supplied them with weapons or cash. It is a conflict that does not involve us, does not need to involve us and arguably American farmers and exporters would be better served by a Russian victory. Basically I don't give a f***k what happens to Ukraine or Russia for that matter really you could even extend that to the EU as long they remains customers willing or otherwise, America First!
Let's get real about war, something that we seem to have collectively forgotten in the First World since the cold war era began. War is where you kill people and break things for political ambitions.. On a very fundamentally level war is failure to resolve our differences a better way. It means people are going to die, people are going to be impoverished, people are going to be maimed, even if it is mostly folks that 'signed up for it' it is still f'ing terrible! We need to remember.
That said war can be justified, there are something that a society can collectively decide are worth fighting about. I say though if you are going to do that part of that justification MUST include a realistic path to victory and a willingness to pursue that path. if you ask me that is the real tragedy of the middle east from the late 1950s on, endless conflicts that always leave a bunch of lives ruined and nobody objects met in a way anyone can actually live with. All of that so it can happen again in another decade or so once a new crop of influential people decide they century old grievance is again greater than the faded memory of pain and loss suffered during the last dust up.
Ukraine has two possible paths to victory, either they inflict enough economic and domestic unrest on Russia to force them to abandon the effort or they bamboozle the enough of the First World to flush wealth down their shit-hole imagining Russia constitutes some real threat to anyone outside the former Soviet bloc. To that extent Zelenskyy seems willing to try both, in fact it is about the one respectable thing about him, in my book. I can't fault him for trying to strike targets over the boarder by any means he can, it is far more impactful than killing any number of Russian conscripts on the battle field ever could be in terms of actually ending the war, and with it the killing!
Which brings us to the other lessons of history here that our national leadership and the EU seem to missed, it is all these alliances and mutual defense agreements that have always lead us to the giant large scale destructive conflicts. NATO was a needed response to what the SSR implied, and the Warsaw was the explicit response to NATO formation. None of it has a reason to continue to exist. The sooner we abandon this sort of internationalism and let every mind their own damn business the safer everyone will actually be.