This Needs Fixin'

I think it’s quite obvious now that just funding the defense of Ukraine has been absurdly expensive and not particularly effective.

I mean, Ukraine is still there, so it’s kinda effective.

But the war is still going with no just end in sight, so not actually effective.

At least, not in the sense of actually achieving what needed to be achieved.

And the U.S. (among others) has a clear obligation to defend Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders; they gave up the world’s 3rd largest collection of nuclear weapons for the promise that we would do exactly that, after all.

We owe them.

And we have been, and still are, letting them down.

We’ve kept their country alive, but allowed much of it to be destroyed and allowed many of their citizens to be injured and to die.

And it didn’t need to happen this way.

We could have had American and European troops on the ground within 24 hours of the invasion starting. And yes, Putin is as nutty as squirrel poop but even he would have been smart enough to stop soon enough if faced with soldiers from a few dozen countries.

And if he weren’t smart enough, a multi-national force would have been more able to force him to stop than Ukraine ever could be on their own.

This invasion could have been dealt with much more quickly and been much less expensive if we’d sent troops instead of dollars.

It’s not too late to do better.

OK, it’s probably too late for the U.S. to do better; we’re dealing with our own squirrel poop at the moment.

But Europe: send troops now.

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