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Feral Finster's avatar

In other words,. the West doesn't have any really good options here. Sanctions are likely to be ineffective, and there is no military option that ends well. At the same time, take away constant infusions of IMF cash and pipeline revenues, and Ukraine would be in even worse shape than it already is.

At the same time, Biden cannot be seen to back down. In part, this is because the United States is an empire in decline, and any overt weakness might cause vassals to start getting ideas.

But the real reason Biden is out of options here is because of the fundamentally third world nature of contemporary USA politics. Without unduly belaboring the point, if you have ever spent more than a few hours living in a Third World country and you were sort of paying attention during this time, you will note that politics in such a country is a zero-sum game. Anything that helps your opponents hurts you, and anything that helps you hurts your opponents. So even a policy that benefits the country as a whole must be bitterly opposed, if your opponents are for it or it also benefits them. (War and the military seem to be the exception in the United States. Wars that in no way benefit the country enjoy unswerving bipartisan support, rising even to the status of sacred cows that can never be questioned. This is also not an uncommon feature in the third world.)

This means that if Biden calls for anything less than Total Victory, his opponents on Team R will pounce, calling for the fainting couch and rending their garments most piteously while wailing something about "appeasement" and insisting that Trump (or whatever other "leader" Team R tries to foist on us) is the reincarnation of Winston Churchill who would have pushed The Button sooner and better. It doesn't help that Team D was doing the same thing to Trump a year or so ago, pushing wackadoodle conspiracy theories that were contradicted by all available facts and by just about everything that the Trump maladministration did, to boot.

So for Team R, the opportunity to call the other guy an appeaser and weakling acting on behalf of foreign powers is especially sweet.

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Katie's avatar

Wow! For the first time, I feel as though I have a reasonable understanding of what led to this point. Thanks for a thorough - and understandable by ordinary readers! - explanation of the history leading up to this current crisis.

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