If you were influential in US politics, what would you recommend the US should do in reference to the war in Ukraine?

Learn from the experience and apply the lessons.

I would stay out of it. I would be in favor of the media broadcasting current status, but no political involvement whatsoever. We are not the caretakers of the world.

Sanction Russia into oblivion, Make sure China doesn’t supply Russia. Supply Ukraine with the tools to win, and humanitarian aide, but no direct military intervention.

I’d first stop supporting most of the world’s dictatorships, and stop exporting arms and military hardware to places like Saudi Arabia, which has currently killed nearly 400,000 people in Yemen.

Stop the meddling. Stop the proxy wars. Stop trying to expand your hegemony.

You can’t pose as some moral arbiter and wag a finger at Putin, when your own crimes are incomparably worse.

Putin has used rhetoric and justifications for the invasion of Ukraine which are analogous to that used by the US and Israel.

Stop your own crimes before pretending you can stop those of others.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

I think Biden, and other western leaders, are making the right decisions in providing humanitarian aid for refugees, military aid to Ukraine’s fighters and sanctions on Russia.

This war is not of Ukraine’s making and the people of Ukraine have done nothing to deserve this. Putin is a monster and we can’t stand by and pretend to be neutral.

See Link:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/great-debate

While the whole world had entered in the World War II the United Staes came in much later and only AFTER Pearl Harbour was hit.

Politicians seem to wait longer to get involved and thus U.S> is the last to come through to assist.
Hope that the U.S. see’s the writing on the wall before even more damage is irrepairable, estpecially when Putin is setting a precedent of terror unleashed.

@Inspired_2write I agree. I re-read Kennedy’s speech about Asia and it was very inspiring and applicable still.

Unfortunately we have painted ourselves into a corner, there’s no easy way out. Everyone agrees that we should not put troops on the ground in Ukraine ans I also agree. We should have sent those jets from Poland to Ukraine. Ukraine had the pilots and we had no need to expose any NATO forces to make that happen. Unfortunately Biden has already told the world that those jets would be offensive weapons and we couldn’t do that.That statement is difficult to undo. So what can we do now?

The first thing I would recommend would be to open oil exploration as quickly as possible. Get us of our dependency on foreign oil. Continue to send as much humanitarian and weapons aid as possible. Drop the Iran deal that Putin is negotiating for us. Putin is not negotiating in our best interest. If we drop the Iran deal maybe the Saudis will take our phone calls and help with the energy crisis. We are setup to have a major crisis with fertilizer since Russia supplies about ⅔ of the words fertilizer. Farmers are spending double the normal price and deciding whether to pay it or simply grow less. Either way it’s a problem for us.

China has already issued a warning that anyone supplying weapons to Taiwan will suffer an unbearable price. Pretty much a page from Putin’s playbook. We have got to0 get this under control quickly or cede control to the Russia/China alliance.

I’m opposed to actively putting troops in there, but financial and material support I am all kinds of in favor of. We should do what we can to raise the cost to Russia as high as we can, because this is the kind of thing that will discourage the next country from invading a smaller/weaker neighbor.

I’m actually impressed by how willing the west has been to be serious about all of this. I was expecting some more wrist-slap sanctions like we got when Crimea was taken. My one regret is that neither the US nor Europe is learning the lesson that they need to start decoupling from Russia’s gas industry. If central European countries (Germany) had done so right from the start, they would have had to endure some pain, but Russia would have endured far more and realized that this whole thing wasn’t worth it. By keeping the money flowing through gas, Russia was hurt by the sanctions, but not enough to force a pullout.

@Entropy Why do you include the US in your statement about gas? The way I understand it the US stopped buying oil and gas from Russia almost immediately when Russia started attacking Ukraine.

@Jaxk I heard on TV (I was not in front of the screen) that the US is stepping up what they are providing to Ukraine. Different military equipment, whatever it is, to give Ukraine even better opportunity to fight off the Russians. My initial reaction was, why didn’t we do this to begin with? Do you know if I understood it correctly?

You seem to be up on a lot of details. I guess Biden took the approach to match might with might. Russia advances and the the US helps Ukraine fight back. I think my emotional reaction is more a Israeli-like mindset, meaning you start coming after us and we will fight back with ten times fire power and be relentless for days or weeks even after you retreat. It hasn’t worked great in Israel, who knows if that area of the world will ever have peace, but what else is there to do with Putin. We can’t just let the Russians run over Ukraine and keep trying to go after other parts of Europe.

I am pretty much in agreement with @Kropotkin, but sadly things will never work that way in my bomb is bigger than yours world power scene.

@JLeslie I guess I’m a day late and a dollar short on this response but generally you can’t win a fight with defense. You have to have an offensive strategy as well. I’m not suggesting we or anyone attack Moscow but the Ukrainians can’t stop at the border either. That strategy is a loser as we discovered in Vietnam.

@Jaxk I don’t understand why we weren’t on the border of Russia and Ukraine months ago before Putin even started to try to line up his troops. I guess the we would be countries willing to help Ukraine? Or, at least the Ukraine army. The Russian threat was already a known possibility, like you said being on the offensive would have probably have been better, although then the propaganda would have been that Ukraine wants to attack Russia, when all they want to do is keep Russia out.

@JLeslie ” I don’t understand why we weren’t on the border of Russia and Ukraine months ago”

Probably because we thought they were going to lose—badly.

@gorillapaws That Ukraine would lose badly?

@JLeslie Yes. Russia was seen as the 2nd best military power in the world. I’m sure nearly everyone in the State Department/DoD thought Ukraine was screwed. The calculus radically changed when Ukraine put up a masterful resistance and Russia clearly made blunder after blunder.

@gorillapaws The calculus which changed was that the war would be quick and relatively easy for the Russians. Though the war might be a humiliating revelation regarding Russian military prowess, it would be a mistake to conclude that Ukraine hasn’t been screwed. If Putin’s goal was to deny Ukraine’s incorporation with the West the conversion of the place into a battlefield certainly turns the trick. Putin has shown us that he can wreck the place rather than allow it NATO or EU membership. It’s repetition of the reality involving the other key essential to Russia’s perceived status as a nation of consequence—Georgia. Both countries have the geographic misfortune of being viewed as integral to the survival of their big neighbor, and Putin would prefer a desert of wreckage bordering Russia rather than NATO.

@HP “Putin would prefer a desert of wreckage bordering Russia rather than NATO.”

It’s not NATO he fears on his boarders. It’s a prosperous Ukrainian petro-state competing with Russian energy exports for the European/Asian markets that’s forever independent of Russian hegemony. Once Ukraine joined NATO, those resources would be forever out of the reach of Russia to exploit for its own benefit. With a shrinking population, a military that’s literally rusting away into nothing and Ukraine on the precipice of being able to harvest those natural gas resources with the help of western investment, Putin had no other option but to invade, or permanently abandon the dream of a USSR 2.0 for all future generations.

If Putin is truly facing potentially terminal health problems, he may be worried that history will remember him as the one who doomed Russia to being a smaller power.

We have no disagrement other than the fact that a prosperous petrochemical Ukraine WITHOUT QUESTION would assure that nation’s QUICK absortion into both the EU and NATO. Putin has abruptly eliminated expanding commercial interactions with the West, and given the West the message that he can and WILL do this at will.