AndreusMaximus
Master
QFT.I agree that much foreign aid could be spent more wisely, or not at all in some cases, but foreign aid is a drop in the bucket of federal expenditures. Military expenditures also are way down there, including stuff like the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars. As a percent of US GDP Iraq/Afghanistan are way below the Reagan build-up, nevermind Vietnam, Korea, or WWII, and we are significantly down from OEF/OIF.
Just this fiscal year the Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, and the Dept of the Treasury have EACH spent more than the DoD, and the Dept of State and foreign aid don’t even register on this scale of expenditure. Hint: it’s not the foreign wars and foreign aid part of government expenditures that are causing economic problems in the United States.
The Russians are bad guys and they should be kicked out of Ukraine, but that doesn’t make Ukraine the good guys and I am perfectly willing to believe they are as corrupt as the Russians say they are (which is the pot calling the kettle black). Joe Biden is definitely dirty in this as well. I’d be happy to tell the rest of NATO “we’re going to lead from the back on this one, you guys got it, good luck” and supply just enough aid to make sure the Russians don’t win.
Israel is culturally and politically a western ally, a technically adept ally as well, and they’re certainly worth more than Ukraine if you’re looking at it from a purely national interest point of view.
It’s all well, and good to natter on about foreign entanglements,such but guess what? The Greatest Generation (and the fact that nearly every other country had to fight on their home turf except us) made us a super power, and you wouldn’t like life much if we weren’t. Just because you don’t want to be entangled doesn’t mean those entanglements are not going to come look for you. The US is the big dog on the planet, and our cultural, economic, and military influence is resented and seen as a source of evil by our enemies (and some nominal “allies”). They are going to come entangle us, whether we want to be in tangled or not. They say it out loud and they mean it. It’s much smarter to fight several “unnecessary” small wars on somebody else’s turf than to have to deal with a truly existential one here at home.
So in the current mess, we should back Israel to the hilt in Gaza and the mideast generally, and if Iran gets waxed in the process the world will be better off. I don’t think Iran really has their arms around an operational nuke yet, but when they do, the world is gonna be much more unpleasant, then it is now. If Hamas is not hunted down and exterminated, they will see this as a victory and continue to attract and literally breed more “soldiers” in the ME and abroad.
And oh, by the way, there was some guy awhile back who was busy lining up the Israelis and the Arabs as allies against a bunch of religious nuts in another country who wanted to build their own nuke (as well as making the Palestinian “problem“ irrelevant). He was well on his way to setting up the ME to take care of its own problems. Wonder whatever happened to that effort, can’t quite remember his name.