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Karl's avatar

It’s incredibly reductive to reduce this question to one of money. The alliances built post-war have led to a respite from history, devoid of great power conflict. Who wants Europe to go back to the centuries prior? How soon people forget how that turned out, and the price we paid in blood and treasure. The alliances also led to the US building the most dominant economy in human history. Our dominance continues today for anyone willing to look at the data, and yes, I understand we continue to have economic challenges, we always will. I wish it was only about money, but Don and JD are literally switching sides. They’ve sided openly with the butcher in Moscow, read their statements. At least they’re transparent. As for me, I’ll side with the democracies. This isn’t a conservative movement by Don, it’s an authoritarian movement with two pillars-destruction of the western alliances, and destruction of the civil service at home. It’s not a new playbook, read some history. It’s a Putin wet dream. As for JD as the messenger, it’s amazing to me Oren believes anything this guy says. Look at his statements on Don, before he self-gelded. Look at his gaslighting of North Carolina hurricane victims during the campaign, exploiting the least among us at a time they’d lost everything. Or his insipid Haitian debacle. He’s a bad human being, does anyone actually read his comments? Whatever happened to honesty, integrity, character, and truth-telling in our public officials?

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Mark's avatar

If Russia wins due to Trump withdrawing US support for Ukraine, that will embolden Russia, China and other bad actors around the world. The resulting “rule of the jungle” would be very bad for global stability and for the US.

The global world order since 1945 is largely a US creation. This was not some altruistic charity project by the US. The US has benefited enormously from the resulting peace and prosperity.

While Europe definitely should be picking up a larger share of the cost of its own defence, it would be foolish and self-defeating for the US to abandon Ukraine to Putin’s predations.

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