General Discussion

along with their fellow travellers among the US right with cries of "we want our money back", with the occasional "MIC" thrown in as if it was the latest buzzword and a debate closer.

Some of that funding's never made it to Ukraine or to meet its needs in the first place because the US can be slow to live up to its promises, if it even does in the end. If it had, the Russians might be in an even worse state than they are now.

Much of it has been in the form of equipment from the US's copious ageing stockpiles, valued at replacement cost, producing a tidy budget profit and preparing a shiny set of new weapons.

Some of it has gone to pay the wages of US arms manufacturers who opened up production lines to overcome the shell shortfall.

So the bulk of it did get spent where you are. Feel better now?

In return for the relatively small outlay (a rounding error compared to US expenditure on other items on a national scale), the US has seen Russia stripped of its mystique as a Big Bogeyman in the East, much more than decimation of Russia's troop strength and materiel, been granted a real-life testing ground for existing and future armaments, and a case study in the modernization of warfare involving drone conflict on land, sea and air. Unless Trump manages to build his "Iron Dome" and the US gives up any idea of being territorially involved elsewhere in the world and retreats into its most comfortable pose of isolationism - under the guise of "America First" - which seems highly unlikely even under Trump the way he's going, it's going to need that data.

There's something distasteful about counting the pennies while a literal genocide is going on in a country an ocean away, especially when that country has lain itself more vulnerable because of security assurances it was given by previous US administrations, not least the most recent one, let alone dismissing a country fighting for its life as "another shiny object". It's not pacifism, it's rank, inhuman cynicism, and it stinks.

The US was glad of all the support (wrongheaded as it may have been) it received when it invoked NATO Article 5 after the Twin Towers were attacked. It's proving to be as untrustworthy in return as its worst naysayers have always said it is.