Having not learned its lesson about publishing dishonest and un-fact-checked swill from GOP senators with that whole “Tom Cotton calls for active-duty military to shoot all the hippies” debacle a few years ago, The New York Times on Friday decided to give diseased penile cyst JD Vance the run of its Opinion page so he could simp for Vladimir Putin’s “Phony nation of Ukraine must be stomped into ground beef under boot heel of Russian greatness” foreign policy.
Vance has been a scumbag since, oh, ever, and if he wants to publish fact-free, self-serving screeds on Breitbart or the Daily Wire or his old Tumblr account, that’s his business. But please keep it away from allegedly legit media organs, the adults are trying to solve serious problems here.
Yr Wonkette’s position on Ukraine is that helping the nation resist Russia’s violent takeover is the correct policy. America and the world do not need to relearn the lesson of what happens when a psychotic dictator destabilizes Europe by conquering neighboring countries with populations he does not see as actual human beings. The world has learned this lesson! More than once! We’re good! Did JD Vance not take one history class in his long journey from budding psychopath to Yale Law School graduate (but we repeat ourselves)? Was he too busy learning how to apply his own TV makeup so he looks like he’s fronting a Cure cover band?
Vance has long opposed the Biden administration’s policy of arming Ukraine in its war against Russia. Not for principled or geopolitically defensible or even coherent reasons, mind you. It is just that opposing helping Ukraine is a surefire path to the top of Donald Trump’s nativist MAGA movement, and Vance is a self-absorbed, ambitious asshole who would throw his own family under a bus if it got him even an ounce more fame and power.
Oh wait, he already threw his own family under the bus for an ounce of fame and power. In that sense, we guess, he is consistently principled!
Vance doesn’t have a reason for screwing Ukraine that holds up to any scrutiny beyond “Help Ukraine? But I don’t wanna!” So he has to put up a couple of strawmen. Come, let us read them and vomit, for comedy.
Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine.
Biden does not seem to have said this anywhere, so far as we can tell. What he and the rest of his administration have said very clearly for two years is that the United States will support Ukraine for as long as it takes to expel Russia from its territory. The administration may or may not change its mind about that at some point. But no one is pretending Ukraine is a measly $60 billion short of victory.
But our national security interests can be — and often are — separate from our economic interests.
And often they are not! The world! It’s complex!
The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict.
We’ve got news for Vance: If the US increases its industrial base to build more weapons, the weapons will go to foreign conflicts. If he’s talking about rebuilding our industrial base to make more bulldozers or dinette sets or whatever, then he might be onto something.
This is the point where, in another reality, a United States senator from a Rust Belt state with underused manufacturing capacity would tell the president, “Hey, you have this need, and my state has thousands of unemployed blue collar workers who need good jobs. We can give them a way to make a good living and keep a foreign despot from overrunning a democratic country and erasing its people from existence. Let’s talk!”
In this reality, though, JD Vance is a fucking idiot.
In some cases, we’d agree with the sentiment about American business. But in this case, we think helping Ukraine not get crushed and wiped off the map is actually a good investment. Much of the money goes to American businesses and workers. Our European allies are happy we helped keep the war from spreading. Russia’s military capacity continues to degrade without any American soldiers having to fight. China maybe thinks twice about attacking Taiwan when it sees the commitment America has made to Ukraine. Civilians stop dying in Russian bombing raids. JD Vance gets to brag about bringing jobs home to Ohio. Where’s the downside?
To fend off these attacks, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and others have indicated they need thousands of Patriot interceptors per year. The problem is this: The United States only manufactures 550 every year. If we pass the supplemental aid package currently being considered in Congress, we could potentially increase annual production to 650, but that’s still less than a third of what Ukraine requires.
This op-ed is suspiciously lacking in links that would support its arguments, and here is a prime example. Yes, Zelensky has asked for more Patriot missile batteries. That is because so far, the US has given Ukraine exactly three — three! — entire batteries. This is nothing. Donald Trump would have given Greg Abbott several dozen if migrants were flying across the Rio Grande.
Ukraine would like a couple of dozen Patriot batteries. At the moment, Zelensky is asking for a grand total of *squints at notes* seven more. And his defense minister, instead of bugging the US, is going around begging allies to send any spare batteries and missiles they may have.
The tl;dr here is that Zelensky would like lots of Patriots. We can give him some. But because we can’t give him thousands, JD Vance has a perfect excuse to say, We can’t give you enough so we might as well not bother giving you any. Good luck learning to love putting kelp in your borscht!
Many in Washington seem to think that hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart and are happy to label any thought to the contrary Russian propaganda.
If there is anything we love, it is editorials in the nation’s biggest newspaper being peppered with unfalsifiable assertions. Anyway, we don’t know what people in Washington are saying. We’d imagine that the Ukrainians marching off to the front are not joyfully singing about it, though.
The bad news is that accepting brute reality would have been most useful last spring, before the Ukrainians launched that extremely costly and unsuccessful military campaign.
It is very easy to tell other people to just roll over and give up their country when you’re not the one who will have to choke down kelp-infused borscht.
The good news is that even now, a defensive strategy can work. Digging in with old-fashioned ditches, cement and land mines are what enabled Russia to weather Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.
Congrats, JD, you’ve invented the Maginot Line. And the Ukrainian military would still need weaponry to shoot at the Russians before they dig themselves out of those ditches. Did you spend your entire Marine Corps stint on KP duty?
By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence.
What negotiations? The ones where Ukraine has to swallow giving up at least a fifth of its territory because JD Vance wants Donald Trump’s minions to sweep him into the vice presidency?
Besides, Vladimir Putin is, by all accounts, not particularly interested in negotiating with Ukraine. He set out to conquer the entire country and there is no reason to think he has changed his mind. All a settlement does is give him a couple of years to rebuild his military and his manufacturing capacity before he tries to finish the job. JD Vance won’t give a shit then either.
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