Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…We’ll escalate the troops levels to X, but only for six months and then we’ll [inaudible 01:19:34]. You just can’t do that. It’s always going to come off as, “We’re going to support you forever and as long as it takes and as long as you need, whatever we have to do to defend freedom and democracy in your country.” And any other statement would be absurd. So I can understand why it feels like on a public level, a blank check and an indefinite time period was granted to Zelenskyy, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. I think, again, I hope we’ve learned our lessons in the Middle East about the forever wars, that this isn’t going to be a forever funding to Ukraine to fight for as long as they want. I do disagree. I feel like we’re playing a little bit retrospectively, saying that, “Well, it’s obvious that they’re not going to capture the Donbas. It’s obvious that they’re not going to capture Crimea.” I agree, for Crimea, that was incredibly obvious, but it was also really obvious that in two weeks, Russia would own Kyiv and Ukraine was going to be Belarus 2.0. I think that even for a lot of military people and analysts around the world, that that was an expectation or at least a significant probability. Nobody knew, the phrase that’s thrown right now is paper tiger, that Russia’s military was as ill-equipped as they were. So I can understand why, especially if you’re Ukraine and if you’ve repelled an invasion from one of the world’s largest armies, why you might feel like, “Well, fuck it, let’s fight for a few months. Let’s fight for a year. Let’s see what happens.” And I can understand the United States supporting them, but I agree that there has to be some reasonable off-ramp, but we’re not going to fight forever. I think the US State Department has already begun those conversations with Zelenskyy to look at what that off-ramp looks like. But yeah, I’m not too sure other than explicitly stating publicly you can only fight until this date. I don’t really know what else I would… I don’t think the Biden administration should have done that. I don’t know what else- Do you think Biden should cut this deal on the funding? Meaning there’s this $105 billion deal that’s been held up by debate between Republicans and Democrats over border. So basically, it contains $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, another several billion dollars for Taiwanese defense against China, and then includes some border funding and some border provisions. Republicans want the border funding and the border provisions because we can get into the illegal immigration issue, but that’s a pretty serious issue, and Biden Democrats have been unwilling to hold that up, and that seems to me like just from, put aside Republicans, Democrats, it seems like political malpractice, meaning there’s a widespread perception in the United States that the border’s a disaster area. Joe Biden wants these things. Many republicans don’t want these things. If he caves on the border stuff, he gets all the things that he wants, and he’s going to be able to go back to the moderates in the country and say, “I did something about the border.” It seems like such an obvious win.…

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