“Pick me! Pick me! I know the answer!”
Vivek Ramaswamy's Entry into National Politics
Last week I spent an energizing eight minutes talking to Julie Mason on the POTUS channel of Sirius XM radio about what I was seeing in Ukraine. Julie asks great questions, and she is always a lot of fun.
Specifically, we talked about Republican politics around Ukraine aid and the GOP presidential debate.
Vivek Ramaswamy reminds me of one of those kids in junior high who tries too hard. “Pick me! Pick me! I know the answer!”
But then, of course, he doesn’t. He is remarkably ignorant on Ukraine.
As I discussed in my previous post, Republicans are trending against Ukraine aid, and Vivek is the latest snake oil salesman to jump on that trend. The crazy thing about this is that everybody agrees that Russia is our enemy. Only six percent of Americans say that Russia is a friendly country. Trump, in his own national security strategy, referred to Russia as our adversary 25 times. China, for perspective, got 33 mentions.
In 2023, the US Department of Defense spent $800 billion, in part to deter Russia. America has been spending money at this scale at DoD for decades. We have appropriated about $48 billion in weapons to Ukraine over two years. Not all of it has made it (the Pentagon moves with breathtaking slowness), but that is a story for another time. The $24 billion spent this year to arm Ukraine amounts to about 3% of this year’s Pentagon budget of $800 billion.
In July of 2023, the UK Ministry of Defense says that Vladimir Putin’s war fighting capability has been cut in half by the Ukrainians. Note that neither the UK Ministry of Defense nor anyone else has said that about the hundreds of billions the Pentagon spent deterring Russia over the last several decades.
And Ukraine is winning. I’ve been to the front. It is really far away. Ukraine remains in control of more than 83% of their territory.
So if you agree that neutralizing our adversaries is a good thing, the Ukrainians have degraded Putin’s war fighting ability by half. They are doing that for an amount equal to about 3% of this year’s Pentagon budget. And not one American soldier has had to die.
Great use of taxpayer dollars.