It seems that the neoconservatives — who haven’t seemed very conservative when it comes to domestic policy — simply have never met a war in which they didn’t want the United States to fight. Of course, by that, they meant other Americans to fight, not themselves. We have previously reported on Bill Kristol, the neoconservative founder and later destroyer of The Weekly Standard, because as a dedicated #NeverTrumper he couldn’t stand to allow any support of Donald Trump in a magazine marketed to conservatives and Republicans. Mr Kristol and the other neocons, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, all love wars and want the United States to participate in them. Today’s left have managed to become so seduced by President Biden’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia than even the very much not-a-neocon Amanda Marcotte was supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, albeit for different reasons.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin also fits into that category:

Are there four brave GOP House members with the courage to save Ukraine?

That’s all it would take to get the majority needed to bypass speaker Mike Johnson and get a vote on Ukraine aid to the House floor.

by Trudy Rubin | Friday, February 23, 2024 | 6:30 AM EST

Wanted: Four GOP House members with a tiny fraction of the courage of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Saturday marks the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. It comes one week after Navalny died in an icy Siberian prison for his fight for democracy and opposition to the Ukraine war.

Yet the United States is on the verge of surrendering Ukraine into Putin’s hands because House Republican leaders refuse to allow members to vote for urgent military aid for Kyiv, a vote that would most likely pass (as it did with in a bipartisan vote in the Senate).

Pressed by Donald Trump and extremist MAGA members, Congress may doom brave Ukrainians to destruction by a Russian dictator who despises the West — and is armed by Iran and North Korea. Nothing like this has been seen since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain conceded part of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in 1938 in hopes of dissuading him from occupying more European lands.

Mrs Rubin is most certainly dedicated to fighting the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich — addressing someone by his given and patronymic names is considered polite and respectful in Russian — but her comparison is accurate only in the most inaccurate of ways. Adolf Hitler was only 49½ years old when the Munich Pact was signed on September 30, 1938, and France and the United Kingdom were neither willing to fight Germany, nor able to send much aid to Czechoslovakia at the time. The Wehrmacht was an unknown quantity at the time, but Josef Goebbels’ propaganda made the world believe it was a tremendous fighting force.

Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is 71½ years old, and the Russian military, if not mostly exhausted by the two-year-long war in Ukraine, would still be in no shape to invade any other countries for perhaps ten years or more after their war with Ukraine is over.

These are undisputed facts which must be taken into account, but the neocons don’t really do that, because those facts just don’t fit the narrative they wish to push.

Whether Trump and GOP extremists succeed in gifting Ukraine to Putin may depend on whether four GOP House members have the courage to stand up to MAGA appeasement and defend America’s long-term security.

Here’s how it could work.

The best chance to skirt House Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal to permit a vote on Ukraine aid would be via a discharge petition. That is a parliamentary maneuver that effectively bypasses the speaker to bring a bill before the full House for a vote — if a majority of members agree to do so. If all Democrats signed on, it would only require four Republicans to get the Ukraine supplemental aid bill to the floor.

Heaven forfend! “Trump and GOP extremists”! “MAGA appeasement”! Mrs Rubin is telling Inquirer readers that there is no reasoned debate here, that only the extremists could possibly, possibly! be opposed to wasting sending yet another $60 billion in money and war materiel to Ukraine.

But let’s tell the truth here: it doesn’t matter how much money and military aid we send to Ukraine, they cannot defeat Russia absent the US and NATO sending actual ground troops to fight Russia, and fighter aircraft and pilots to gain air superiority. That would mean the US and NATO in direct combat with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal.

Given Russia’s relatively poor showing against the Ukrainians, it would seem probable that American and NATO troops could push the Russians out of Ukraine, at least once they got there, but it has to be asked: at what point of a seeming military defeat would President Putin decide to cross the nuclear threshold? A concentration of US and NATO troops would be the perfect target for Russian ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, and once that threshold is crossed, who could say when the nukes would stop being used? Would Russia even risk that deployment, rather than strike the deployment bases, either in Poland, a NATO member, or Ukraine once the troops moved into the country but before they reached the front lines?

There is something truly sickening about the fact that Johnson — and so many GOP supporters of aid for Ukraine — are too scared to allow Congress to vote on such a key measure. Johnson fears being ousted from his speakership by the MAGA clique, as was the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy. House members fear that, if they buck the Trump line, a MAGA candidate will run against them in the GOP primary. And above all hangs the threat of physical danger to them or their families by deranged MAGA supporters who take Trump’s ugly rhetoric to heart.

Yet, surely, among more than 200 GOP House members, there are four whose belief in democracy and U.S. security would embolden them to take the risk.

Mrs Rubin, naturally, asserts that there’s a serious physical danger to any Republicans who voted to support this, “by deranged MAGA supporters who take Trump’s ugly rhetoric to heart,” but, shockingly enough, no such thing has happened to the Republicans in the Senate who voted to support Ukraine.

But, more importantly, Mrs Rubin noted that Republican House members who voted for such might face primary opponents. Well, if they fear primary opponents, then they must believe that their constituents wouldn’t support wasting sending more aid to Ukraine. Aren’t congressmen supposed to represent their constituents?

“This is not just about Ukraine, it is about our security,” (Representative Brendan) Boyle (D-PA) told me. “Putin is evil on the same level as Hitler. It is a lot less expensive to stand up to him now; if we wait until later, it will be much more costly in money and lives.”

Mr Putin might be “evil on the same level as Hitler”, but his military forces have not proven to be on the same level as the Wehrmacht in 1939. We are not likely to see Russian troops landing on the beaches of Maine and Virginia even if Ukraine collapses completely. We’re not going to see them invading even tiny Estonia, a NATO member roughly the size of New Hampshire and Vermont, because Ukraine has shown the Russians that they simply don’t have the wherewithal to do invasions well. Perhaps in ten years Russia will have rebuilt its forces enough to contemplate that, but Vladimir Vladimirovich will be 81 years old in ten years. if he’s even still alive then.

I don’t want to see Ukraine lose either, but I am not willing to waste American dollars and American weapons, and possibly American lives — remember: my older daughter is a reservist with the Army Corps of Engineers — to prop up Ukraine.

$60 billion in US aid would do what? It would help Ukraine to keep fighting the stalemate they’ve managed to achieve, but that’s all. $60 billion would keep the war going, and keep the killing on both sides and the destruction in Ukraine marching ever-forward, but it wouldn’t enable Ukraine to throw the Russians out of their country.

Mrs Rubin noted that the European Union have committed twice as much aid to Ukraine as the US has, to which I say, “Great! It’s a European problem; let the Europeans handle it! But leave the United States out of it.”