If you accept that this war is a very low-cost, high-reward means for the US to advance its strategic interests overseas, then you’d have to have tapioca for brains to also believe that the US wouldn’t have gone out of its way to make sure the war happens.
As opposition to funding the US proxy war in Ukraine increases on Capitol Hill, empire apologists have been frantically churning out think pieces about how much the war serves US strategic interests in order to manufacture support for its continued backing by Washington. Such arguments flatly contradict the propaganda messaging we were inundated with at the beginning of the war that this was an “unprovoked invasion”, but empire managers don’t seem particularly interested in defending that narrative anymore.
The latest appearance in this new “our Ukraine proxy warfare greatly advances US strategic interests” genre of op-ed comes to us courtesy of notorious war propagandist Max Boot via The Washington Post. Boot’s article was originally titled “Ukraine aid is a great investment. Don’t let MAGA Republicans end it.”, but the headline has since been revised to the slightly less creepy “This is what the U.S. is getting by aiding Ukraine.”
Claiming that funding the war is “the right thing to do strategically,” Boot argues that “it is hard to think of any U.S. foreign policy initiative since the end of the Cold War that has been more successful or more important than U.S. aid to Ukraine.”
“Russia has lost an estimated 120,000 soldiers and 170,000 to 180,000 have been injured,” Boot writes. “Russia has also lost an estimated 2,329 tanks, 2,817 infantry fighting vehicles, 2,868 trucks and jeeps, 354 armored personnel carriers, 538 self-propelled artillery vehicles, 310 towed artillery pieces, 92 fixed-wing aircraft and 106 helicopters.”
“The Russian armed forces have been devastated, thereby reducing the risk to front-line NATO states such as Poland and the Baltic republics that the United States is treaty-bound to protect,” Boot continues. “And all of that has been accomplished without having to put a single U.S. soldier at risk on the front lines.”
“That’s an incredible investment,” gloats Boot.
At no time in his masturbatory gushing about how many Russians this war has helped kill does Boot make any mention of the immense toll this deliberately provoked and completely unnecessary war has taken on Ukrainian lives. Their deaths and dismemberments and displacement are the largest price being paid into this “investment” by far, but Boot doesn’t deem them worthy of even a footnote.
We’ve been seeing this “investment” line being promoted with increasing frequency by US empire managers and their apologists. In an article published in the Connecticut Post last month, Senator Richard Blumenthal assured Americans that “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment.” A few days prior to that Senator Mitt Romney had described the proxy war as “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done,” because “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money… a weakened Russia is a good thing.” In December Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that funding the proxy war is “a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies and contest our core interests.” Last November the imperial war machine-funded think tank Center for European Policy Analysis published a report arguing that “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment.”
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