Rand Paul delaying military aid to the central government of the Ukraine, in the hope Americans can get better assurances about how their money is being spent, was unquestionably a good thing.
One thing the media is getting right is that Americans need to think more about their country’s foreign policy, and they need to think more about how it affects them. Unfortunately, the majority of opinions being presented amount to a simplistic pro-Ukraine messaging campaign, undoubtedly also sponsored by the US government.
Costs of interventionism
Previous adventurism and foreign entanglements were at very little cost to Americans, compared to the possible fallout over the Ukraine. Biden himself warned of pain when it comes to Americans affording gas, connecting it with the conflict he wants to intensify in the Ukraine.
There is ample reason to think the war in the Ukraine will be lost by the West, however long it takes. The two-decade War in Afghanistan was more likely to succeed than a war on the Russian steppes of the Ukraine, where Russia is highly invested and sufficient millions of ethnic Russians reside, enough to justify not just a temporary Russian presence but a permanent one, even with great loss of life.
No hope of Western glory
The Ukraine conflict offers no hope of Western victory and expansion, just like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Revelling in Russian soldiers dying, which has been the case anyway for local Russian civilians in the Donbass since 2014, won’t change the connection of these people to a land they long possessed and have the ability to at least control a great deal of. For us to think killing Russians is the answer to the West's problem here is nothing more than a manifestation of violent urges to compensate for the Western flight from Afghanistan, and no more than a continuation of killing the Taliban, which turned out to be pointless. In the end, the land will always be possessed by the people who live and die on that land, and not by those who want to brag about how many people they killed there, which is all the US does in every conflict it loses.
Conflict with Russia exposes countries to potential famine, as Biden blamed food shortages on Russia. Western countries are not immune to this problem, and the West could be swamped with the emaciated fleeing migrants from other countries. Given that global warming can affect crop yields, we could end up facing famines in our own countries, the UK and US, if the war lasts a long time and the Russians are willing to endure it for decades.
Notice the unelected parasites of US policy
For the first time in recent history, foreign policy issues seriously affect Americans, such that their welfare may depend on identifying and removing the long-term US foreign policy strategists guiding successive administrations into failed wars. Unfortunately, there is no clear means to achieve this. The revolving door between so-called "journalism" and foreign policy advisory roles exposes that the junta of undemocratic maggots stays in control, no matter what administration replaces the last, and these maggots never leave.
Look at Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Ned Price, as a few examples of varied importance. While sharing the same murderous neoconservative glare, responsible for thousands of deaths in failed wars in the Middle East, each such person has never stood for election, instead cowering from the people and worming their way around them, and yet still shaping policy and laying out the only options available to the administration. The American people will need special tweezers or an iron fist to remove these unelected parasites, or their ideas will be responsible for creating unmanageable costs for citizens.