Secretary of State Marco Rubio and ‘counting up the costs’ if the U.S. chooses to lose in Ukraine

10:56 01.02.2025 •

Marco Rubio in an interview on Sirius XM’s ‘The Megyn Kelly Show’.

Yes, by all means, Secretary of State Marco Rubio should be “realistic” about Ukraine, notes ‘The Washington Post’.

Ukraine is being destroyed by the fighting with Russia and the conflict must be swiftly settled through negotiations, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said.

In an interview on Sirius XM’s ‘The Megyn Kelly Show’, Rubio reiterated US President Donald Trump’s willingness to find a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis, saying that Trump believes the conflict “needs to end now.”

“It needs to end to a negotiation. In any negotiation, both sides are going to have to give something up,” Rubio stated.

Even a growing number Democrats who vowed to support Kiev for “as long as it takes” under the previous administration of US President Joe Biden “would now acknowledge that what we have been funding is a stalemate, a protracted conflict, and maybe even worse than a stalemate, one in which incrementally Ukraine is being destroyed and losing more and more territory,” the secretary of state said.

“What the dishonesty that has existed is that we somehow led people to believe that Ukraine would be able not just to defeat Russia, but, you know, destroy them, push them all the way back to what the world looked like in... 2014,” Rubio added.

As a result of the conflict, Ukraine is “being set back a hundred years. Their energy grid is being wiped out… And you know how many Ukrainians have left Ukraine, living in other countries now? They may never return. I mean, that is their future, and it is endangered in that regard,” Rubio warned.

In the aftermath of costly U.S. frustrations in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, advocating foreign policy “realism” is often shorthand for modest assessments of what U.S. power can accomplish in a world less malleable than many policymakers once thought. Those three interventions involved attempts to cause democratic institutions to take root in inhospitable social soil. The U.S. intervention in Ukraine — the proxy war with Russia is a war — is different. And the cost of losing even, perhaps especially, a proxy war can be steep.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio says we should be “realistic” regarding Ukraine, he is not, one hopes, worrying about U.S. hubris. The bigger danger is excessive pessimism about what can be achieved, and a too-sanguine calculation of a low cost of choosing defeat.

Before he became vice president, JD Vance said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” Richard Moore, head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, says the cost of not supporting Ukraine “would be infinitely higher” than the cost of supporting it. Elaine McCusker, Frederick W. Kagan and Richard Sims, in their American Enterprise Institute report “Dollars and Sense: America’s Interest in a Ukrainian Victory,” explain why.

They estimate that a five-year $808 billion increase in defense spending would be necessary if Vladimir Putin prevails and menaces eastern and central Europe. That is seven times more than the cost they estimate of preventing a 2026 collapse of Ukraine’s military — a cost consisting mostly of money spent in the United States on weapons production.

All wars end. This one will, either with negotiations or with a Ukrainian collapse presaging another war. Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia (2012-2014), now at Stanford and the Hoover Institution, correctly says (in Foreign Affairs) that for the negotiations to achieve more, Ukraine needs “the credible deterrence that only NATO can offer.”

NATO membership might be unattainable. More military muscle for Ukraine is not.

Success, such as it might be in Ukraine, will be unsatisfying but much less costly than failure to achieve it. And defeat in Ukraine is a choice.

 

…Americans love money more than anything else.

Americans evaluate the conflict in Ukraine through money. It means that they have not understood the essence of the conflict. And therefore they will lose all their money if they persist in their desire ‘to make money on this war’.

The USA will lose, and is already losing, a lot of dollars, which they love very much.

 

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