The USSR was the evil empire. As long as they were communists the rivalry made sense. Once the USSR fell apart and the Russians abandoned communism it made sense for us to reconcile.
These people seething with hatred for Russians today are completely deranged.
The author is correct, the proper, natural position for the America 1st movement is to be anti-foreign intervention, anti-war, and certainly against police actions around the world. The legitimate role of the US military is to protect our borders, our people and our property. From that standpoint the proper use of our military would be to deploy along our borders, where we are being invaded, and to assist in expelling the foreign armies of occupation that have been allowed in for the past not just four years, but the past 40 years. Neocons, globalists, internationalists and blood drinkers of all stripes must be rejected by real Americans. We are certainly must not be drawn into the combat between Israel and Iran as we have absolutely no skin in that game.
The dumbest slander against GWOT Veterans (and Veterans from other eras) against fighting in the latest shiny foreign entanglement, are midwit comparisons to Commie anti-war protesters, as if they assume every Veteran should automatically be for war, any war.
No. War without purpose or realistic aims of defending America is what we’re against. Futility and lack of purpose wars are insipid. Fire has purpose. One does not burn down their house to simply watch the flames.
The boomers motivation against war in the 60’s was far more motivated by their (and their friends) drafter status. I’m not saying they were wrong about opposing the war but that their opposition was much more about self interest than morality. At the time there was no way to be sure of that but their support of subsequent interventions where the cannon fodder was supplied by others tells the tale.
True, I think Fabius Minarchus wrote about this in one of his articles. The US would probably have had less resistance to Vietnam if it was volunteer instead of the draft.
A-fucking-men! I’m an old Cold Warrior whose specialty was the USSR and a “card carrying” Baby Boomer meaning I can speak to the truth of much of what y’all are saying here. The only war the “hippie freak flower children” were ever against was any that might involve them personally. They run your lives now because after the ‘peace and love’ anti war bullshit had run its course they took baths, cut their hair and ran for Congress and infested the bureaucracies around the country.
I don't think it's a strange time as much as it reveals their true nature. I am pro-war in theory, which is why I wasn't bothered by Russia trying to conquer the Ukraine. If anything, I was cheering on the Russians. The commie boomer on the other hand, believes that war is evil, so we need to stop Putin from invading Ukraine - that's why she gets hysterical about it. The left is pro-war precisely to the degree that they hate war in theory. Yes, the irony of using our military force in order to stop other nations from using their military force is completely lost on them.
what we are (re)learning is the war is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, is politics by other means. the cold war stalemate, probably added some stability, or the illusion of stability. We are back to standard human nature where politicians will focus on external enemies to distract from internal problems without the Cold War limits on them.
I don't even understand what the return investment is here. We go into the Middle East, stay there for over two decades, and then what? When can we go back home? We weren't even in Vietnam for this long. Should we go all in on Iran we will be in for even longer. We have too much going on at home to be dealing with everything out there.
The anti-war sentiment on the right is not based on the same principles as similar movements on the left. It is much more. No more wars we can’t win quickly and decisively.
Jacksonians don’t like forever wars. But they could be tricked into a war billed as quick and decisive.
What is the "right"? As long as that umbrella can be pulled over the heads of neocons it's a meaningless term. Trump's base is not Jacksonian in this frame presented. The base believes in just war.
Tell MAGA, America First or whatever we call the reemerging right that the US has declared a never ending war on the Mexican cartels, there would be an avalanche of support from the base and people signing up to fight.
Auron will never talk honestly about anything to do with Jews and Israel. His paymaster The Blaze media is owned and run by a zealous Zionist—of biblical proportions. Auron is not to be trusted on anything within this realm.
I can see what Israel is doing in terms of pure self interest. It’s a risky plan but it might work. I think post October 7 they stopped caring what the world thought. But that is up to them. We do not need to get dragged into this. It is imperative we look askance at anything they say.
America First is one thing, but we are entering a multipolar world with strong adversaries who don't share our Christian / Enlightenment values. We can and must downsize the Empire, but we will be stronger with continued trade. It's just wishful thinking that we can pull in the drawbridge and isolate. It didn't work in the 20th Century.
The Bullshit is strong on both sides. The only credible military force NATO has ever had was that of the United States along with the vast majority of the money. With Trump in the White House the NATO military cosplayers are more on their own than they have ever been. Unfortunately, the Russian weapons, especially their armor seem to be almost as ‘boutique’ as that supplied by NATO and the US to the Ukraine. I had a higher estimation of them perhaps influenced by past memories of the history of the Red Army. However, Russia can fall back on its ancient tried and true tactics of the human wave meat avalanche and grind the Ukraine into the ground. Russia has never been concerned about casualties since its post Mongol inception. My money is still on Russia for that reason.
I don't think it's especially likely that US ground troops or really NATO troops more generally would be committed to Ukraine (in a conventional conflict they'd basically crush the Russian army, and thereby force Russia into using nukes to save face.) The current proxy stalemate is more-or-less intentional.
Lol. You still live in a fantasy world. The U.S./NATO is a paper tiger. Even without entering the war, you are all getting "crushed." None of your boutique weapons work on the battlefield, and your "maneuver" warfare got thoroughly trounced in the failed Ukrainian 2023 summer offensive. The U.S. provides for every aspect of the war; the Kiev regime provides corpses. Clown!
Who is living in a fantasy world? The Ukrainians have been able to hold off an army 4-5x larger than their own with the benefit of NATO/US-donated hardware, intel and advisors, for more than three years. If the Russians' numerical advantage was neutralised and attrition tactics became non-viable, logic indicates their lines would crumble within months.
Notable that when they cut off the intel feed for targeting inside Russian territory for a few days, the Ukrainian salient in Kursk immediately collapsed.
Without the U.S. telling the Ukrainians exactly where to be and exactly where to target their drone teams, the Ukrainians turned out to be fairly average.
Being able to use NATO countries as their deep logistics has been a big advantage for Ukraine as well.
The Ukrainians have had more troops than the Russians have had inside Ukraine for the entire war. The main difference is that the Russians have a big infantry advantage because they’ve killed so many of Ukrainian vets who never got rotated off the line.
That’s why the Russians have been consistently taking territory. It’s not meatwave attacks, either. That was mostly in 2023 for the battle of Bakhmut where the Russians emptied out their prisons and fed the Storm Z penal units into the grinder.
I'm not sure how this negates my point though? I guess the Russian numerical advantage could vary depending on which numbers you look at, but I think it's fairly clear that NATO forces entering Ukraine directly would tip the scales pretty decisively in Ukraine's favour. The fact they haven't done this already indicates to me that crushing Russia in a conventional war isn't really the objective here.
The Ukrainians are vastly inflating Russian casualties and underreporting their own casualties. If we went by official Ukrainian claims, Russia wouldn’t have an army left to continue assaults. Yet the offensives continue. If the Russians were using meatwave assaults as tactical doctrine, the Ukrainians would be gleefully posting videos daily.
The reason the Russians are moving so slow is because they’re practicing force conservation and rotating combat units. Most assaults are conducted at the fire team and squad level. It’s really difficult to mass any troops for a big meatwave assault because they’d get detected and blown up beforehand, which is what was happening in 2022 and early 2023.
The Russians spent 2023 on the defensive and completely reorganized their tactical doctrine to emphasize small unit offensives across broad fronts with limited objectives. They’re not making the big arrow pushes that maneuver warfare calls for because it’s ineffective and inefficient in this very new combat environment.
The pervasive drone coverage and speedy kill chains affects both sides. It’s very challenging to attack, which is where the Russians are suffering most of their casualties. It’s easier to defend, but Russian drones and artillery are ravaging Ukrainian front line logistics, which is where a lot of their casualties are happening. With fiber optic drones having ranges of up to 15km, Ukrainians have to stage their reserves much further back than they had to in 2023. This has led to a serious degradation of their ability to conduct effective counterattacks to eliminate Russian salients that develop into localized encirclements.
Even moving at night, it’s dangerous to be outside of a concealed bunker or dugout. This has also led to higher Ukrainian losses because the medevac chain is broken due to vehicles being such prime targets and the need to move the wounded who can be moved at night.
It’s slow, methodical, attritional warfare, because as the Ukrainian ls discovered in their failed offensive of 2023, and discovered again in 2024 when they tried to expand the initial big push into Kursk, vehicles and troops without hardened positions to hide in results in big losses.
If NATO forces entered the fray, the Russians would dig in and bet that NATO countries would quickly find domestic political support collapsing as the body count started piling up. Maybe NATO could win, but they’d pay a very high cost, and a nuclear exchange could be the result if they were actually able to penetrate into Crimea and eastern Donbas.
> "The Ukrainians are vastly inflating Russian casualties and underreporting their own casualties. If we went by official Ukrainian claims, Russia wouldn’t have an army left to continue assaults"
I think it's a little naive to assume that Russian reporting on this topic is more trustworthy, and these casualty estimates are not exclusively based on Ukrainian reporting. Russia also has 2 million in reserve forces before conscription is considered, so ~250K dead and ~750K wounded seems well within the range of what they could plausibly absorb? The same can't be said for Russian estimates of Ukrainian casualties.
> "Maybe NATO could win, but they’d pay a very high cost, and a nuclear exchange could be the result if they were actually able to penetrate into Crimea and eastern Donbas."
Yeah, I'm not claiming it would be a bloodless operation- although NATO having a vast advantage in air power seems pretty pertinent to me when it comes to, e.g, taking out artillery emplacements or logistic centres- but the risks of nukes coming out if Russia was actually beaten is the main point I'm making.
I think they're *also* trying to avoid a scenario where Ukraine is actually beaten and pacified, because that'll put Russia on the doorstep of places like Poland, Hungary and Romania, who are existing NATO allies, and invading those will *require* either dismantling NATO or a full-scale NATO retaliation (assuming the Russians don't invade the Baltics or Finland directly, which I'm guessing would not be their play.)
The USSR was the evil empire. As long as they were communists the rivalry made sense. Once the USSR fell apart and the Russians abandoned communism it made sense for us to reconcile.
These people seething with hatred for Russians today are completely deranged.
I agree with you
The pro-war right was a neocon aberration. The anti-war left was only a slightly-less-transient Boomer phenomenon.
Once the draft went away the boomers lost their anti-war fervor
The author is correct, the proper, natural position for the America 1st movement is to be anti-foreign intervention, anti-war, and certainly against police actions around the world. The legitimate role of the US military is to protect our borders, our people and our property. From that standpoint the proper use of our military would be to deploy along our borders, where we are being invaded, and to assist in expelling the foreign armies of occupation that have been allowed in for the past not just four years, but the past 40 years. Neocons, globalists, internationalists and blood drinkers of all stripes must be rejected by real Americans. We are certainly must not be drawn into the combat between Israel and Iran as we have absolutely no skin in that game.
The dumbest slander against GWOT Veterans (and Veterans from other eras) against fighting in the latest shiny foreign entanglement, are midwit comparisons to Commie anti-war protesters, as if they assume every Veteran should automatically be for war, any war.
No. War without purpose or realistic aims of defending America is what we’re against. Futility and lack of purpose wars are insipid. Fire has purpose. One does not burn down their house to simply watch the flames.
Arguably, it is exactly those commie anti-war protestors who are now the ones most vehemently wanting to go to war with Russia over the Ukraine.
The boomers motivation against war in the 60’s was far more motivated by their (and their friends) drafter status. I’m not saying they were wrong about opposing the war but that their opposition was much more about self interest than morality. At the time there was no way to be sure of that but their support of subsequent interventions where the cannon fodder was supplied by others tells the tale.
True, I think Fabius Minarchus wrote about this in one of his articles. The US would probably have had less resistance to Vietnam if it was volunteer instead of the draft.
A-fucking-men! I’m an old Cold Warrior whose specialty was the USSR and a “card carrying” Baby Boomer meaning I can speak to the truth of much of what y’all are saying here. The only war the “hippie freak flower children” were ever against was any that might involve them personally. They run your lives now because after the ‘peace and love’ anti war bullshit had run its course they took baths, cut their hair and ran for Congress and infested the bureaucracies around the country.
It's a strange time.
I don't think it's a strange time as much as it reveals their true nature. I am pro-war in theory, which is why I wasn't bothered by Russia trying to conquer the Ukraine. If anything, I was cheering on the Russians. The commie boomer on the other hand, believes that war is evil, so we need to stop Putin from invading Ukraine - that's why she gets hysterical about it. The left is pro-war precisely to the degree that they hate war in theory. Yes, the irony of using our military force in order to stop other nations from using their military force is completely lost on them.
It's the post-war consensus vs accepting the historical norm.
what we are (re)learning is the war is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, is politics by other means. the cold war stalemate, probably added some stability, or the illusion of stability. We are back to standard human nature where politicians will focus on external enemies to distract from internal problems without the Cold War limits on them.
I don't even understand what the return investment is here. We go into the Middle East, stay there for over two decades, and then what? When can we go back home? We weren't even in Vietnam for this long. Should we go all in on Iran we will be in for even longer. We have too much going on at home to be dealing with everything out there.
Not sure if you have read this. Trumps base is very Jacksonian.
https://www.amazon.com/Special-Providence-American-Foreign-Changed/dp/0415935369
The anti-war sentiment on the right is not based on the same principles as similar movements on the left. It is much more. No more wars we can’t win quickly and decisively.
Jacksonians don’t like forever wars. But they could be tricked into a war billed as quick and decisive.
What is the "right"? As long as that umbrella can be pulled over the heads of neocons it's a meaningless term. Trump's base is not Jacksonian in this frame presented. The base believes in just war.
Tell MAGA, America First or whatever we call the reemerging right that the US has declared a never ending war on the Mexican cartels, there would be an avalanche of support from the base and people signing up to fight.
Auron will never talk honestly about anything to do with Jews and Israel. His paymaster The Blaze media is owned and run by a zealous Zionist—of biblical proportions. Auron is not to be trusted on anything within this realm.
I can see what Israel is doing in terms of pure self interest. It’s a risky plan but it might work. I think post October 7 they stopped caring what the world thought. But that is up to them. We do not need to get dragged into this. It is imperative we look askance at anything they say.
Certainly hope there isn't a war with Iran. I just want Canada and France and Japan kept out of it.
Its pathetic to watch so-called Republicans afraid to defend Western Civilization.
We are trying to defend it at home while the globalists are importing the third world.
America First is one thing, but we are entering a multipolar world with strong adversaries who don't share our Christian / Enlightenment values. We can and must downsize the Empire, but we will be stronger with continued trade. It's just wishful thinking that we can pull in the drawbridge and isolate. It didn't work in the 20th Century.
The Bullshit is strong on both sides. The only credible military force NATO has ever had was that of the United States along with the vast majority of the money. With Trump in the White House the NATO military cosplayers are more on their own than they have ever been. Unfortunately, the Russian weapons, especially their armor seem to be almost as ‘boutique’ as that supplied by NATO and the US to the Ukraine. I had a higher estimation of them perhaps influenced by past memories of the history of the Red Army. However, Russia can fall back on its ancient tried and true tactics of the human wave meat avalanche and grind the Ukraine into the ground. Russia has never been concerned about casualties since its post Mongol inception. My money is still on Russia for that reason.
I don't think it's especially likely that US ground troops or really NATO troops more generally would be committed to Ukraine (in a conventional conflict they'd basically crush the Russian army, and thereby force Russia into using nukes to save face.) The current proxy stalemate is more-or-less intentional.
Lol. You still live in a fantasy world. The U.S./NATO is a paper tiger. Even without entering the war, you are all getting "crushed." None of your boutique weapons work on the battlefield, and your "maneuver" warfare got thoroughly trounced in the failed Ukrainian 2023 summer offensive. The U.S. provides for every aspect of the war; the Kiev regime provides corpses. Clown!
Who is living in a fantasy world? The Ukrainians have been able to hold off an army 4-5x larger than their own with the benefit of NATO/US-donated hardware, intel and advisors, for more than three years. If the Russians' numerical advantage was neutralised and attrition tactics became non-viable, logic indicates their lines would crumble within months.
Notable that when they cut off the intel feed for targeting inside Russian territory for a few days, the Ukrainian salient in Kursk immediately collapsed.
Without the U.S. telling the Ukrainians exactly where to be and exactly where to target their drone teams, the Ukrainians turned out to be fairly average.
Being able to use NATO countries as their deep logistics has been a big advantage for Ukraine as well.
The Ukrainians have had more troops than the Russians have had inside Ukraine for the entire war. The main difference is that the Russians have a big infantry advantage because they’ve killed so many of Ukrainian vets who never got rotated off the line.
That’s why the Russians have been consistently taking territory. It’s not meatwave attacks, either. That was mostly in 2023 for the battle of Bakhmut where the Russians emptied out their prisons and fed the Storm Z penal units into the grinder.
> "The Ukrainians have had more troops than the Russians have had inside Ukraine for the entire war"
That seems incongruous with reported Russian casualties being 2x-3x higher, unless they're being obliterated as fast as they're being replaced?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1296573/russia-ukraine-military-comparison/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293174/nato-russia-military-comparison/
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/without-the-usa-would-nato-still-win/
I'm not sure how this negates my point though? I guess the Russian numerical advantage could vary depending on which numbers you look at, but I think it's fairly clear that NATO forces entering Ukraine directly would tip the scales pretty decisively in Ukraine's favour. The fact they haven't done this already indicates to me that crushing Russia in a conventional war isn't really the objective here.
The Ukrainians are vastly inflating Russian casualties and underreporting their own casualties. If we went by official Ukrainian claims, Russia wouldn’t have an army left to continue assaults. Yet the offensives continue. If the Russians were using meatwave assaults as tactical doctrine, the Ukrainians would be gleefully posting videos daily.
The reason the Russians are moving so slow is because they’re practicing force conservation and rotating combat units. Most assaults are conducted at the fire team and squad level. It’s really difficult to mass any troops for a big meatwave assault because they’d get detected and blown up beforehand, which is what was happening in 2022 and early 2023.
The Russians spent 2023 on the defensive and completely reorganized their tactical doctrine to emphasize small unit offensives across broad fronts with limited objectives. They’re not making the big arrow pushes that maneuver warfare calls for because it’s ineffective and inefficient in this very new combat environment.
The pervasive drone coverage and speedy kill chains affects both sides. It’s very challenging to attack, which is where the Russians are suffering most of their casualties. It’s easier to defend, but Russian drones and artillery are ravaging Ukrainian front line logistics, which is where a lot of their casualties are happening. With fiber optic drones having ranges of up to 15km, Ukrainians have to stage their reserves much further back than they had to in 2023. This has led to a serious degradation of their ability to conduct effective counterattacks to eliminate Russian salients that develop into localized encirclements.
Even moving at night, it’s dangerous to be outside of a concealed bunker or dugout. This has also led to higher Ukrainian losses because the medevac chain is broken due to vehicles being such prime targets and the need to move the wounded who can be moved at night.
It’s slow, methodical, attritional warfare, because as the Ukrainian ls discovered in their failed offensive of 2023, and discovered again in 2024 when they tried to expand the initial big push into Kursk, vehicles and troops without hardened positions to hide in results in big losses.
If NATO forces entered the fray, the Russians would dig in and bet that NATO countries would quickly find domestic political support collapsing as the body count started piling up. Maybe NATO could win, but they’d pay a very high cost, and a nuclear exchange could be the result if they were actually able to penetrate into Crimea and eastern Donbas.
> "The Ukrainians are vastly inflating Russian casualties and underreporting their own casualties. If we went by official Ukrainian claims, Russia wouldn’t have an army left to continue assaults"
I think it's a little naive to assume that Russian reporting on this topic is more trustworthy, and these casualty estimates are not exclusively based on Ukrainian reporting. Russia also has 2 million in reserve forces before conscription is considered, so ~250K dead and ~750K wounded seems well within the range of what they could plausibly absorb? The same can't be said for Russian estimates of Ukrainian casualties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Total_casualties
> "Maybe NATO could win, but they’d pay a very high cost, and a nuclear exchange could be the result if they were actually able to penetrate into Crimea and eastern Donbas."
Yeah, I'm not claiming it would be a bloodless operation- although NATO having a vast advantage in air power seems pretty pertinent to me when it comes to, e.g, taking out artillery emplacements or logistic centres- but the risks of nukes coming out if Russia was actually beaten is the main point I'm making.
https://theweek.com/news/defence/104574/nato-vs-russia-who-would-win
I think they're *also* trying to avoid a scenario where Ukraine is actually beaten and pacified, because that'll put Russia on the doorstep of places like Poland, Hungary and Romania, who are existing NATO allies, and invading those will *require* either dismantling NATO or a full-scale NATO retaliation (assuming the Russians don't invade the Baltics or Finland directly, which I'm guessing would not be their play.)