I’m not sure this is a serious question, but I’ll try to answer it seriously.
Why do so many American politicians from both parties care 100 times more about the Ukraine border than the USA border?
First of all, they don’t. The US has spent $333 billion on border security since 2003, and Biden is proposing to spend a record $25 billion in 2024. Agencies enforcing border and immigration security employ over 84,000 people.
The US has given Ukraine aid worth $113 billion, with a significant portion of those funds going to replace outdated U.S. military equipment with upgraded, more capable hardware - something we would do anyway, though probably at a slower pace.
In August, Biden called for a new round of $24 billion aid to Ukraine. Even if you think that’s too much, it’s not “100x more” than the $25 billion he requested for border security, up $800 million from last year.
Whether it’s drug smuggling or migrants, the issues facing the US on its southern border are complicated and defy simple solutions. They are further complicated by our massive economic relationship with Mexico (our largest trading partner besides Canada) and by something we don’t like to talk about: vibrant US demand for recreation drugs and for illegal workers for many jobs Americans won’t do. It’s far from clear, to me, that the solutions to these problems lie solely or even mainly at the border.
In contrast, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine - along with Ukrainians’ determined resistance - offers a discrete and defined challenge to which we and our allies have, so far, responded surprisingly effectively.
Western resolve has not only denied Putin what he imagined would be an easy victory, it has given China pause to reconsider how the West (which it considered divided and decadent) might respond to a similar attack on Taiwan.
It should be noted that while the US has spent treasure, it hasn’t spent blood. Nor has it crossed any “red lines” that would provoke a wider war or a nuclear exchange, as critics like Musk have constantly predicted.
Finding an end-game in Ukraine is a genuine challenge. No one thinks we can pour endless amounts of money into the conflict. But if we are to negotiate a lasting peace, we need to do so from a position of strength, not a position of surrender.
Elon Musk runs several companies: electric cars, batteries, space rockets, and social media. Surely he should be able to appreciate that countries need to be able to tackle more than one challenge at a time.
Saying “we can’t deal with this challenge until this other one is solved” simply isn’t a luxury that history affords us.
Originally published as a Twitter thread.
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He's gone from posting cringe reddit memes to the kind of normie takes that everyone's boomer uncle regularly posts on facebook. What a transformation.
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