alt Hacker News> That is precisely the benefitting of the military industrial complex that I am fed up with.
This whole position just strikes me as misguided, because the numbers simply dont work. At all. Because if what you mainly care about is reducing US taxes flowing into weapon manufacturers, then the Ukraine is such a marginal portion that it basically does not matter at all:
If you said "lets reduce US spending on military to what all the rest of NATO together spends" (mind you, that is still the largest military budget in the world!), then that change alone would save in a single year over 4 (total!) Ukraine aid programs (and this is including all financial and humanitarian aid so far).
If you look at the stock price for major US arms manufacturers (RTX, LMT, NOC-- picked for being large and majority non-civilian revenue), then the whole Ukraine thing is basically not even a blip-- you would not even be able to tell (contrast the whole bitcoin/AI boom which is clearly visible in Nvidia price).
> With the question of warmongering settled at this point
I strongly disagree that this question is settled with a yes. I do absolutely agree with you that the answer from the US and especially its european allies should have been more decisive and unambiguous.
In the end, what the Ukraine war did and still does is establish a price on blatant imperialism. That price needs to be as high as possible to discourage and prevent repetitions as much as possible.
I would argue that this was a success in that regard already, but a small one, especially regarding the EU. Cutting further support would undermine and weaken this even more.
I'd also like to challenge your position on wanting to force an end to avoid further loss of life: How can you be confident that an (immediate) conclusion in Russians favor by cutting Ukraine military, humanitarian and financial aid (possibly also from allies) would actually be a net benefit in lives saved?
If you just look at the first and second Chechen war and the 8 years of insurgency directly after, what would make you confident that the exact same atrocities would not repeat at 20 times the scale?
To me personally, cutting support for the Ukraine when ones country is founded on principles of self-determination, freedom and democracy is peak hypocrisy.
Sources:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RTX
https://de.finance.yahoo.com/quote/LMT
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NOC/
Ukraine aid volume: