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At times. The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo was pretty bad!
Quite right, which is why they organized the Oil Embargo in response to the US sending an enormous amount of military aid to Israel. That is why, amongst other reasons, Osama Bin Laden hated the West and blew up the Twin Towers. It's a fundamentally symmetrical phenomenon. Arabs play the game and can react to our activities. Which is why, unless there are good reasons, we should avoid antagonizing them by, for example, providing Israel with massive amounts of military aid that they use to kill Arabs. Or invading Iraq. Likewise with Russia. If we didn't try to depose their allies in Syria, advance our sphere of influence ever closer to them... we wouldn't be experiencing the current crisis.
But what are the second-order impacts of this? If other countries know that we'll sacrifice them en masse for our own interests, why would they ally with us? Is Taiwan sleeping soundly, knowing they're also 'not a treaty ally but we like them' and seeing Ukraine getting turned into the Somme? We don't even recognize that they're a country! And what are the Russians going to do in retaliation? Send assistance to our other enemies? Stir up trouble? Coup various nations in Africa? Once the war is over, a lot of Russians are going to remain very angry with us for getting their countrymen killed with our weapons. Putin will likely be replaced with a real hardliner when he dies.
It will take at least 5 years of surge production to replace the reserves of munitions that have been expended. Taiwan may not have that time and Taiwan is actually important. It's not like we can just print money and buy missiles, there are hard caps in industry and trained manpower. The people who know how to build munitions factories are often retired now, our manufacturing sector has shrunk.
https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/230109_Military_Inventories_Graphic.jpg?V07Bh5IFz5cOgg9qXyu.wrwD7BYakT7C
Well then we bring on WW3. The whole point is to avoid that outcome. France, Britain and the US have a large nuclear arsenal and can prevent Russia invading NATO members but Russia can also lay waste to the Polish army, Europe and America. When it comes to tactical nuclear weapons, their advantage is considerable.
Given that we spent the last few years building up the Ukrainian military, it would be embarrassing to give up on them. But it would be far more embarrassing to lose if we make a major effort, which we have now made. It's the difference between looking impotent and proclaiming one's impotence to the whole world. Ideally, we should've done nothing to start with, then there would be no risk of looking weak, since we never declared an interest in Ukraine. Russia demolishing Georgia didn't make us look weak, we never really tried to strengthen Georgia militarily. But now that we've pursued this loathsome path, it is hard to leave. It becomes more and more tempting to keep doubling down in a desperate hope for victory. Likewise, the Russians will keep intensifying their efforts. They've spent significant amounts of blood on this, they are becoming less and less willing to give up, their demands will increase.
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That's literally half a century ago. To me it honestly seems like the muslim world has by now more or less accepted the Israel-Western alliance and hasn't had appetite to punish us for it in a long, long while, and the 1973 Oil Embargo (emphasis on 1973) is just evidence in favour from my PoV. I have to admit, I'm increasingly unsure how much point there is in this argument, since we seem to interpret the same evidence very differently and our intuitions and expectations about alternative worlds are our main disagreement, and I don't see how either can convince the other here, it's not like we can just run a simulation of different scenarios.
I don't think Ukraine losing completely is a foregone conclusion, I was pointing out that even granting your assumptions the current war is better for us than the alternative where Ukraine gets curbstomped and de-facto incorporated because we do nothing. Likewise "I'd rather die than be drafted into the Russian Army" is a rather common sentiment for Ukrainians. I don't trust Russian stats either, there is endless stories on their side as well about questionable draftings. We can also prop up Ukraine economically more or less indefinitely, Russia has no such backing. The counteroffensive was too optimistic and much more manpower-intensive than Ukraine can afford, but I think Ukraine has still a decent chance to grind everything into a stalemate. On the issue of retaliation, I have absolutely no confidence in Putin not doing those things anyway. Again, I see a bigger chance in trying to drain him of resources than in just hoping that if we give him Ukraine on a silver plate he'll be nice.
Nope, it just doesn't work. Georgia is far away enough and small enough that even most Europeans genuinely don't care about it, but Ukraine is literally next door for pretty much the entire Eastern Europe, and even for Germans it's uncomfortably close to home. For us, Georgia is a "I didn't even know it's technically Europe" country, Ukraine is a "my grandma's carer is from there and I've always liked her" country. I'm pretty sure Scandinavians, especially Finns, would also care no matter what. It's mostly southwest Europe + France + UK that could possibly not care. Even if the US had never supported Ukraine, large parts of Europe would at the very least rage impotently and probably try to send aid (and remember the occasion). In your alternative world, the west would look impotent and divided, more than in this world. Even worse, it gives Europeans yet another excuse to just not help out if Taiwan ever should get attacked and try to strike a deal with China instead.
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