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The west would have benefited from Russia taking Ukraine in a week. Ukraine's pensionsystem is a complete mess, their infrastructure is worse than Russia's and they would have gotten 20 million new citizens that hate them. Combine this with sanctions on Russia and it could easily have toppled Russia. The plan was probably to give Ukrainians light weapons, training and let Ukraine become a Soviet-Afghan war 2.0. Three billion dollars of aid to the taliban played an important role in sinking the Soviet union. The architects behind the war had experience from Iraq and saw poorly funded militias cost the US tax payer the equivalent of the GDP of a medium sized country.
Instead they have gotten a nightmare in which Russian mass produced drones are being shot down by 250 000 dollar missiles in limited supply.
The neocon plan was to pull out of Afghanistan, have a quick collapse of Russia and then focus on China. Now they are the supply line for a Ukrainian military the size of the American force in Vietnam at the height of the war that is fighting a far more intense war while Russia is turning into a large arms factory. The aid won't stop when the fighting ends. After this war a force 4-5 times the size of the US marine corps including its reserves has to be completely rebuild and then sustained. They now have a military the size of the French, British and Germany military combined that is consuming supplies at WWIII levels and will need a complete restoration after the war. The pivot out of the middle east ended with a 7+ month war over a tiny strip of resourceless desert.
Meanwhile China builds more tonnage of military ships than all of NATO combined.
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