Pinching Pennies for Putin

[Nevilledog]

https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/pinching-pennies-for-putin/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/PJsWk

There is a William F. Buckley Jr. line for every occasion, and the one for Sen. J.D. Vance is: “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”

Vance came to his heartland populism via an education at Yale Law School, Peter Thiel’s money, Hollywood, and the New York Times bestseller list. A venture capital man who once denounced Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency and who currently is so intimately and uncomfortably attached to Trump that it is impossible to distinguish him from a hemorrhoid, Vance has decided to be the clown prince of a very small kingdom: the realm of people who feel very strongly that the U.S. government should accommodate Vladimir Putin’s imperial project in Ukraine and beyond. Vance is not stupid, and he has seen how far a clown prince can go in Washington. He even has some reason to hope that he is 1,659 days away from being elected president of these United States after serving as Donald Trump’s vice president and riding that lame duck as far as he will waddle.

It is difficult to feel much other than contempt for what Vance has become and pity for the way he became it. My own background is similar to his in the worst ways, and I sympathize when it comes to the temptation to say to the world, as Vance has, “Tell me what sort of man you want me to be, and I’ll pretend to be that sort of man.” I can understand it, and even forgive it. (Eventually.) But you can never trust a man who has decided to be the Tom Ripley of American politics.

Vance has set his sights on U.S. foreign aid—aid to Israel and Ukraine specifically, but foreign aid more generally. U.S. foreign-aid spending is up a bit in the past couple of years, and currently sits at about 1 percent of federal spending—most years, it is a good deal less than 1 percent of federal spending. Though it doesn’t amount to much, there are legitimate criticisms of our foreign-aid outlays: There is some variation year to year, but, typically, about $1 out of every $5 in foreign aid takes the form of military aid, which is typically offered on the condition that the money be spent acquiring goods and services from U.S.-based firms—i.e., whatever else it achieves, that money is also laundered into a kind of backdoor corporate-welfare scheme. Even without the strings attached, much of that money would be spent with U.S. providers—Americans are the world’s finest makers of arms and excel at the business side of war-making, a fact that embarrasses some people such as Vance and Ron Paul and professor Noam Chomsky and others of that ilk—but the conditions create perverse incentives, and Washington doesn’t need any more of those. Much of our support for Ukraine has consisted of drawing down existing U.S. military inventory, sending the materiel to Ukraine, and then using the appropriated funds to replenish our own stocks. That isn’t the worst way to go about it, though those who worry that increasing presidential discretion over the drawdown process are right to do so.

*snip*

[Meadowoak]

1. Poopy pants and JD Vance ticket. No thanks