Council on Foreign Relations Debate: Should We Stop Funding the War in Ukraine?

I was doing something else when listening to this, and shouldn't have been. It required more attention than I could give it. But I came away still not knowing what to think. So the general trajectory of my thinking remains the same: I don't know, but, forced to say something, I'm weakly convinced by Mearsheimer. I'm sort of skeptical of Hitler/WWII analogies. Putin didn't exactly waltz into Ukraine this time. But the history--including the U.S.'s role in pre-invasion Ukraine--is basically opaque (or translucent at best) to me. I just don't know. People who specialize in roughly this topic can't seem to agree. I don't even rise to the level of dilettante here. There's no reason to take anything I say or think about it seriously. 

   The women on the pro-funding side did make a few really bad arguments IMO. Like the innovation argument. Seems to me that "Ukraine is so innovative! (eg drones and such)" is a pretty weak reason to think they can win--especially if that means: push the Rooskies out. If I'm playing a strategy game I need to win, and I can choose (a) the side with massive numerical and financial advantage or (b) the side that's very innovative...I pick (a). 

I continue to think that we raised to cost of this invasion so high that Putin would have to be nuts to try it again--or, God forbid, to invade a NATO country--as the pro-funding side of this debate repeatedly warns about. We could drive the Rooskies out if we wanted to--but it just doesn't seem to be worth it. Defending, say, Latvia or any other NATO member would seem to be a completely different matter.

It's miserably awful that we couldn't (or didn't) coax Putin over toward our side. The last thing we need is what seems to be happening--the emergence of a Russia/China alliance. (Well, really: a Putin/CCP alliance; this isn't so much the fault of the Russians or the Chinese, but of their leaders/governments.)

Bleh.

Confusion.