Summary
Former Ukrainian boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko accused podcaster Joe Rogan of “repeating Russian propaganda” after Rogan criticized U.S. military aid to Ukraine and suggested it could escalate into World War III.
Klitschko defended Ukraine’s resistance against Russia, highlighting the country’s fight for freedom and condemning Rogan’s remarks as aiding Putin’s agenda.
He invited Rogan to discuss their differences on the podcast “like free men.”
Rogan, who recently endorsed Donald Trump, called the war a “proxy war” and criticized Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to strike Russian soil with U.S.-supplied missiles.
Because proxy wars are deeply associated with the Cold War era of superpowers funding long and brutal wars. The problem is that the Ukraine war is closer to the lend lease portion of WWII, we’re putting our thumb on the scale, but it’s an economic strategy as much as a geopolitical one.
That makes it even more like a proxy war.
The cold war era proxy wars were all about saving Democracy and the “free world”. We funded one war after an other under the “domino theory.” Those are the same arguments we hear today except we’ve replaced USSR with Russia and Communist with Authoritarian. The message is the same; we don’t want to get involved directly but we’ll support this country as a bastion against world domination.
Some of the aid to Ukraine is structured as loans with expedited provisions to forgive the loans and some of it is outright grants. The US made a lot of money off of the lend lease program to the UK. I haven’t ready any analysis that suggests that the US expects to make any money off of Ukraine.
This is much more like our support of Afghanistan than our support of the UK.
That’s fair, the biggest thing though that I think makes it not one is that we promised this aid before the war. Ukraine denuclearized in exchange for protection, they also allied with us out of fear that they’d be invaded. Now they’re being invaded by a nuclear power and we can either write the checks we promised or we can lose the entirety of our international perception of dependability in a way that basically guarantees mass nuclear proliferation (if we pull out Belarus for example would be idiotic to not develop nuclear deterrence).
And I’ll admit, I’ve had an issue with Russia since they annexed crimea and I have a long standing soft spot for Ukrainians resisting Russia. But letting Russia take Ukraine for fear of war feels Chamberlainian.
And it’s fair, I know we started by selling Ukraine weapons that were too outdated for us to use ourselves. So I generally just assumed we’re making net profit off of it.
CFR has a discussion on the aid to Ukraine https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine The accounting can be a bit confusing but it’s certainly costing the US money.
That seems to be the crux of the matter. People are objecting to the implications of a proxy war rather than the actual meaning. Past treaties, and Russian aggression have nothing to do with whether or not it’s a proxy war. The intent to strategically prevent future Russian aggression, without direct involvement, is exactly what makes it a proxy war.
There also seems to be some implication that “proxy war” means that the entire purpose of the war is to satisfy the greed of some shadowy cabal. It literally just means that there’s someone who’s helping pay without being directly involved.