Bill initially said yes but quickly walked it back.

I didn't walk it back. I said US troops should be part of the security guarantee in any agreement with Russia. Ukraine will not rely on promises and flowery language. Nor should we expect them to.

Absent a security agreement, we should be shipping them the weapons they needed. This was my one area of disagreement with Biden. We should have been shipping them the weapons they asked for, when they asked for them, subject to the restraints of our own production capacity and our own security needs apart from defending Ukraine.
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One of my daydreams involved those F-16s that we slow-walked.

Prior to our entry into WW2, Chiang Kai-shek got together with Roosevelt and cut a deal that allowed US pilots to resign their commissions in the US Army and go to China to fly P-40s for the Chinese (initially). Chenault's "Flying Tigers". We should have been doing exactly that with the F-16s rather than bellyaching about "Ukrainians need months-long training before they can fly F-16s.

Granted, hindsight is 20-20, and Putin was throwing up a number of nuclear red-lines at the time, though those proved to be more bluff that real threat.

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