you want a peacetime draft, the Navy fighting an undeclared war on the high seas and a massive mobilization that directs, oh, 5 to 10 percent more of GDP for defense spending?

I’d hate it, but that’s irrelevant. Some things are worth fighting for, and the right to self determination of a free Ukraine is one of them.

You mentioned Churchill a few posts ago. In his multi-volume “History of the Second World War”, the first volume- “The Gathering Storm” I believe it was ( one of the first things I did when I retired was give most of my library away, so I no longer have that collection) but it was in the first hundred pages or so that Churchill, writing with the benefit of hindsight, wrote that in 1933, it would have been a simple matter for England to send in a battalion or two of English troops to put an end to Hitler’s dreams of conquest. And Ww2, or at least the European part of that war- was the sad result of not doing so.

With Russia, we are not at 1934. Perhaps we are somewhere around 1938, just prior to Hitler’s stroll into Czechoslovakia and his assimilation of the Czech armaments industry into the Reich’s military production.

A rough analogy, I concede, but it’s no coincidence that the area of Eastern Ukraine that Putin is trying to assimilate into Mother Russia, includes most of Ukraine’s heavy industry and mineral wealth.. I worry about the Russia that Europe (and we) would face in a few years if we sold Ukraine down the river.