What’s the Problem Here?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

 

As is his tendency, Dominic Pino has written a stellar, comprehensive, and all but irrefutable critique of the barstool geopolitics the Heritage Foundation retails as analysis of Russia’s war in Ukraine and America’s support for Kyiv’s continued sovereignty. Indeed, what Pino has brought to bear is apparently so irrefutable that his critics have been reduced to pointing and laughing in lieu of positing a cogent counterargument.

 

To wit:

I guess we’re all supposed to just intuit why this sentence marks its author as somehow morally compromised or intellectually deficient, but I must confess I lack the requisite earthiness to understand the offense Pino has caused here. He is correct: Most of America’s financial support for Ukraine is spent domestically on manufacturing arms for export. Is that bad?

 

Is the nationalist wing of the GOP — a coalition that has warmed to the reliable failure of government economic planning (which they euphemistically call “industrial policy,” of which the armaments industry is perhaps the prime example) — now suddenly hostile to the roughly 400,000 Americans who work in and around the firearms and armaments industries? Are the government contracts that sustain that industry the problem? Should the U.S. stop accepting lucrative arms contracts abroad from America’s allies and partners, which would prove a boon to America’s competitors in Europe, Russia, and China? Or is this merely a primal lament over the imperfect world into which we were born, in which bombs and bullets flow freely but a child somewhere has gone to bed hungry?

 

Among those who “know what time it is” and possess the kind of common touch that can only be cultivated by spending all one’s time on Twitter, Pino has said, “the quiet part out loud.” They appear to believe that their argument makes itself. It does not.