America’s actually been poisoning itself for decades, but Ukraine has upped the dosage. From Brad Pearce at libertarianinstitute.org:
The U.S. Congress is working towards a bill which would fund Ukraine into 2025. This, of course, is into the next presidential term. As Senator JD Vance recently explained to Tucker Carlson, the idea behind this is that if Donald Trump is again elected it will obligate him to continue supporting Ukraine and bring about an opportunity to impeach him if he does not.
Many have wondered why the U.S. political class is so obsessed with Ukraine, but I believe the answer is simple: money. I used to have a relatively elegant theory of NATO’s grand strategy, developed over a long period of observation, regarding the geopolitics of containing Russia’s sea access. However, since the outlandish and forgotten “Hunter Biden funded biolabs in Ukraine” story of early 2022, something different has become clear: our political class has been driven mad by the wages of corruption in Ukraine. When you look at the way that one ramshackle country has driven our politics both foreign and domestic, it is perhaps a defining feature of our era.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the former Soviet states, already poor from the collapse of communism, became what many have described as a sort of neoliberal hell, with state resources looted by newly wealthy oligarchs and sold to the West for pennies on the dollar. It is generally considered that Russia began to emerge from this as the time Putin took power and confronted some of the oligarchs who then fled the country—seemingly his original sin with the Western powers.