Buying time was not Chamberlain's intent... an aversion to war at any cost was the basis for his appeasement of the Nazis.
Actually, buying time was exactly his intent. After Munich, the UK stepped up its rearmament programs
What everyone forgets about 1930s diplomacy is that the Democratic West didn't see Fascism as a threat; they saw it as a bulwark against Bolshevism, which is why they tolerated Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Horthy, and Chiang Kai-Shek. The Official name of the "Axis" was the "Anti-Comintern Pact", they were resisting those dirty, stinking commies.
If anything, Chamberlain did what you wanted, he wrote the Polish Colonels a blank check and got a war anyway. That resulted in Hitler cutting a deal with Stalin. (Kind of blowing a hole in that anti-Commie thing, but never mind.)
And the question now becomes... aid a valiant resisting country now or face a victorious land-hungry dictator later.
No, the question is, do we keep throwing good money after bad? This is the Sunk Cost Fallacy. We've invested a significant amount of money, time, resources, and lives into an effort that has yielded no results, so we must continue to invest our time and resources.
Not that I think Trump is capable of being this deep a thinker, he's the dumbest man we've ever elected. But some of the people around him realize this.
Only because there are still considerable limits on the weaponry being supplied to Ukraine.
And, insofar as manpower is concerned, if the Russians can import scores of thousands of mercenaries, so should the Ukrainians.
Um, where are these mercenaries going to come from? Does "Soldier of Fortune" still publish?
A decade is a heartbeat in the life of a Nation.
Russia will retool, regroup, rearm, and incorporate into future strategy and tactics, all they've learned in Ukraine.
Assuming that The West is stupid enough to give them the breathing space to do that.
Meh, not really. If anything, Russia has been on a steady decline in her power and international influence since the 1980s. We should be a lot more concerned with China. (And I think our fears of China are overblown, for that matter.)
We've seen such Dishonorable Peace > Re-Arm > Attack Again tactics out of Russia on multiple occasions in the past century or so, and we (and The West at-large) would do well to recall that cheating, vicious Russian imperialistic mindset.
Really? Name one. Actually, what we've seen in the past century is the West consistently trying to screw Russia, such as giving the aforementioned pass to the Axis. When circumstances forced us to align with them, we were almost immediately treating them as the enemy after the war.
The Europeans have more "sense" about this - for once - than we do... fat-and-sassy behind our two wide oceans.
Oceans which don't mean anywhere NEAR as much for long-term national safety as they once did.
But it is the Fate of Man to forget the lessons of the past and to take the Easy Way Out, so... go right ahead and Appease.
The Europeans caused this problem as much as the Russians have. They were the ones who instigated the Maidan Revolution against Yanukovich after he rejected their crappy deal for a better one with Russia. (And Obama was an idiot for going along with it.)
Putin is an asshole. He's not Hitler.
