Ukraine Distraction
America's multi-billion dollar spend to aid Ukraine unnecessarily escalates the risk of world war while diminishing US focus on more important priorities e.g. rise of China and US border control.
Russia's assault on Ukraine is a regional matter and not a threat to world peace.
Post WWII, the West rightly feared the Bolsheviks because they were set, backed up by nuclear threat, on exportation of Marxist ideology worldwide. Today, Putin, unlike his Bolshevik predecessors, has no designs to ideologically convert the world. He does, however, seek to revive the essence of Mother Russia, culturally crippled under eighty years of Bolshevik rule. Russia, with a population decline of one million annually and half of Russian males inebriated at any given time is dying. Putin knows his patient, fading Russia, needs defibrillation. Teaming with Russian cultural avatar, the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin's last-ditch effort to revive Russian culture extends to incorporating parts of Asia and Europe into Russia where there are concentrations of Russian people and where Russian culture has predominated over the centuries. Russia doesn't have the resources, or the intent, to be a military threat beyond areas of Russian population assemblage. To be sure, Russia's nuclear arsenal is formidable, but Russia's leadership, ruthless though they be, is made up of rational actors who will not resort to the use of nuclear weapons, a surefire end to any hope to revive the current moribund Russian culture. European nations, closer to the fray, may have reason to think differently about Russian aggression in Ukraine, but the US should stay out of it.
US response to Russia's assault on Ukraine has been uncertain and ineffective.
Notwithstanding the undesirability of US intervention to resist Russian aggression in Ukraine, a full-throated effort by NATO/US to oust Russia from Ukraine would have been a better option to respond to Putin's belligerence than the ongoing slow burn, costly, dribbling of US war materiel into Ukraine portending ambiguous war results and depleting stocks of US ammo. Despite its rough edged, seemingly haphazard military effort, Russia has patience and staying power and ability to suffer on a level that most Westerners cannot comprehend. And so, without a US strategy to negotiate a peace, Russia will "win" the war on current trajectory of limited western military sustenance for Ukraine. A US loss in Ukraine will empower Russia to become a world player beyond its true financial and military strength and position China to accelerate its own Russia-like effort to further advance Chinese tribalism by attacking Taiwan.
Former friends temporize in the wake of perceived US weakness as a world leader.
Meanwhile, current, equivocal US "support" for the Ukraine war serves to bolster the strength of the growing non-aligned movement thereby weakening US ties with longtime friends such as Saudi Arabia and India. The strengthening nonaligned group ignores western trade and financial sanctions on Russia and increases its trade in Russian oil and armaments. Some trade deals between heretofore US friendly, now nonaligned nations, and China are being transacted in yuan posing a threat to US dollar reserve currency status. China's military position is strengthened as US ammo stocks are depleted. As a result of its equivocal actions in Ukraine, heretofore strong US allies are hedging their bets on the US. A weakened US, perceived or real, raises the likelihood of world war.
Ergo...
Without a US laser focus on rising China military, cyber, and currency threats, and domestic issues such as the US border fiasco, the world is less safe today as a result of the Biden administration's equivocating, wasteful and unnecessary financial/weapons aid to Ukraine. Pushback, if any, against Russian aggression in Ukraine should come from Europe. Other than angling for negotiations to end the current war, and transitioning arms assistance to Ukraine to European nations, the US should stay out of it and shift its focus to the more important priorities of countering the rise of China and US border control, both of which actions will make the world a safer place.