There's this futile insistence on the left that the right will somehow be shown up by their own hypocrisy. They won't. They never will. For the left, it's all about reason. For the right, it's all about presentation.

HOT TAKE: Troops to Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, American first-strike hardware encircling Ukraine for the next fifteen years, AWACS, ELINT & SIGINT sorties just this side of the border 24-7 and deniable materiel support for the Ukrainian insurgency. Massive defense boost, mobilization of reserves and joint NATO exercises & FONAPs with Turkey in the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.

I still think we're missing a beat with Kazakhstan. I think Putin could have taken Kazakhstan without firing a shot, gotten invited to suppress the uprising and ended up staying forever. I think the Chinese would have gone along with it if they got paid off effectively. Now? Now any move in Kazakhstan is going to be peril-frought and freakazoidal.

Trump has been making a bunch of foreign policy gaffes. The "base" won't care but everyone else is going to have a hard time endorsing spiteful hatred for spiteful hatred's sake if it's also demonstrably incompetent to the task at hand. DeSantis, meanwhile, gave a CPAC speech this morning that didn't even mention Ukraine. The dude is not going to survive debate season.