I’m old enough to remember when Republicans hated Russia, and warned everyone that Russians couldn’t be trusted. Now Republicans (one in particular) are willing to sell our security to them.
Republicans used to say (quite recently), ‘We fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here.’ Now they say, ‘Let’s not fight them at all. That leopard’s never going to eat my face!’
They don’t understand the concept of ‘return on investment’. Yes, supporting an ally is expensive for us. They don’t understand how much more expensive it will be if they don’t make the investment.
Actually, Republicans’ blindness to ROI reminds me of this quote from Discworld:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet .