The CIA gave stinger missiles to the Taliban when the Soviets were in Afghanistan.
The Russians gave military hardware to the North Vietnamese when the USA was there.
I think the line is when your troops shoot their troops.
Providing weapons has been a US-Soviet past time for the whole Cold War.
In this case, I think the US could have even moved in troops without being at war, early in the invasion. It just needs a pretext. By far the best response a week in, when Russia claimed chemical weapons, Nazis, etc., would have been to send in a multilateral force to investigate Russia's claims. It's face-saving for the Russians and ends the war.
If you look on various dating apps big in Ukraine right now, you'll see there are a lot of Americans new to Ukraine right now.
I've got a feeling we might be pulling a Russia... Ie. None of our troops are there officially, bit there's an awful lot of troops volunteering and 'on holiday' and 'advising' there.
It is weird right? And yet it isn't either. Selling weapons to people so they can vanquish their enemies has been a time honored tradition. If we were less invested in which side won, I wouldn't be surprised to see companies selling to both sides, because business is business right?
There are "rules" (and by rules I mean what is interpreted as "participating" vs "supporting" in a conflict that have been established and enforced for well over a thousand years. And supplying weapons has been firmly established in the 'supporting' category not the 'participating' category.
This conflict is illustrating a lot of things that haven't been seen since the cold war, which is an opportunity to learn new things about how the world works if you haven't seen it before.
The next interesting step happens when this conflict settles out, what does it look like.
