You say you are an economist, but your post sounds like a politician.
Klassik understands
@Le Baron 's point. Well, Klassik believes so at least, but Le Baron can correct Klassik if Klassik is off here.
Politicians generally don't give evasive answers to foreign policy matters taking up a lot of room in the popular news. If one wants to hear a straightforward answer from a politician, ask them about a matter such as Ukraine and you'll generally get a pretty straightforward one or two line answer. Perhaps one will get three lines if the politician believes they have some gravitas in foreign policy. Perhaps some here would like for Le Baron, Klassik, and others to give such 'hot take' answers, but to do so will be about as foolish as the comments coming from the politicians.
As
@ks.234 astutely points out above, the actual pertinent questions are quite complex and, in many cases, quite fluid. Pertinent questions related to the 'Should Ukraine receive arms?" questions include at a minimum but are not limited to: are the arms purely for defense or are the arms serving other purposes (proxy war)? What are the intended goals for the arms...achieve outright military victory or to achieve an expedient peace agreement? Are the recipients of the arms those willing to engage in peace after the conclusion of the conflict or are they extremists who might cause civil wars and further regional conflicts? What will the reaction be from the enemy by increasing arms...an arms race or perhaps an expedient conclusion? What will an increase in arms do to the general region? What will the arms do the local ecology in terms of unexploded munitions and such which, for example, continue to kill people in Asia ~50 years after the US left the region.
Again, as
@ks.234 points out, there must be questions about the short-term, medium-term, and long-term impact of conflict and possible resolutions. After the US used the Afghan-USSR war as a proxy war, it seemed initially that the outcomes were very positive for the US and perhaps for the Eastern Bloc as a whole. However, Afghanistan was ignored and the US/west changed foreign policy approaches towards Eastern Europe during the latter half of the 1990s. The end result of something celebrated at the time was all that came out of Afghanistan's dire situation and now war in Europe.
If Ukraine/west are ultimately victorious under any circumstances, what will the rebuild and relations be like in Ukraine and Russia? Will it be like what it is during most conflicts the US is involved in, such as World War I and many recent conflicts, or like World War II?
Klassik is going to assume that nobody here has highly classified information about intelligence and military strategy from any of the belligerents. With that in mind, all anyone can go by are reports from reliable reporters on the ground in the conflict, which isn't usually as easy to get as it may seem, past history, and statements from governments. When Bush and Blair were pushing their nonsensical 'intelligence' excuse for war ~20 years ago, it was impossible to say for sure that the US-UK were engaging in nonsense, but the evidence and past history of the involved parties indicated to those sharp enough to analyze things that things weren't adding up. Indeed, even though we still don't really know why for sure the US-UK engaged in such a ridiculous war, we do know the initial inklings by those who calculated that the reasoning from the US-UK was shoddy were very, very correct. The same can be said about the west's actions in Afghanistan during the 1980s and after.
As I have said before, the US has a long history of exploiting war for profit, and
@Klassik ‘s post should be read with care in this respect.
Sí señor. The corrupt nature of the upper ranks of the US military and the State Department must be considered. As Klassik pointed out earlier, Lloyd Austin was plucked for his high-ranking State Department job from the board of directors of a military contractor and a private health care firm. Both him and Secretary of State Blinken were involved in profiteering off militarization with a private equity firm right before they were appointed. Such corruption in the military/State Department is very, very common. If people don't come in with corrupt connections, they end up working for the military contractors after they serve top rôles in the military/State Department. Either way, this corrupt history must be considered as it surely would be in other contexts. President Eisenhower's
farewell address as president where he warned about the military-industrial complex is just as relevant today as it ever has been.
