Warning of danger to world from Ukraine, middle-east wars, Biden seeks $100 billion aid package from broken US Congress

WASHINGTON: American taxpayers could soon be coughing up nearly $100 billion to shore up US primacy and security — including that of its allies Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan — after President Joe Biden maintained that walking back from the three-front challenge would increase the cost and threats to America and to the world.
In only his second nighttime Oval Office address to the nation, Biden said, soon after his return from Israel, that his request to Congress for aid would be “a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations.”
“American leadership is what holds the world together.American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with,” he said, adding, “To put all that at risk, if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it.”

Biden also put Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hamas in the same bracket, saying they “represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.”
The US President invoked the India-Middle East-Europe rail corridor that was announced at the New Delhi G20 summit to argue that such connectivity would result in “a more stable, better connected…more predictable markets, with more employment, less rage, less grievances, less war.”

The aid package, with more than half of it going to Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, and $7 billion for the Indo-Pacific region (mainly for Taiwan), will face a tough passage in a broken US Congress which has not been able to elect a speaker amid chaos in the Republican Party. Public support for aid is also evaporating amid a border crisis in the US, with Republicans wanting to allocate more money to stem illegal immigration.

While the White House is said to have addressed that demand by proposing $14 billion for border security, Republicans are opposed to clubbing the Ukraine and Israel theaters together, arguing that any aid to Israel should not be used as leverage to send tens of billions more dollars to Ukraine. Washington has already funneled more than $ 100 billion to Ukraine since the Russian invasion.
But Biden argued in his speech that if the US allowed Putin to “erase Ukraine’s independence, would-be aggressors around the world would be emboldened to try the same. ” The risk of conflict and chaos could spread in other parts of the world including in the Indo-Pacific and especially in the Middle East, he added.
The US President’s argument for greater American involvement in the two war theaters in a sense contradicts his earlier push to withdraw from Afghanistan — the critical difference being that unlike in Afghanistan, he has assured there will be no American boots on the ground in the new war theaters that have opened up. But Americans are leery of the build up, considering there are more than 2500 marines on board the two aircraft carriers dispatched to the Mediterranean.