How many more friends can we abandon?

“If there is no U.S. support, ... we have no air defense, no Patriot missiles, no jammers for electronic warfare, no 155-millimeter artillery rounds,” the Ukrainian president told the Washington Post the other day. “It means we will go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps.”

We fled from Saigon in 1975, when the Congress refused to let President Ford use American air power to stop North Vietnamese tanks from overrunning South Vietnam. We fled from Kabul in 2021, when President Biden gave up the fight and stranded 100 or more Americans and thousands of Afghan supporters to the mercy of the Taliban. Now it's Congress again that's the problem, as a handful of Republican right-wingers have blocked a $60 billion military aid package for the past six months. Are we going to see another desperate American airlift from Kyiv?

Meanwhile, the Democrats' left wing -- starting with President Biden! -- is telling the Israelis how to fight their war, and we'll withhold their military aid unless they do it out way. Where does this stupidity end -- with two airlifts, one from Jerusalem (which Israel regards as its capital) and another from Tel Aviv (where we dithering Americans maintain a "branch office" of the US Embassy and many of our diplomatic offices)? How much humiliation can one nation experience before it becomes a laughingstock?

"If Ukraine falls," Zelensky warns, "Putin will divide the world." Not Putin by himself, of course, but Putin in concert with China, Iran, and North Korea, who are already providing overt and covert aid to his invasion of Eastern Europe.