Ukraine
You’re not understanding, the arms and money we send Ukraine enables them to continue the war. Last year, Russia offered a peace deal, giving up a portion of the territory they occupied at the time. Ukraine declined and says they won’t settle for less than all their territory, including Crimea. Without the weapons, they’d be forced to agree to a deal. Given that Russia probably knows they can’t deal with the insurgency outside of Russian-speaking Ukraine, they’ll probably agree to borders similar to what exists now.
China would have wanted Taiwan regardless
I mean the Republic of China is a part of China, it’s eventual reunification is inevitable, but they obviously see that reunification by invasion would be very expensive, both in cost of the invasion, cost of the insurgency, and resulting sanctions from their third-biggest trading partner. The only case where they’d waste billions of dollars and hundreds of thousand of lives is if the US made that option better than the alternative.
The same calculation happened with Russia; after the maidan coup, the civil war on their border caused them to strategic infrastructure and terrorist attacks. They erroneously calculated the cost of having a hostile, NATO-backed state on the border would be greater than a quick invasion and replacing the US puppet with another Russian one.
You need to look closer to understand what pressures cause countries to do things, these places aren’t cartoons who just decide to self-destruct their economies and send an entire generation into a meat grinder because aUTHoriTariaNism.
The dems are in power now, they didn’t do those things, so nobody believed they’d actually do it if they were elected again.
Additionally, parading around endorsements from Dick and Liz Cheney, and promising to build a border wall, tax breaks for small businesses, and other republican policies from 2016 didn’t help the perception that the dems weren’t going to help people.