Eliot A. Cohen of The Atlantic finds it "heartbreaking" that your kids aren't dying in Ukraine.
The United States needs to think much bigger than it has thus far.
Yeah, we need to think bigger!!
Okay, maybe not that big.
Then again, Cohen doesn't seem to be overly troubled with risking a nuclear war, dismissing the prospect with the kind of indifference usually reserved for mundane things, like if someone forgot to pick up the half-and-half. "As for the coffee creamer question, you'll just have to make do with milk..."
As for the nuclear question: We should not signal to the Russians that they have a trump card they can always play to stop us from doing pretty much anything.
I can never tell if our alleged intellectual elite are really this dumb, or if they are just being manipulative, as this kind of construction is incredibly juvenile, the way a child who has just been told, no, you can't build a wall with mommy's good china and run your bicycle through it would scream, "you never let me do anything!!!"
What the Russians have signaled, and what would be obvious even if they had not, is that if the United States attacks the Russian military in a county right on its border with which the United States has no treaty obligations, that might lead to a nuclear conflagration. It's not as if the Russians sent Cuban troops to occupy the Midwest and Patrick Swayze is the only thing standing between us and liberty.
Nuclear weapons are why the United States should refrain from attacking Russia directly, not why it should fear fighting Russians in a country they invaded.
I'm pretty sure Hitler believed Germany was being attacked directly when we landed at Normandy.
Only a few years ago, the United States Air Force killed Russian Wagner mercenaries by the hundreds in Syria...
Mercenaries are not remotely the same thing as Russian regulars fighting on Russia's border.
...American and Russian pilots tangled in the skies over Korea and possibly Vietnam.
"Possibly" Vietnam? Feel free to ignore that.
Regarding Korea, yes, they did, but they did so under a tacit agreement that it not be discussed too openly and with the understanding that the conflict would remain confined to Korea, a country thousands of miles away from either combatant.
Ukraine is an entirely different matter for many reasons not the least of which being that Russia has been quite explicit regarding what they would consider an act of war.
Consider a scenario in which the United States sent troops into Mexico having determined, as many already have, that Mexico had descended into a narco-state and presented an existential threat to America.
Now consider what our response would be should Russia staged troops in Guatemala and started marching towards Nogales.
The moral equivalency of the two doesn't matter; what matters is what your opponent believes, and Putin believes that Ukraine had become just such a threat and would greet the direct entry of the United States as an act of war.
Nuclear deterrence cuts both ways, and the Russian leadership knows it.
Hey, we have nukes, too!
Great. Let's play nuclear brinkmanship with the fate of the entire planet and every living thing on it at stake over... Ukraine.
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is a horror, no doubt about it, but no less a horror than what has been going on in other parts of the world.
Let's start with Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of dead and years of unspeakably brutal murders.
The Tigray war centered on Ethiopia. Tens of thousands dead.
Yemen, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad... I'm literally going alphabetically now.
In each case civilians (often millions) were killed, displaced, and terrorized. None of these countries have nuclear weapons. What's keeping us out of those conflicts? Where are our moral betters on those humanitarian disasters?
Perhaps more importantly, why are our leaders so interested in Ukraine? That's a question worth asking.
Vladimir Putin and those around him are ill-informed but not mad...
Oh, they're just ill-informed! Maybe a Udemy course would help, or better, a subscription to The Atlantic!
...and the use of nuclear weapons would threaten their very survival.
Keep that last thought in mind as we review Eliot's prescription.
NATO (and above all, American) air power could sweep the skies over Ukraine clear of Russian aircraft, and after a week or two of smashing Russian air defenses, devastate its ground forces... The truth is, with enough arms, the Ukrainians can break the invaders, and in some areas they have begun to do so.
As the leader of NATO and of the free world, the United States needs to think much bigger than it has thus far. The stream of arms going into Ukraine needs to be a flood.
American officials need to rise to the moment... They need to say, and say repeatedly, that a Russian war with NATO would only consummate the destruction that the Russian military is suffering at this very moment.
How can one read this, never mind write it, and not believe that Russia, or more importantly, Putin, would take this as an action that, "would threaten their very survival"?
So, at that point, what does Russia have to lose in using nuclear weapons? As Russian TV anchor Dmitry Kiselyov told viewers recently,
Why do we need the world, if Russia isn't there?
A bluff? "Disinformation"?
Partly, sure, but partly not as a bluff is only credible if it is believable and here is where Eliot either lacks imagination, or is really terrible at his job.
There are tactical nuclear weapons in both NATO's and Russia's arsenal. They weren't created as a science project, they were created as yet another piece of military ordinance, something to be used, as the description implies, tactically, in small areas, and has been an explicit part of Russian military doctrine since 2014.
Media outlets are quick to discount this possibility noting that even tactical nuclear weapons would be a horror.
Our military leaders say the same thing.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on February 6, 2018, then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis stated "I do not think there is any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game changer."
Nuclear weapons are bad, yes, but it's important we look at the data dispassionately, or more importantly, the way Putin might.
What tactical nuclear weapons might Russia use?
For example, the 2S7 gun - 203mm calibre - has a range of about 37km [22 miles] and fires a shell that weighs 110kg.
Sir Richard added: "It can also fire a nuclear shell with a yield of about one kilotonne - one thousand tonnes of TNT equivalent.
Using "NUKEMAP," we can see what kind of devastation a nuclear weapon of that size would create. I've assumed a surface detonation in these cases (typically a larger radius of severe destruction close in, but a smaller radius of more minor destruction), and dropped a 1 kiloton nuclear weapon in downtown Kyiv.
To add some perspective, the 160-meter diameter fireball created by a tactical nuke with a yield of one kiloton dropped on the 50 yard line of a football field would be enough to vaporize the stadium and produce extremely overdone burgers for the first few rows of tailgaters.
In terms of blast damage, you're measuring in city blocks, which is to say, a fairly confined area (leaving aside the fallout which according to this scenario is heading straight towards Russia).
Let's put it in more personal terms, and see what this same weapon would do if dropped on Washington DC. (In terms of distances, the program yields the same results, so we'll just look at the map for this one.)
Again, the initial destructive power of these weapons is measured in city blocks, and if such a weapon were to be dropped a few blocks north of the Washington Monument, it would barely break the windows in the White House.
Push Putin to the point where he could be run out of Ukraine, and likely be taken out by one of his own generals, why wouldn't he drop a tactical nuke or two? What would he have to lose at that point?
And what would the West do?
We'd do nothing, at least not militarily because the risks of escalation are just too great.
Russia would likely be treated as a pariah nation, perhaps even by China, but that would be it, assuming our leaders are not suffering from the same deep-seated insecurities that Eliot does.
I mean, the guy has problems.
In the movie The Untouchables, the cop Jim Malone tells Eliot Ness what bringing down the gangster Al Capone is going to require: "You wanna know how to get Capone? Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife; you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital; you send one of his to the morgue … Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?"
Putin and his subordinates are, in fact, less politicians than gangsters, and need to be treated as such. Instead of talk of off-ramps, for example, there should be promises of war-crimes trials (names included) for those who kidnap mayors, shoot at fleeing civilians, and target maternity hospitals; instead of worry about escalation, there should be promises of the eradication of the Russian army in Ukraine should it use chemical weapons. Instead of carefully titrated military aid, there should be a massive effort to arm people who know why they are fighting and are good at it.
This is all bloody and brutal stuff. But, to quote Clausewitz again, "If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand." We are dealing with an enemy that is vicious but weak, menacing but deeply fearful, and that is likely to crack long before our side does—if only we have the stomach for doing what needs to be done.
Eliot is an old-guard neocon who rarely saw a war he didn't like. His last book could have been named, "Hey, Let's Get To Warrin'!" but instead he titled it: "The Big Stick."
I'm not kidding.
"The Big Stick?"
Seriously?
Dude, you have issues.
And I would greatly prefer we not spill American blood as part of your therapy.
We should not allow ourselves to be bullied or shamed into war. To think going hard into Ukraine is a bad idea does not make one a Putin stooge, and the coordinated effort to silence those of us who feel this way has to make one wonder just why they fear open, clear-headed debate on one of the most important decisions a people can make.
One final thought.
Where the heck is the anti-war Left and their allies in the media now that we need them?
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