Since 1949 when Soviet union acquired nuclear weapons, and especially shortly thereafter when they acquired thermonuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them, we have lived under the equivalent threat for about 70 years. We did not succumb to these implied risks of Soviet atrocities, thank God, or we would be eating borscht and speaking Russian today. We adopted MAD a brinksmanship policy established by Eisenhower and brought to full flower by Ronald Reagan.
When one submits to intimidation or blackmail, whether by nuclear weapons or EMTs, the endgame is not just predictable but inevitable-abject surrender.
The problem for the United States is not that we will be conquered by an invading horde of Chinese or Russians but that the left of the United States will so unnerve us that we simply open the gates and invite the barbarians through. China will not have to conquer America, we will do it ourselves for them. The problem is not the power of our defense but the power of our will. If one attempts to reverse these truths by saying it's different now because Putin is being "pushed back into a corner" and therefore might initiate a Mad exchange so we should surrender now, that is a policy of protracted suicide.
If you are, as I think you are, arguing that our responses should be considered with a view to advancing our interests without unnecessarily provoking our adversary to the point of MAD, I would agree. But we must not do so by surrendering all the turf to Putin anymore than appeasement worked for Hitler. Nor should we concede that we invited an attack on Pearl Harbor by embargoing oil to Japan for its murder and rape of China. More of dealing with an irrational regime such as China in 1941: the warlord faction of the military that had seized to control of Japan was not amenable to rational treatment. It simply was bent on war. Hitler was clearly equally unmanageable by appeasement disguised as enlightened diplomacy.
Putin's announcement that he is putting his nuclear forces on high alert must be judged either as the expression of a paranoiac or merely a negotiating tactic with Ukraine and a prybar to break apart NATO. Let us assume the worst, that Putin is paranoid. To come to this conclusion is to rely on the skimpy–ist evidence. If he is in fact a paranoid it is almost impossible to determine what might or might not set him off and pointless to constrain our policy so as not to inflame his disease. That is hopeless because it is useless to deal with madness by reason or appeasement.
We will have no national policy if we permit ourselves to be gaslighted by a paranoiac whether real or stage-managed. Especially is it impossible to determine the reality of either Putin's mental state or his rational state because we can only surmise the internal pressures upon him by his gang of cronies, kleptocratics and thugs. We do not really know what audience he is playing to and therefore we don't how to read him or play him. Rather we must make our own judgments based on our own interests marginally subject to tentative expectations of his behavior.
Let us assume that the nuclear forces readiness announcement is contrived. Again, to surrender to this tactic is to surrender in everything.
This nonsense that it is in some way it was immoral to extend Western influence eastward toward Russia has got to be firmly dismissed. The expansion of NATO might not be wise but it certainly is not immoral. Russia simply has no moral standing on the issue considering its history. Nor do Russia's desires about its national security justify invading the national sovereignty of Ukraine, or anywhere else. Russia, no less than the United States, committed to upholding the national integrity of Ukraine when Ukraine surrendered its atomic weapons and delivered them to Russia. Morality, as May West said about goodness, has nothing to do with it.
The Ukrainians have a right to be as corrupt as they want to be without fear of invasion, full stop.
The present condition of Ukraine's corruption or the state of its democracy cannot be seen except in Pari Materia with its devastated history imposed on it by the Soviet Union when Stalin murdered millions of kulaks to collectivize agriculture. Its history as a ravaged battleground in World War II, done by the Soviet Union as well as by the Nazis, leaves one wondering how the Ukrainians survived it all, nevermind as a Madisonian democracy. If we indulge moral judgments about Ukraine's corruption, this history and Russia's responsibility for it should be factored in.
The notion that SWIFT sanctions "WILL BEYOND QUESTION cause Putin to see this as the end of everything for his country and will cause him to take the entire world down along with Russia" is unknowable and simply rank projection. Russia's state media has threatened many things but we simply must not permit ourselves to be whipsawed by every threat pronounced. To do so is to abandon policy entirely. Again, you are quite right, "The West has to push back against this, especially making sure that Russia doesn't try to move beyond Ukraine, but that pushback has to be extremely carefully calibrated." The lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is instructive in the need to give your enemy a face-saving exit path. That must not justify inert helplessness.
We must firmly dismiss the notion that we have no national interests in this conflict in Ukraine. We might as well say that we had no national interests compromised by our skedaddle from Afghanistan. Common sense compels us to draw a straight line from Afghanistan to Ukraine, equally one can simply project a straight line from Ukraine to Taiwan. After Taiwan, the deluge.
Finally we are all prone to be ready to fight the last war. Similarly, we are all too prone to take the wrong lessons from the last war. The lessons of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are not that all interventions are destructive but that each case must stand on its own. If we now entirely discard the option of military force as a matter of national policy, we will have disarmed ourselves entirely. That is why we never forswore he right to first strike, for example. That is why Trump, who did not behave so foolishly, kept us out of war and yet kept our enemies in check. We must husband our resources and avoid pointless wars in order to survive the threat from China but we must not squander our power to intimidate as we have done in Afghanistan and now in Ukraine.
Certainly, we must husband our national resolve to prevail, which as I stated above is the ultimate threat to our survival. The threat from China is in an order of magnitude greater than the threat from Russia and it is increasingly evident in our metastasizing internal corruption. It is the China threat that causes many of us to write before the 2020 election that that election would decide whether we survived our marathon race with China.
Thank you for your thoughtful post.
