As lawless as they are.. Never think there is no way out for the good guys.
If they get their way illegally, unconstitutionaly, there is plenty of room to do what has to be done.
*If you are in a war with some one, and you are the only one playing fair, you will lose.*
If the Russians get their way using nuclear posturing, then in twenty years there will be a handful of tiny countries that DO NOT possess nuclear weapons. Ever other country will field as many as they can possibly build. Everyone realizes that if Ukraine had not given up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for American assurances of help if they got in trouble and a treaty with Russia promising not to cause that trouble, then this war would not have happened.
Imagine the opportunities for accidents and lethal missteps when every country has its own chain of command to unleash death on an unimaginable scale. The US, which arguably has the best command and control has on a couple of occasions accidentally loaded nuclear weapons on aircraft because they were mistaken as nonnuclear. A couple of years ago nuclear tipped cruise missiles were accidentally loaded onto a B-52. Had that plane been on a mission to launch them, it would have fired nuclear tipped missiles thinking they were standard ones. (Presumably without the codes they wouldn’t detonate. But imagine how scary that is when you add in thirty or fifty new countries to the nuclear club.)
As incompetent as the Biden administration is, standing up to Russia is only way to avoid even worse future problems. I’m still of the opinion this whole situation would have been effectively short-circuited by a couple of strategically placed mean tweets.