We have passed the point of no return on this. Pushing Ukraine to join NATO puts danger on Russia’s border and southern ports. The West originally said they would not expand east after the soviet union fell but we did and placed short and medium range missiles on Russia’s borders in other countries. Imagine if Russia places missiles in Mexico and Canada pointed at us? How would we react? Our equipment, drones, drone pilots, military advisors, billions of dollars and soon aircraft flows into Ukraine. This has upped the ante and placed us really in direct conflict/war with Russia. Actions from the West are part of what caused this war. And yes us blowing up the gas pipes in the Baltic Sea forcing our “allies” to submit is making NATO question our motives and agenda. This could have been solved in the beginning by diplomacy and wared off an invasion in the first place.
I was posting this almost daily in March of ‘22, pleading that people think about what was happening. Kahn called how it would go down 50 years ago.
“In this this widely discussed and influential book, Herman Kahn probes the dynamics of escalation and demonstrates how the intensification of conflict can be depicted by means of a definite escalation ladder, ascent of which brings opponents closer to all-out war. At each rung of the ladder, before the climb proceeds, decisions must be made based on numerous choices. Some are clear and obvious, others obscure, but the options are always there.
Thermonuclear annihilation, says Kahn, is unlikely to come through accident; but nations may elect to climb the ladder to extinction. The basic material for the book was developed in briefings delivered by Kahn to military and civilian experts and revised in the light of his findings of a trip to Vietnam in the 1960s. In On Escalation he states the facts squarely. He asks the reader to face unemotionally the terrors of a world fully capable of suicide and to consider carefully the alternatives to such a path.
In the never-never land of nuclear warfare, where nuclear incredulity is pervasive and paralyzing to the imagination even for the professional analyst, salient details of possible scenarios for the outbreak of war, and even more for war fighting, are largely unexplored or even unnoticed. For scenarios in which war is terminated, the issues and possibilities of which are almost completely unstudied, the situation is even worse. Kahn’s discussion throws light on the terrain and gives the individual a sense of the range of possibilities and complexities involved and are useful.”
On Escalation, Herman Kahn