George Rebane

Allowing Russia to exercise asymmetric control of Ukraine’s airspace during its unwarranted, illegal, and rapacious invasion of the country is a big mistake.  At every turn in this war and the lead-up to it, the west, led from behind by Biden, has been visibly and overly concerned about how Putin may respond to this or that initiative designed to dissuade or delay the conquest of Ukraine.  Even politicians ignorant of history have now seen how such behavior does nothing to stay the hand of the tyrant.  Does no one on our side counsel that we too should demonstrate our strength against tyranny by actions that would concern Putin as to how we may react to his next atrocities?  At what point do we say ‘Enough!’?  No dictator with territorial ambitions has ever stopped on his own; they have all had to be stopped by nations allied with a common purpose to restore a humanitarian and peaceful world order.

My own strong opinion is that were we to populate Ukrainian skies with F-22s and F-35s (inviting other NATO nations to join), thousands of lives would be saved and the war would soon be over.  As Joe Lieberman also argues (here), in doing so we would be implementing “responsibility to protect”, the international norm that was unanimously adopted by the United Nations World Summit in 2005.  As I argued in the 12mar22 Scattershots (here), there is no natural stopping point for Putin before he controls the Eurasian continent.  And the more of his successes we continue to tolerate, the bigger will be the resulting war required to put an end to such conquests both in Europe and Asia.  If we don’t start Putin worrying about his own survival now, then when will there come a better time to re-establish the Westphalian world order?

[Addendum]  A longtime reader (@502pm below) contested the wisdom of NATO allies imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine with the now widely accepted prognostication that such a tactic would immediately cause Putin to escalate his invasion into a cross-borders nuclear war – in short, WW3.  It was offered as the most probable response and ensuing scenario.  In my 547pm I rejected that as the only possible contingency, and offered the much more likely alternative contingency were we to continue Biden’s strategy of a limited defense that in effect is no defense.  This is corroborated hourly by Putin’s rapid expansion of the scope of his invasion, now expanding it into western Ukraine with attacks on multiple targets with scores of cruise missiles.

The west’s current response that lets Russia maintain air superiority to support his overwhelming numbers of mechanized infantry, armor, massed artillery, and amphibious assault will result in the inevitable ‘rubbling’ of Ukraine, no matter how ineptly the Russians execute their land attack.  To date, the west led by Biden, has made it clear that saving Ukraine is not our top priority; minimally irritating Putin is.  Given our feckless support and promise not to do more, President Zelensky will soon come to the decision to either surrender sooner and save Ukrainian lives or surrender later, leave Ukraine in a pile of rubble, and sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to no avail.  As he continues to shame NATO, Zelensky will do the right thing and save lives if the west is not willing to up the game and also start giving Putin worries as to what we will do.

And the latest surrender of Ukraine will cement Putin’s list of conquests – Georgia, Chechnya, Donbas, Crimea – as the proper strategy to continue expanding Russia.  We will inevitably then fight in Poland and the Baltics.  It will also affirm Xi Jinping’s assessment (repeating that of Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo) that America is now a weakened and fearful paper tiger, willing to surrender all in order to assure peace in our times.  Appeasement will most certainly bring about a drastic change to an Orwellian-structured world order.  My counter contingency of today’s ongoing appeasement has a long history of being practiced along with the mass suffering by all concerned.  And this contingency has a demonstrated high probability of coming to pass.  Putin pulling the nuclear trigger and thereby assuring his place in history as humanity’s ultimate pariah, eclipsing Mao, Stalin, and Hitler, is to me a reach and a low probability event.

So that’s the debate.  It’s all a matter of probabilities that the opposing sides assign to their contingencies going forward.  I’ll take my stand with history and Putin’s desire to live to fight another day.

[16mar22 update]  Brookings Institute leftwing maven William Galston is a nationally known regular contributor of progressive perspectives in the WSJ.  In the paper’s 16mar22 edition (here) he concludes “We shouldn’t risk nuclear war, but there’s still a lot more we could do” while arguing that we have a “moral obligation to help Ukraine against Russia”.  In supporting his argument he uses profoundly misguided and inappropriate examples of America’s reticence to intervene in the Rwandan slaughter of Tutsis and the 1964 stabbing of Kitty Genovese while bystanders watched and did nothing.

In these citations Galston misses two major points that characterize the Ukrainian war.  First, the assailants in both cases were weak, and not able to overwhelm the proximal agents able to aid the victims.  And second, neither attacker was prepared or capable of continuing his murderous rampage beyond committing their initial atrocities.  This is not the case with Russia invading Ukraine.  To the world Putin has made it clear that his intentions have been and will continue to be more than simply the return of a compliant Ukraine into the resurging Russian empire.

And echoing Biden’s peremptorily cowering announcement (joined by many Republicans), that the US will do nothing to risk nuclear war with Russia, seals an extremely dangerous future for all, while not reducing the eventual risk of nuclear war one whit.  For the decades during the cold war it was the prospect of MAD (mutually assured destruction) that reined in the USSR and kept us from a nuclear holocaust.  Had the Left’s ‘better Red than dead’ become the geo-strategic policy of the west and NATO to contain communism, we would all be fluent in Russian by now.  MAD worked only because Moscow knew we were willing to risk a nuclear war as we implemented policies (the ‘minor wars’ presaged by George Kennan) to stifle the spread of communism.  Without communicating such risk to the Politburo, MAD would have been toothless.

So, the bottom line for us today should be to counter Putin’s nuclear saber rattling with that of our own – ‘if you pull the nuclear trigger Vlad, we will incinerate you.’ – and bring back MAD. The time to stand up to a thug is early in the game before he and his star chamber become invested in the success of his previous threats – that should be our Plan A. The later we trade in our wish bone for a back bone, the more likely the thug will be willing to initiate a nuclear exchange.  Remember that Stalin blinked in 1948, Khrushchev in 1962, Brezhnev in 1981, Gorbachev in 1989.  Today again there is no endpoint in sight for retreating from such threats and conquests that does not involve eventual wholesale worldwide misery.

Anybody have a workable wishbone Plan B?