Elwood P Dowd is one of the liberal commenters on my good friend William Teach’s The Pirate’s Cove. The distinguished Mr Dowd is a Democrat and true hater of President Trump, and every so often, he gets me rolling in my response. He wrote:

If Trump abandons Ukraine to Putin, the Baltics are likely to be at risk. Do you believe King Donald would risk anything to help NATO defend Latvia? LOL.

Kind of a throwaway ending to a longer comment on a completely different subject, but that was the part to which I had to respond.

In 1939, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of France gave an unconditional guarantee to Poland that they would defend the Poles’ independence. Two days after the Nazis invaded, the UK and France declared war on Germany, but not a single British or French soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine ever fought in Poland to defend the country from the Third Reich! If der Führer hadn’t been stupid and invaded the USSR, it’s quite possible that the Nazis would still be in control of Poland, and all of Europe.

The NATO alliance was signed in April of 1949, when it was guesstimated that the Soviets were still at least five years away from developing an atomic bomb; in August of 1949, they test detonated their first nuclear weapon. NATO continued, preparing for the pouring of Soviet tanks through the Fulda Gap, to invade West Germany and the rest of democratic Europe, but it was always known that the USSR had a huge advantage in tanks and men, and it would require the United States, coming from 3,000 miles away to defend against this huge conventional attack.

As the USSR fell, and shrank to Russia itself, NATO added members, and is now supposed to defend the tiny Baltic States, directly on Russia’s border, which raises the obvious question: how can that be done? How do we defend Estonia, population 1.37 million, against a massive, even if inept, Russian army? Are we really willing to attack a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal to defend that tiny country?

Remember: while the US, UK, and France, all nations with their own nuclear deterrent force, have been willing to provide money and equipment, but none have sent a single soldier to help defend Ukraine, a large nation with a population of 43 million souls.

Ukraine isn’t a NATO nation, so we have no obligation to defend it, which makes that situation different from the Baltic States, but to defend those nations still requires a reasonable and workable plan, not just a commitment. Me? I can’t think of how we would do so. Of course, I’m not even an armchair general, but if there is a solid and reasonable defense plan, I’ve never heard of it.

The United States has the same kind of defense commitment to the Republic of China, but while Formosa is roughly 100 miles from the coast of the People’s Republic, it’s 6,000 miles from the California coast. Before Red China had a deliverable nuclear force, our defense commitment could include the use of nuclear weapons, but China now has the strategic nuclear force which can hit the United States. What is the reasonable plan to defend Taiwan without risking World War III and nuclear devastation against the United States?

With a six-month buildup that Saddam Hussein couldn’t prevent, we were able to expel the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, though the elder President Bush stopped the war too soon, and left the butcher of Baghdad still in control. It was up to the younger President Bush to depose Mr Hussein and the Ba’ath Party regime, but in the end, Iraq is still an authoritarian country. We had to go into Afghanistan to destroy al Qaeda, which we did, but after twenty years of war, the Taliban we initially deposed are back in charge of the country.

If we couldn’t liberate Iraq and Afghanistan, occupy them, and turn them into reasonable Westernized democracies, how the f(ornicate) are we expected to be able to defeat Red China or Russia?

This problem is something few people really want to address, but is something that President Trump instinctively realizes. Unlike some of our past Presidents, he’s truly war-averse, which ought to be considered a good thing, but he still had our troops involved in the fighting in Afghanistan and Syria; my older daughter was in Afghanistan! He also saw that, despite our great military power, all we were able to do was pinprick attacks that killed some of the enemy, but we still gained absolutely nothing in either Afghanistan and Syria. He wound up negotiating our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the one the dummkopf from Delaware botched, though it’s at least possible that things would have gone just as badly in that operation had Mr Trump won the 2020 election.

All those years, all those men, and all that treasure, expended for virtually nothing. President Trump saw that, and it only reaffirmed his war-averse nature.

Despite all of the chest-thumping and posturing I’ve seen, over Ukraine and Russia’s evil Vladimir Putin, no one seems to have any flaming idea how to actually win that war without sending American/NATO troops to directly fight Russia and risking nuclear fire raining down. Perhaps the warmongers like John Bolton and Bill Kristol — the former served in the Reserves, but did everything he could to avoid Vietnam and the latter never served a day in uniform — can tell us how they would do things, but nobody else seems to have been able to tell me.