I have said it before: There has been a whole lot of World War II thinking applied to the Russo-Ukraine War — or perhaps I should call it Russo-Ukraine War 2.0, considering Russia’s seizure and annexation of part of Ukraine in 2014 — with the logic that pushed the United Kingdom and France to declare war on Nazi Germany two days after the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, but that is such superficial thinking that I am amazed no one has realized it. In that event, the UK and France could not and did not actually do anything to liberate Poland; the liberation of Poland came in 1944, when the Red Army pushed out the Germans, and ‘liberation’ by the Soviet Union hardly freed the Poles.

And there’s that biggest of differences: no one in Europe, or anywhere in the world, had in 1939 what Russia has now: a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal. As he was losing the war, Adolf Hitler tried everything he could, used every weapon he had, but, other than the V-1 and V-2 terror rockets, and a short-range bomber force that could reach only parts of England, had no power to strike at his enemies. We do not and cannot know what Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will do if, in the end, he sees Russia really losing RUW 2.0, but we do know that he could cross that nuclear threshold, and use tactical nukes against Ukrainian troop concentrations and other targets. And once that nuclear threshold is crossed, who can know when things will stop? And if the United States and NATO nations are supplying Ukraine from bases in Poland, how are those bases not legitimate targets if Russia has the weapons to reach them . . . and Russia does.

But that doesn’t really seem to concern a lot of “strategic thinkers” these days:

At the NATO summit in Vilnius: Will Biden seize or squander the chance to end Putin’s war on Ukraine?

Biden must offer Kyiv a clear path to NATO membership after the end of the fighting and ensure it has the weapons to win.

by Trudy Rubin | Sunday, July 9, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

Does Joe Biden want to be remembered as the president who lost Ukraine?

“(T)he president who lost Ukraine”? What, are we back in 1949, and the “who lost China” political idiocy? There was a lot of that around, as though the United States could have sent the Army into China to stop Mao Zedong and the Communists from routing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, chasing them off the mainland and into Formosa?

That question must be asked as NATO allies prepare to meet at a historic summit in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Tuesday and Wednesday, which will focus on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued aggression in Ukraine.

This is the moment when NATO members, led by Biden, should be laying out a clear path for Ukraine to join the alliance once the war ends. This is the moment, which, if seized, could plausibly lead to Ukrainian victory by year’s end.

“(P)lausibly,” huh? Nothing in this war has proceeded in anything like what the military “experts” predicted. Russia was not able to brush the Ukrainians aside, but the rosy projections that the Ukrainians could push the Russians back out have not materialized, either. The only things which have really advanced in this war are the mud, the blood, the devastation, and the death.

This is also the moment when Biden should be announcing that the United States will finally expedite the arrival of critical weapons systems — long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets — that are vital to the success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

As of this writing, though, all signs are that Biden will squander the moment, and none of the above will happen. As John Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said during a webinar last week, ”Very thin gruel is likely in Vilnius.” If so, Biden and NATO will be gifting Putin big time, even as he reels from a failed mutiny attempt by one of his closest allies.

There’s still a bit of time for Biden to shift gears and surprise us. Here are the vital steps he should take at the summit to help end Putin’s war.

Make clear that the United States and NATO support a Ukrainian “victory” according to Kyiv’s definition, which means regaining all territory seized by Russia, including Crimea. The White House keeps saying we are with Kyiv “as long as it takes,” but never clarifies “takes for what?” Why not say we are with the Ukrainians until they win?

President Putin had sent his troops into the eastern half of Ukraine back in 2014, seizing a large chunk of the territory, including Crimea, which Russia directly annexed. Mrs Rubin now wants the current war to continue until Ukraine not only holds off and then pushes out Russia from the parts of Ukraine that it tried to seize when she invaded in 2022, but also to expel Russia from land it has held for the last nine years, the seizure of which our NATO allies and we condemned in 2014, but which Presidents Obama, Trump, and, initially, Biden actually did nothing about.

There’s a lot more of Mrs Rubin’s column, in which she advocates sending 300 KM range ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles to Ukraine, which has “promised” not to use them on targets inside Russia, but who can know, in advance, whether that promise would be kept if a desperate Ukraine identified targets inside Russia — or Byelorus — against which the weapons would be useful?

In what almost seems as though the Head Neoconservative sent a memo around to his minions, The Washington Post had several articles on the subject. A straight news piece noted that U.S. leaders insist war with Russia must end before Ukraine joins NATO, and even neoconservative Max Boot, very much a Ukraine supporter, realized that, as much as his “heart” says Ukraine should be admitted into NATO, his “head” says no.

Yet there is deep and understandable reluctance among Western European states and the United States to admit Ukraine to NATO, because it is at war with Russia and will be for the foreseeable future. This isn’t a stable stalemate like the division of East and West Germany or North and South Korea. This is a dynamic, ongoing conflict that, if NATO were to take in Ukraine, could draw other members into a shooting war with a nuclear-armed Russia.

It’s true, as Scheunemann and Farkas argue, that Article 5 — which holds “that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies” — “does not mandate a specific response by member states.” NATO members could say they are complying with Article 5 by doing what they are already doing: supplying Ukraine with weapons, training and intelligence and imposing sanctions on Russia. But there has always been an implicit assumption that an armed attack on a NATO member would result in military action by other NATO members. If that’s not the case, it would risk watering down Article 5 and reducing the overall effectiveness of the NATO alliance. Do we really want to send a message to Putin that he could invade, say, Lithuania and the West won’t fight to defend that embattled democracy?

If Mr Boot was uncommonly cautious, Marc A. Thiessen and Stephen E. Biegun were less so, arguing that only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine.

No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues. That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.

Even Mrs Rubin said that NATO membership for Ukraine should only come after Ukraine wins its war, or a cease-fire is somehow declared.

But what would that mean? If declaring a cease-fire means that Ukraine would them be offered NATO membership, then any incentive President Putin has for agreeing to a cease-fire is greatly diminished. More, if a ‘path’ to membership is specified, President Putin would know what he needed to do, and when he needed to do it.

We do not know what a post-Putin Russia will look like, but there’s one point I do not see the neocons considering. With all of the comparisons to ‘we should have stopped Adolf Hitler in 1938’ that we see concerning Vladimir Putin, the Nazi leader was 49 years old in 1938, while Vladimir Vladimirovich will turn 71 in three months time. With a Russian military which will have to rebuild following the war with Ukraine, regardless of how that war ends, the argument that we have to deter future aggression from him seems short-sighted. Even if Russia finally wins in Ukraine, and Mr Putin manages to hang onto power for the rest of his miserable life, he could be approaching, or even over, 80 years old before Russia would be ready for another aggressive move, and Russian military leaders of tomorrow, who today are the field-grade officers mired in the Ukraine war, are going to have the experience to know that another such assault against another nation will not go according to plan.

When NATO was formed, there were ‘buffer states’ between NATO and the Soviet Union; today, NATO nations are directly on Russia’s borders, and that fact gets a lot more serious if Ukraine becomes one of them. Many Western analysts say that, since NATO is a wholly defensive alliance, that shouldn’t really be a concern of the Russians, but they are thinking in Western terms, and not with a Russian mindset. When an American ‘analyst’ tells us how the Russians should feel, should think, he’s talking out of his ass, because it’s not necessarily how the Russians will feel about things.

How did we react when the USSR prepared to install nuclear weapons in Cuba? President Kennedy risked a direct military conflict with Soviet naval forces, at a time when the Soviets’ nuclear forces existed, but were vastly inferior to our own.