My good friend William Teach pointed me to an OpEd in The New York Times. And yes, I stole borrowed the image at the right from him!

America Is In Over Its Head

By Thomas Meaney | Thursday, March 2, 2023

The greatest blunder President Vladimir Putin may have made so far in Ukraine is giving the West the impression that Russia could lose the war. The early Russian strike on Kyiv stumbled and failed. The Russian behemoth seemed not nearly as formidable as it had been made out to be. The war suddenly appeared as a face-off between a mass of disenchanted Russian incompetents and supercharged, savvy Ukrainian patriots.

Such expectations naturally ratcheted up Ukrainian war aims. President Volodymyr Zelensky was once a member of the peace-deal camp in Ukraine. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” he declared one month into the conflict. Now he calls for complete victory: the reconquering of every inch of Russian-occupied territory, including Crimea. Polls indicate that Ukrainians will settle for nothing less. As battles rage across Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s leaders and some of their Western backers are already dreaming of Nuremberg-style trials of Mr. Putin and his inner circle in Moscow.

Can we tell the truth here? The only way that there could be “Nuremberg-style trials” of Vladimir Putin and his minions is if Russian forces were not only pushed all the way out of Ukraine, but Vladimir Putin’s government fell, and was completely replaced by, if not Western democrats, strongly anti-Putin forces. This means not just Ukraine retaining its sovereignty, but Russia being wholly defeated.

The trouble is that Ukraine has only one surefire way of accomplishing this feat in the near term: direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time. (Never mind that such a deployment would most likely shorten the odds of one of the grimmer prospects of the war: The more Russia loses, the more it is likely to resort to nuclear weapons.)

And that is what I have been saying all along!

Absent NATO involvement, the Ukrainian Army can hold the line and regain ground, as it has done in Kharkiv and Kherson, but complete victory is very nearly impossible. If Russia can hardly advance a few hundred yards a day in Bakhmut at a cost of 50 to 70 men, since the Ukrainians are so well entrenched, would Ukrainians be able to advance any better against equally well-entrenched Russians in the whole area between Russia and the eastern side of the Dnipro delta, including the Azov Sea coastline and the isthmus leading to Crimea? What has been a meat grinder in one direction is likely to be a meat grinder in the other.

Mr Meaney, a fellow at the Max Planck Society in Göttingen, Germany, writes about U.S. foreign policy and international affairs in The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and elsewhere, has, in effect, described not World War II, but World War I, a war of entrenchment, though this time both sides have weapons which can strike over no man’s land. It’s also true that in such a static front, the use of ‘tactical’ or ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons would make some military sense. That, after all, is what they were made for in the first place!

There’s a lot more at the original, and Mr Teach noted that you can find it here, avoiding the Times paywall, and it deserves a read. Mr Meaney noted that the aid Volodymyr Zelensky has requested has only been partially promised, and delivery will be slow.

That Mr. Zelensky has staked so much of his diplomacy on these armament shipments makes sense: He needs to communicate to the Kremlin that Ukraine is prepared for a long, slogging conflict. But in terms of battle-ready material for the next six months, very little of the promised bounty will be deployable. If Mr. Zelensky wants to complete his self-image as Winston Churchill sooner rather than later, he will want to hasten the day when he can toast NATO’s — which is to say, America’s — entry into the conflict.

Let’s be clear here: NATO can only enter the Russo-Ukrainian War directly if President Biden sends American troops. Why? Because Russia has that strategic nuclear arsenal that can only be counterbalanced by the United States’ strategic nuclear arsenal. If other NATO forces enter the war directly without the US, then NATO will have attacked, and the provision in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”, will not have been met.^[1]Article 6 defines an attack against a NATO member: For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack: on the territory of any of the … Continue reading NATO troops crossing over into either Ukraine, Byelorussia, or Russia herself would not be Russia attacking NATO, but the other way around. While the United Kingdom and France have strategic nuclear arsenals of their own, they are much smaller than Russia’s.

So far, Western public opinion has been in favor of helping Ukraine, but I do recall something of American history: Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, won re-election by telling the voters that they had kept America out of the wars in Europe, and while Americans in general were in favor of the Allies, they weren’t in favor of sending troops to Europe. Will Americans really want to send American troops into direct combat with Russia, a Russia which has nuclear weapons?

Yes, I have a direct interest in this: my older daughter is in the United States Army Reserves, in the Corps of Engineers, the very people who would be sent to build forward installations for troop and equipment deployment. If we got directly involved, while the Engineers wouldn’t be sent directly to the front, they would be sent into Poland, close to the Ukrainian border, and it would be in Russia’s military interest to strike such installations.

But even absent that, if NATO got directly involved, there would be a reverse of the situation strategists always thought about during the Cold War. The threat against which NATO had to defend was not a strategic nuclear attack, but the massive Red Army, with far more tanks and men and equipment than the NATO forces had in place, streaming through the Fulda Gap to invade democratic Europe, and the United States having to use its tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons to defeat the massive conventional assault.

Now, with Russia’s conventional forces having shown themselves to be far weaker than the Red Army of 1945, it would be Russia having to consider tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons to blunt a NATO conventional attack.

Other than against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have never been used in war. The two atomic bombs used against Japan finally compelled Japan’s unconditional surrender, and though President Truman had promised a rain of terror from the skies if Japan didn’t surrender, the two atomic bombs used were all we had at the time.

Now there are thousands, the vast majority of which are controlled by the United States and Russia. If the nuclear threshold is crossed in the Russo-Ukrainian War, who can know when the use of nuclear weapons will stop?