XPost: alt.current-events.russia, alt.current-events.ukraine, alt.current-events.usa
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics

I will make two main arguments today. First, the United States is
principally responsible for causing the Ukraine crisis. This is not to
deny that Putin started the war and that he is responsible for Russia’s
conduct on the battlefield. Nor is it to deny that America’s allies bear
some responsibility, but they largely follow Washington’s lead on Ukraine.
My key point, however, is that the United States has pushed forward
policies toward Ukraine that Putin and his colleagues see as an
existential threat to their country—a point they have made repeatedly for
many years. Specifically, I am talking about America’s obsession with
bringing Ukraine into NATO and making it a Western bulwark on Russia’s
border. The Biden administration was unwilling to eliminate that threat
through diplomacy and indeed recommitted itself to bringing Ukraine into
NATO in 2021. Putin responded by invading Ukraine on February 24th, 2022.

Second, the Biden administration has reacted to the outbreak of the war by doubling down against Russia. Washington and its Western allies are
committed to decisively defeating Russia in Ukraine and employing
comprehensive sanctions to greatly weaken Russian power. The United States
is not seriously interested in finding a diplomatic solution to the war,
which means the war is likely to drag on for months, if not years. In the process, Ukraine, which has already suffered grievously, is going to
experience even greater harm. In essence, the United States and its allies
are helping lead Ukraine down the primrose path.

Furthermore, there is a danger that the war will escalate, as NATO might
get dragged into the fighting and nuclear weapons might be used. We live
in perilous times.

Let me now lay out my argument in greater detail, starting with a
description of the conventional wisdom about the causes of the conflict.

The Conventional Wisdom

It is widely and firmly believed in the West that Putin is solely
responsible for causing the Ukraine crisis and certainly the ongoing war.
He is said to have imperial ambitions, which is to say he is bent on
conquering Ukraine and other countries as well—all for the purpose of
creating a greater Russia that bears some resemblance to the former Soviet Union. In other words, Ukraine is Putin’s first target, but not his last.
As one scholar put it, he is “acting on a sinister, long-held belief: to
erase Ukraine from the map of the world.” Given Putin’s purported goals,
it makes perfect sense for Finland and Sweden to join NATO and for the
alliance to increase its force levels in Eastern Europe. After all,
Imperial Russia must be contained.

While this narrative is repeated over and over in the mainstream media and
by virtually every Western leader, there is no evidence to support it. To
the extent that purveyors of the conventional wisdom provide evidence, it
has little if any bearing on Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine. For
example, some emphasize that he said that Ukraine is an “artificial state”
or that it is not a “real state.” Such opaque comments, however, say
nothing about his reason for going to war. The same is true of Putin’s statement that he views Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” with a
common history. Others point out that he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Of course,
Putin also said, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.
Whoever wants it back has no brain.” Still, others point out that he said
that “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more
precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.” But as he went on to say in that
same speech: “Of course, we cannot change past events, but we must at
least admit them openly and honestly.”

To make the case that Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine and incorporating it into Russia, it is necessary to provide evidence that
first, he thought it was a desirable goal, that second, he thought it was
a feasible goal, and third, he intended to pursue that goal. There is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less
intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state and make it
part of a greater Russia when he sent his troops into Ukraine on February
24th.

In fact, there is significant evidence that Putin recognized Ukraine as an independent country. In his July 12th, 2021, article about Russian-
Ukrainian relations, which proponents of the conventional wisdom often
point to as evidence of his imperial ambitions, he tells the Ukrainian
people, “You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome!”
Regarding how Russia should treat Ukraine, he writes, “There is only one answer: with respect.” He concludes that lengthy article with the
following words: “And what Ukraine will be—it is up to its citizens to
decide.” It is hard to reconcile these statements with the claim that he
wants to incorporate Ukraine within a greater Russia.

In that same July 12th, 2021 article and again in an important speech he
gave on February 21st, 2022, Putin emphasized that Russia accepts “the new geopolitical reality that took shape after the dissolution of the USSR.”
He reiterated that same point for a third time on February 24th, 2022,
when he announced that Russia would invade Ukraine. He also made it clear
that “it is not our plan to occupy Ukrainian territory” and that he
respected Ukrainian sovereignty, but only up to a point: “Russia cannot
feel safe, develop, and exist while facing a permanent threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine.” In essence, Putin was not interested in
making Ukraine a part of Russia; he was interested in making sure it did
not become a “springboard” for Western aggression against Russia, a
subject I will say more about shortly.

One might argue that Putin was lying about his motives, that he was
attempting to disguise his imperial ambitions. As it turns out, I have
written a book about lying in international politics—Why Leaders Lie: The
Truth about Lying in International Politics—and it is clear to me that
Putin was not lying. For starters, one of my principal findings is that
leaders do not lie much to each other; they lie more often to their own publics. Regarding Putin, whatever one thinks of him, he does not have a history of lying to other leaders. Although some assert that he frequently
lies and cannot be trusted, there is little evidence of him lying to
foreign audiences. Moreover, he has publicly spelled out his thinking
about Ukraine on numerous occasions over the past two years and he has consistently emphasized that his principal concern is Ukraine’s relations
with the West, especially NATO. He has never once hinted that he wants to
make Ukraine part of Russia. If this behavior is part of a giant deception campaign, it would be without precedent in recorded history.

Perhaps the best indicator that Putin is not bent on conquering and
absorbing Ukraine is the military strategy Moscow has employed from the
start of the campaign. The Russian military did not attempt to conquer all
of Ukraine. That would have required a classic blitzkrieg strategy that
aimed at quickly overrunning all of Ukraine with armored forces supported
by tactical airpower. That strategy was not feasible, however, because
there were only 190,000 soldiers in Russia’s invading army, which is far
too small a force to vanquish and occupy Ukraine, which is not only the
largest country between the Atlantic Ocean and Russia, but also has a population over 40 million. Unsurprisingly, the Russians pursued a limited
aims strategy, which focused on either capturing or threatening Kyiv and conquering a large swath of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine. In short, Russia did not have the capability to subdue all of Ukraine, much
less conquer other countries in Eastern Europe.

To take this argument a step further, Putin and other Russian leaders
surely understand from the Cold War that occupying counties in the age of nationalism is invariably a prescription for never-ending trouble. The
Soviet experience in Afghanistan is a glaring example of this phenomenon,
but more relevant for the issue at hand is Moscow’s relations with its
allies in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The Soviet Union maintained
a huge military presence in that region and was involved in the politics
of almost every country located there. Those allies, however, were a
frequent thorn in Moscow’s side. The Soviet Union put down a major
insurrection in East Germany in 1953, and then invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968—all for the purpose of keeping those countries in
line. There was serious trouble in Poland in 1956, 1970, and again in 1980-1981. Although Polish authorities dealt with these events, they
served as a reminder that intervention might be necessary. Albania,
Romania, and Yugoslavia routinely caused Moscow trouble, but Soviet
leaders tended to tolerate their misbehavior, because their location made
them less important for deterring NATO.

What about contemporary Ukraine? It is obvious from Putin’s July 12th,
2021, essay that he understood at that time that Ukrainian nationalism is
a powerful force and that the civil war in the Donbass, which had been
going on since 2014, had done much to poison relations between Russia and Ukraine. He surely knew that Russia’s invasion force would not be welcomed
with open arms by Ukrainians, and that it would be a Herculean task for
Russia to subjugate Ukraine if it had the necessary forces to conquer the entire country, which it did not have.

Finally, it is worth noting that hardly anyone made the argument that
Putin had imperial ambitions from the time he took office in 2000 until
the Ukraine crisis first broke out on February 22nd, 2014. In fact, the
Russian leader was an invited guest to the April 2008 NATO summit in
Bucharest where the alliance announced that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members. Putin’s opposition to that announcement had
hardly any effect on Washington because Russia was judged to be too weak
to stop further NATO enlargement, just as it had been too weak to stop the
1999 and 2004 tranches of expansion.

Relatedly, it is important to note that NATO expansion before February
2014 was not aimed at containing Russia. Given the sad state of Russian military power, Moscow was in no position to pursue revanchist policies in Eastern Europe. Tellingly, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul notes that Putin’s seizure of Crimea was not planned before the crisis
broke out in 2014. It was an impulsive move in response to the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader. In short, NATO enlargement was not intended to contain a Russian threat but was instead as part of a broader policy to spread the liberal international order into Eastern Europe and
make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

It was only when the Ukraine crisis broke out in February 2014 that the
United States and its allies suddenly began describing Putin as a
dangerous leader with imperial ambitions and Russia as a serious military threat that had to be contained. What caused this shift? This new rhetoric
was designed to serve one essential purpose: to enable the West to blame
Putin for the outbreak of trouble in Ukraine. And now that the crisis has turned into a full-scale war, it is imperative to make sure that he alone
is blamed for this disastrous turn of events. This blame game explains why Putin is now widely portrayed as an imperialist here in the West, even
though there is hardly any evidence to support that perspective. Let me
now turn to the real cause of the Ukraine crisis.

The Real Cause of the Crisis

The taproot of the crisis is the American-led effort to make Ukraine a
Western bulwark on Russia’s borders. That strategy has three prongs: integrating Ukraine into the EU
turning Ukraine into a pro-Western liberal democracy and
most importantly, incorporating Ukraine into NATO.

The strategy was set in motion at NATO’s annual summit in Bucharest in
April 2008, when the alliance announced that Ukraine and Georgia “will
become members.” Russian leaders responded immediately with outrage,
making it clear that this decision was an existential threat to Russia,
and that they had no intention of letting either country join NATO.
According to a respected Russian journalist, Putin “flew into a rage,” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.”

William Burns, who is now the head of the CIA, but was the U.S. ambassador
to Moscow at the time of the Bucharest summit. He wrote a memo to then- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that succinctly describes Russian
thinking about Ukraine joining NATO. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. In more
than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” NATO, he
said, “would be seen … as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s
Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze...It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and
eastern Ukraine.”

Burns, of course, was not the only policymaker who understood that
bringing Ukraine into NATO was fraught with danger. Indeed, at the
Bucharest Summit, both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French
President Nicolas Sarkozy were opposed to moving forward on NATO
membership for Ukraine because they feared it would infuriate Russia.
Angela Merkel recently explained her opposition in an interview: “I was
very sure […] that Putin is not going to just let that happen. From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.”

The Bush administration, which was pushing such a decision for NATO
however, cared little about Moscow’s “brightest of red lines” and
pressured the French and German leaders to agree to issuing a public pronouncement that said unequivocally that Ukraine and Georgia would
eventually join the alliance.

Unsurprisingly, the American-led effort to integrate Georgia into NATO
resulted in a war between Georgia and Russia in August 2008—just four
months after the Bucharest summit. Nevertheless, the United States and its allies continued moving forward with their plans to make Ukraine a Western bastion on Russia’s borders. These efforts eventually sparked a major
crisis in February 2014, after a U.S.-supported uprising caused Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to flee the country. He was
replaced by pro-American Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. In response,
Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and helped fuel a civil war that broke
out in the Donbass between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian government.

One often hears the argument that in the eight years between when the
crisis broke out in February 2014 and when the war began in February 2022,
the United States and its allies paid little attention to bringing Ukraine
into NATO. In effect, the issue had been taken off the table, and thus
NATO enlargement could not possibly have been an important cause of the escalating crisis in 2021 and the subsequent outbreak of war earlier this
year. This line of argument is false. In fact, the Western response to the events of 2014 was to double down on the existing strategy and effectively
make Ukraine a de facto member of NATO. The alliance began training the Ukrainian military in 2014, averaging 10,000 trained troops annually over
the next eight years. In December 2017, the Trump administration decided
to provide Kyiv with “defensive weapons.” Other NATO countries quickly got
into the act, shipping even more weapons to Ukraine.

In addition, Ukraine’s military began participating in joint military
exercises with NATO forces. In July 2021, Kyiv and Washington co-hosted Operation Sea Breeze, a naval exercise in the Black Sea that included
navies from 31 countries and was directly aimed at Russia. Two months
later in September 2021, the Ukrainian army led Rapid Trident 21, which according to an official press-release from the U.S. Army was a “U.S. Army Europe and Africa assisted annual exercise designed to enhance
interoperability among allied and partner nations, to demonstrate units
are poised and ready to respond to any crisis.” NATO’s effort to arm and
train Ukraine’s military explains in good part why it has fared so well
against Russian forces in the ongoing war. A headline in a recent issue of
The Wall Street Journal put it quite nicely, “The Secret of Ukraine’s
Military Success: Years of NATO Training.”

In addition to NATO’s ongoing efforts to make the Ukrainian military a
more formidable fighting force, the politics surrounding Ukraine’s
membership in NATO and its integration into the West changed in 2021.
There was renewed enthusiasm for pursuing those objectives in both Kyiv
and Washington. President Zelensky, who had never shown much enthusiasm
for bringing Ukraine into NATO and who was elected in March 2019 on a
platform that called for working with Russia to settle the ongoing crisis, reversed course in early 2021 and not only embraced NATO expansion but
also adopted a hardline approach toward Moscow. He made a series of
moves—like shutting down pro-Russian TV stations and arresting an
especially close friend of Putin and charging him with treason—that were
sure to anger Moscow.

President Biden, who moved into the White House in January 2021, had long
been committed to bringing Ukraine into NATO and was also super-hawkish
towards Russia. Unsurprisingly, on June 14th, 2021, NATO issued the
following communique´ at its annual Brussels summit:
“We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine
will become a member of the Alliance with the Membership Action Plan (MAP)
as an integral part of the process; we reaffirm all elements of that
decision, as well as subsequent decisions, including that each partner
will be judged on its own merits. We stand firm in our support for
Ukraine’s right to decide its own future and foreign policy course free
from outside interference.”

On September 1st, 2021, Zelensky visited the White House, where Biden made
it clear that the United States was “firmly committed” to “Ukraine’s Euro- Atlantic aspirations.” Then on November 10th, 2021, Secretary of State
Antony Blinken, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, signed an important document—the “U.S.- Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership.”
The aim of both parties, the document stated, is to “underscore […] a commitment to Ukraine’s implementation of the deep and comprehensive
reforms necessary for full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.” That document explicitly builds not just on “the
commitments made to strengthen the Ukraine-U.S. strategic partnership by Presidents Zelensky and Biden,” but also reaffirms the U.S. commitment to
the “2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration.”

In short, there is little doubt that starting in early 2021 Ukraine began moving rapidly toward joining NATO. Even so, some supporters of this
policy argue that Moscow should not have been concerned, because “NATO is
a defensive alliance and poses no threat to Russia.” But that is not how
Putin and other Russian leaders think about NATO and it is what they think
that matters. There is no question that Ukraine joining NATO remained the “brightest of red lines” for Moscow.

To deal with this growing threat, Putin stationed ever-increasing numbers
of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border between February 2021 and February
2022. His aim was to coerce Biden and Zelensky into altering course and
halting their efforts to integrate Ukraine into the West. On December
17th, 2021, the Russians reached a boiling point. And Moscow sent separate letters to the Biden administration and NATO demanding a written guarantee that:

Ukraine would not join NATO
no offensive weapons would be stationed near Russia’s borders, and
NATO troops and equipment moved into eastern Europe since 1997 would be
moved back to western Europe.

Putin made numerous public statements during this period that left no
doubt that he viewed NATO expansion into Ukraine as an existential threat. Speaking to the Defense Ministry Board on December 21st, 2021, he stated:
“what they are doing, or trying or planning to do in Ukraine, is not
happening thousands of kilometers away from our national border. It is on
the doorstep of our house. They must understand that we simply have
nowhere further to retreat to. Do they really think we do not see these threats? Or do they think that we will just stand idly watching threats to Russia emerge?” Two months later at a press conference on February 22nd,
2022, just days before the war started, Putin said: “we are categorically opposed to Ukraine joining NATO because this poses a threat to us, and we
have arguments to support this. I have repeatedly spoken about it in this hall.” He then made it clear that he recognized that Ukraine was becoming
a de facto member of NATO. The United States and its allies, he said,
“continue to pump the current Kyiv authorities full of modern types of weapons.” He went on to say that if this was not stopped, Moscow “would be
left with an ‘anti-Russia’ armed to the teeth. This is totally
unacceptable.”

Putin’s logic should be manifestly clear to Americans in the audience, who
have long understood that we have the Monroe Doctrine, which stipulates
that no distant great power is allowed to place any of its military forces
in the Western Hemisphere.

I might note that in all of Putin’s public statements during the months
leading up to the war, there is not a scintilla of evidence that he was contemplating conquering Ukraine and making it part of Russia, much less attacking other countries in Eastern Europe. Other Russian
leaders—including the defense minister, the foreign minister, the deputy foreign minister, and the Russian ambassador to Washington—also emphasized
the centrality of NATO expansion for causing the Ukraine crisis. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the point succinctly at a press conference on January 14th, 2022, when he said, “the key to everything is the guarantee
that NATO will not expand eastward.”

Nevertheless, the efforts of Lavrov and Putin to get the United States and
its allies to abandon their efforts to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border failed completely. Secretary of State Antony Blinken
responded to Russia’s mid-December demands by simply saying, “There is no change. There will be no change.” Putin then launched an invasion of
Ukraine to eliminate the threat he saw from NATO.

Where Are We Now & Where Are We Going?

The Ukraine war has been raging for almost four months I would like to
make three separate points. 1) I would like to talk about the specific consequences of the war for Ukraine; 2) the prospects for escalation; and
3) the prospects for ending the war in the foreseeable future.

This war is an unmitigated disaster for Ukraine. As I noted earlier, Putin
made it clear in 2008 that Russia would wreck Ukraine to prevent it from joining NATO. He is delivering on that promise. Russian forces have
conquered at least 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and destroyed or
badly damaged many Ukrainian cities and towns. More than 6.5 million
Ukrainians have fled the country, while more than 8 million have been internally displaced. Many thousands of Ukrainians—including innocent civilians—are dead or badly wounded and the Ukrainian economy is in
shambles. The World Bank estimates that Ukraine’s economy will shrink by
almost 50 percent over the course of 2022. Estimates are that
approximately $100 billion worth of damage has been inflicted on Ukraine
and that it will take close to a trillion dollars to rebuild the country.
In the meantime, Kyiv requires about $5 billion of aid every month just to
keep the government running.

Furthermore, there appears to be little hope that Ukraine will be able to regain use of its ports on the Azov and Black Seas anytime soon. Before
the war, roughly 70 percent of all Ukrainian exports and imports—and 98
percent of its grain exports—moved through these ports. This is the basic situation after less than four months of fighting. It is downright scary
to contemplate what Ukraine will look like if this war drags on for a few
more years.

So, what are the prospects for negotiating a peace agreement and ending
the war in the next few months? I am sorry to say that I see no way this
war ends anytime soon. This is a view shared by prominent policymakers on
both the Western and the Russian sides. The main reason for my pessimism
is that both Russia and the United States are deeply committed to winning
the war and it is impossible to fashion an agreement where both sides win.
To be more specific, the key to a settlement from Russia’s perspective is making Ukraine a neutral state, which means that Ukraine must divorce
itself from the West, especially the United States. But that outcome is unacceptable to the Biden administration and a large portion of the
American foreign policy establishment, because it would represent a
victory for Russia.

Ukrainian leaders have agency of course, and one might hope that—given all
the horror being inflicted on their country—they will push for
neutralization to spare their country further harm. Indeed, Zelensky
briefly mentioned that possibility in the first month of the war, but he
never seriously pursued it. There is little chance, however, that Kyiv
will push for neutralization, because the ultra-nationalists in Ukraine,
who wield significant political power, have zero interest in yielding to
any of Russia’s demands, especially one that dictates Ukraine’s political alignment with the outside world. The Biden administration and the
countries on NATO’s eastern flank—Poland and the Baltic states—are likely
to support Ukraine’s ultranationalists on this issue.

To complicate matters further, how does one deal with the large swaths of Ukrainian territory that Russia has conquered since the war started, as
well as Crimea’s fate? It is hard to fathom Moscow voluntarily giving up
any of the Ukrainian territory it now occupies, much less all of it, as Russia’s territorial goals today are probably not the ones they started
the war with. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine any Ukrainian
leader accepting a deal that allows Russia to keep any Ukrainian
territory, except possibly Crimea. I certainly hope I am wrong, but I see
no end in sight to this ruinous war.

Let me now turn to the matter of escalation. It is widely accepted among international relations scholars that there is a powerful tendency for protracted wars to escalate. Other countries can get dragged into the
fight and the level of violence is likely to escalate. The potential for
this happening in the Ukraine war is real. There is a danger that the
United States and its NATO allies will get dragged into the fighting,
which they have been able to avoid up to this point, even though we are
now effectively at war with Russia. There is also the possibility that
nuclear weapons might be used in Ukraine and that might even lead to a
nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. The underlying
reason these outcomes might be realized is that the stakes are so high for
both sides, and thus neither can afford to lose.

As I have emphasized, Putin and his lieutenants believe that Ukraine
joining the West is an existential threat to Russia that must be
eliminated. In practical terms, that means Russia must win its war in
Ukraine. Defeat is unacceptable. The Biden administration, on the other
hand, has stressed that its goal is not only to defeat the Russians in
Ukraine, but also to use sanctions to inflict egregious damage on the
Russian economy. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has emphasized that the West’s goal is to weaken Russia to the point where it could not invade
Ukraine again. In effect, the Biden administration is committed to
knocking Russia out of the ranks of the great powers. At the same time, President Biden himself has called Russia’s war in Ukraine a “genocide”
and charged Putin with being a “war criminal” who should face a “war
crimes trial” after the war. Such rhetoric hardly lends itself to
negotiating an end to the war. After all, how do you negotiate with a
genocidal state?

American policy has two significant consequences. For starters, it greatly amplifies the existential threat Moscow faces in this war and makes it
more important than ever that it prevails in Ukraine. At the same time, it means the United States is deeply committed to making sure that Russia
loses. The Biden administration has now invested so much in the Ukraine war—both materially and rhetorically—that a Russian victory would
represent a devastating defeat for Washington.

Obviously, both sides cannot win. Moreover, there is a serious possibility
that one side will begin to lose badly. If American policy succeeds and
the Russians are losing to the Ukrainians on the battlefield, Putin might
turn to nuclear weapons to rescue the situation. The U.S. Director of
National Intelligence, Avril Haines, told the Senate Armed Services
Committee in May 2022 that this was one of the two situations that might
lead Putin to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. For those of you who think
this is unlikely, please remember that NATO planned to use nuclear weapons
in similar circumstances during the Cold War. We were planning to use
nuclear weapons in West Germany if the Warsaw Pact overran it. If Russia
were to employ nuclear weapons in Ukraine, it is difficult to say how the
Biden administration would react, but it surely would be under great
pressure to retaliate, thus raising the possibility of a great-power
nuclear war. There is a perverse paradox at play here. The more successful
the United States and its allies are at achieving their war aims, the more likely it is that the war will turn nuclear.

Let’s turn the tables and ask what happens if the United States and its
NATO allies appear to be heading toward defeat, which effectively means
that the Russians are routing the Ukrainian military and the government in
Kyiv moves to negotiate a peace deal intended to save as much of the
country as possible. In that event, there would be tremendous pressure on
the United States and its allies to get even more deeply involved in the fighting. It is not likely, but certainly possible that American or maybe Polish troops would get pulled into the fighting, which means NATO would literally be at war with Russia. This is the other scenario, according to
Avril Haines, where the Russians might turn to nuclear weapons. It is
difficult to say precisely how events will play out in the Ukraine war,
but there is no question there will be serious potential for escalation,
to include nuclear escalation. The mere possibility of that outcome should
send shivers down your spine.

There are likely to be other disastrous consequences from this war, which
I cannot discuss in any detail because of time constraints. For example,
there is reason to think the war will lead to a world food crisis in which
many millions of people will die.

Furthermore, relations between Russia and the West have been so thoroughly poisoned that it will take many years to repair them. In the meantime,
that profound hostility will fuel instability around the globe, but
especially in Europe. Some will say there is a silver lining: relations
among countries in the West have markedly improved, Transatlantic
relations, NATO and the EU are in better shape than ever. That is true for
the moment, but there are deep fissures below the surface, and they are

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