The Most Reckless Act

Professor Thomas Fazi writes:

Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use NATO long-range missile ATACMS to strike Russia officially will probably go down in history as the most reckless act of an administration that has assembled a very long list of reckless, heinous, criminal acts, from Ukraine to Gaza. To be clear: Biden — a cognitively impaired, lame-duck president whose party has just been voted out in a landslide election — may have just declared war on Russia.

Yes, the US and NATO have of course been involved in an indirect or proxy war for the past three years (or ten years, depending on one’s point of view). But thus far Russia has accepted to go along with the fiction that it is only at war with Ukraine — despite the fact that Ukraine is entirely dependent on NATO support, and has struck Russian territory on repeated occasions with NATO weapons and technical-logistical support.

But two months ago Putin made it very clear that allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with long-range missiles supplied by NATO would be tantamount to the Alliance directly entering the war. This is what he said:

The Ukrainian army is not able to strike with modern long-range precision systems of Western manufacture. It cannot do this. It can only do so using intelligence from satellites, which Ukraine does not have. This is data from [European Union] satellites, or from the United States, in general from NATO.

He added that only NATO servicemen can enter flight assignments for the missile systems, concluding: 

It is about deciding whether NATO countries [want to be] directly involved in a military conflict [with Russia] or not. This would mean their direction participation. And this changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict. This would mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if that is the case, we will take appropriate decisions, based on the threat that will be posed to us.

In short, Biden — and by extension NATO — has just decided to declare war on Russia. This is even more terrifying when considering the recent changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine announced by Putin, where he said that Western support for a conventional attack on Russia by Ukraine — referring specifically to Ukraine’s demand to use Western weapons to strike deeper into Russian territory — should be considered a joint attack and could, under certain circumstances, merit a nuclear response. He said:

It is proposed that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation.

The stakes have never been as high. Biden and NATO countries are doing their best to drag their citizens into a potentially nuclear conflict with Russia. And this comes on the heels of a US presidential election that was clearly also a vote against Biden’s reckless proxy war against Russia, a sentiment also shared by a majority of Western European citizens. They would sooner set fire to the world than give up their power — and admit defeat in Ukraine. The idea is to escalate the conflict over the next two months leading up to Trump’s inauguration, creating a significantly more challenging situation for him to inherit. This strategy is intended to pressure him into adopting a more hawkish stance on the conflict.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Much will depend, of course, on what targets these missiles are used on, and how deep into Russian territory they are deployed. Potentially they can get very far.

At that point, we can only hope that Russia will continue to show restraint in the face of Western aggression, and chooses not to retaliate — at least not in kind, i.e., allowing, say, Belarus to strike NATO targets in Western Europe. But Russia faces a strategic conundrum: on the one hand, it wants to avoid an all-out conflict with NATO, which could easily spiral into apocalyptic nuclear war; on the other hand, if it continues not to respond to NATO’s attacks, it will indirectly fuel the conflict’s escalation by sending the message that there’s virtually nothing NATO can do that will invite a retaliation from Russia. That is, it will further weaken nuclear deterrence — the notion that nuclear-armed superpowers should never engage in a direct military conflict.

So how might Russia react? Here’s what Glenn Diesen writes:

Russia can pursue either horizontal or vertical escalation. Horizontal escalation is more restrained by retaliating in other areas by for example supplying air defences to Iran, making arms deals with North Korea, sending Russian warships to the Caribbean, sending advanced weaponry to NATO adversaries, or even providing intelligence for strikes on for example US occupation troops in Syria and Iraq.

However, a direct attack by NATO on Russia will likely pressure the Russians to respond directly with vertical escalation irrespective of the risk of a nuclear exchange. F16s and other weaponry that will be used against Russia have been placed in Poland and Romania as these are considered “safe spaces” as long as NATO is not directly involved in the war. NATO drones operating over the Black Sea and providing targeting data to Ukraine seem like an obvious target. NATO satellites that are used to guide missile attacks on Russia can also be destroyed. Attacks with tactical nuclear weapons in Western Ukraine would also be a powerful retaliation that send a strong message without attacking NATO directly. 

Andrew Korybko has a different take:

Realistically speaking, however, all that’ll likely happen between then and now is that Russia carries out more missile strikes against military targets in Ukraine. Nothing extraordinary like its speculative use of tactical nukes or bombing NATO is expected, both possibilities of which were addressed in the pieces that were enumerated in the earlier analysis about Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine. At most, it might destroy a major bridge across the Dnieper or carry out decapitation strikes, but even those are unlikely.

Putin is averse to escalation since he sincerely fears everything spiralling out of control into World War III. Time and again, precedent proves that he’ll do his utmost to avoid that worst-case scenario as proven by him refusing to significantly escalate after Ukraine bombed the Kremlin, Russia’s early warning systems, strategic airfields, the Crimean Bridge, oil refineries, and residential areas, among its many other targets. There’s accordingly no reason to expect him to jump out of character and significantly escalate after this.

Having said that, sometimes even the most patient people snap, and it’s always possible that Putin might have enough and decide to do what many of his supporters have wanted from the get-go.

The next two months may prove to be the most dangerous the world has ever seen.