Playing With Nuclear Fire
Russia and NATO are now on the escalatory ladder in Ukraine, and NATO, not Russia, is driving both parties upward. The latest escalation is a decision by the United States and, stupidly, Germany, to allow Ukraine to fire American and German made missiles into Russia itself. Currently, the permission applies only to the northern front in the vicinity of Kharkiv, but you can count on that limitation being lifted in another step upward on the ladder - a ladder that reaches all the way to nuclear war.
The excuse is that Russia is attempting to take the city of Kharkiv, which lies only about twelve miles from the Russian border. Russia would no doubt be happy to acquire Kharkiv, but that does not appear to be the objective in its current operation. Its purpose is to create a buffer zone between Russia and Ukraine. The reason it needs one is that Ukraine-backed Russian exile forces have attacked Russia along that border. Action begets reaction.
That is not what is driving both Russia and NATO up the ladder toward the employment of nuclear weapons – something the Russians have warned they will do if pressed to hard. The driver is that NATO has adopted an unattainable strategic objective, namely that Ukraine gets back all its Russian occupied land, including Crimea. Unless either the Russian army or the Russian home front collapses, that will not happen. At present, neither of those events seems likely, although authoritarian states such as Russia are brittle and can break with little warning.
Absent those events, Ukraine is trapped in a war of attrition she is bound to lose. She is already running out of manpower, despite which the Ukrainian government had great difficulty getting a lowering of the conscription age from twenty-seven to twenty-five through parliament (most other countries conscript at age eighteen). Western ammunition production cannot meet the needs of a long war, while Russia’s can. Ukraine’s attempt to generate a war of maneuver in the summer of 2023 failed, largely because her operational plan lacked Shwerpunkt. From what little information I’ve been able to get, Western-built tanks did not survive on the offensive any better than did their Russian counterparts, mainly because of top-attack anti-tank munitions. Awnings like those now seen on Israeli Merkava tanks in Gaza can help, but so far Ukraine does not appear to employ them.
This leaves NATO facing defeat, which is any outcome where Ukraine does not recover all her territory. Panic is beginning to set in. French President Macron has raised publicly the possibility of sending French and potentially other NATO troops to Ukraine. Germany has said no, but as we just saw in Berlin’s collapse on restricting German weapons to Ukrainian territory, the traffic-light coalition is always yellow. The matter is likely to be decided in Washington. If Trump wins, realism returns and a compromise peace is likely. But if Biden wins, the Blob will not be able to accept even a partial NATO defeat, which means the climb up the escalation ladder will continue. Have people forgotten what nuclear weapons can do?
Setting an unattainable strategic objective usually leads to escalation to total war, nuclear or not. Netanyahu has done the same thing in the war in Gaza; despite the best efforts of the IDF, Israel is not able to destroy Hamas as either a military or a political power center inside Gaza. Again, panic is setting in, with Netanyahu likely to open another front against Hezbollah to distract attention from his failure in Gaza. Panic takes many forms, but escalation is included in most of them.
NATO made a strategic blunder at the outset. Will it accept it cannot meet its strategic objective and be satisfied with something less, or will it dig its own grave deeper? If war halfway around the world or beyond Europe’s eastern border ends with a nuclear exchange, Macron and others who pushed for escalation will end their days hearing the words, “a la lanterne!”