The problem with the idea of a no-fly zone is its enforcement:
Russian anti-aircraft batteries in Belarus and Russia easily cover all of Ukraine’s territory, and would shoot down allied planes at will. In order for a no-fly zone to be enforced, therefore, we would have to be ready to bomb military installations outside of Ukraine, and indeed on Russian soil. While acknowledging these dangers, Breedlove himself thinks that we should not take the threat of a no-fly zone off the table, presumably for strategic ambiguity reasons. As a bluff never carried through, it has some merits: the more Russia wonders about our final intentions, the better. But it’s worth carefully thinking through the consequences of actually taking the decision.
Once the United States starts losing planes over Ukraine, for example, the domestic pressure to get revenge will become orders of magnitude greater than it already is. Demands for punitive actions against Russian ground forces will become shriller, with calls to bomb troops in Ukraine as well as bases in Belarus or Russia. Besides a thirst for revenge, righteous indignation would also increase. After all, most of the horrors we are witnessing are the result of Russian artillery pounding an overmatched Ukrainian resistance and targeting helpless civilians in cities. Air power has its limits, however. Properly punishing Russian forces will at some point require deploying ground troops of our own. A no-fly zone could transform into a more ambitious land war for securing Ukrainian territory in no time, a land war that itself spills over into Belarus and Russia.
How bad could that be, though? Doesn’t the apparent sorry state of the Russian army mean that NATO would have little trouble in stopping Moscow’s murderous campaign fairly quickly?
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While the United States was preoccupied fighting low-grade colonial wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and building up its force posture to most effectively kill aggrieved shepherds with machine guns riding around in Toyota LandCruisers, Russia (and China) have been upgrading their tactical nuclear arsenal in preparation for exactly the kind of confrontation we see now in Ukraine.
Tactical nuclear weapons should be distinguished from strategic nuclear weapons. The former are of much lower yield and destructive power than the latter, and are designed to obliterate a tank battalion or a base rather than an entire city. Indeed, they were first developed by the United States in the Cold War in order to deter superior Soviet land forces from contemplating an invasion of a comparatively overmatched NATO army on the European continent. The idea was that if the Soviets rolled tanks into the Fulda Gap, for example, NATO could destroy them without triggering the ultimate escalation to Mutually Assured Destruction — a nuclear exchange targeting cities on both sides that would likely end human civilization as we know it.
The military strategist Elbridge Colby was among those warning in 2018 that American complacency on the question of tactical nukes was leading us to disaster. Liberals and doves were certain that with nuclear war now “unthinkable,” there was no point in investing in weapons that would skirt the threshold of total annihilation. It was part a failure of imagination, and part of a broader belief in rationalist “progress” — with the madness of the Cold War behind us, no one would again risk taking the world to the brink. A new day had dawned on the world with the fall of the Soviet Union. There was no going back to darkness.
Sadly, planners in Moscow were not as idealistic, or complacent. Willick cites a Congressional Research Service report, saying that “the United States has only 230 [tactical nuclear weapons], ‘with around 100 deployed with aircraft in Europe.’ Russia has up to 2,000.” Talmadge nails down the predicament we find ourselves in: “The problem is that precisely because all-out nuclear war would be so costly for both the U.S. and Russia, Mr. Putin likely believes it won’t happen. As a result, he may feel relatively safe engaging in conventional aggression or even limited nuclear use below that threshold — demonstration strikes, for example, or attacks on military targets — without much risk of a Western response.”
How about a no-fly zone over Epstein Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Camp David, and Davos.
This is nonsense! The idea that Western European nations are prepared to let the incompetent Biden* Administration fight a nuclear war on their borders?
Let’s get sensible. US/NATO drove Russia into a corner by ignoring Russia’s clearly stated concerns about allowing the Ukraine into NATO. “Our Guys” put Russia in a position where its only choices were flight or fight — and, not surprisingly, Russia chose to fight.
Russia is now in an existential situation. If the West manages to push Russia into a losing situation, the strategic nuclear missiles will fly.
Let’s stop this 1914 “Home by Christmas” underestimation of just how destructive this unnecessary war could become. The West should be trying to resolve the situation and tamp down the violence, instead of cranking it up to 11.
You may have been glad to have the Cold War behind you but so many in DC have worked years to bring it back.
There’s a lot of money and above all prestige to be had in fighting the good fight, especially when you don’t war and don’t cold.
I am continuously puzzled by this variations of the theme “Enforcing no-fly zone may escalate into war”. Enforcing no-fly zone IS war.
“I am continuously puzzled by this variations of the theme ‘Enforcing no-fly zone may escalate into war’. Enforcing no-fly zone IS war.”
There are many nominal consequences to low world-formation capacity. One of them is this: a lumpenprog lives in a world with no agency.
Things like ‘war’, ‘poverty’, ‘success’, ‘crime’, ‘riches’, ‘peace’, ‘safety’, and et cetera, are seen more like abstract energy fields, emanating from the cosmos de novo, that may randomly seem to ‘imbue’ some locations, and not others. They do not even see the inhabitants of such locations; they are not seen as things that are *done*, as things that are *performed* that some *agent* in particular; as something that is *brought into being* by the agent – the avatar, conduit, or substrate through which the phenomena might be instantiated (and without which, it cannot).
They almost always speak in terms of the passive voice: ‘someone should get rid of that guy’, ‘[X] people should just disappear’, and et cetera. Sotto voce: intentionality is something that other people have, not themselves.
One may, for example, correctly point out that the prevailing conduct of many portions of ruling high-status populations in the west, and large portions of populations taking cues from such high status populations, amounts effectively to an official europoid genocide policy. If pointed out to such a person they might so oft say, “that’s crazy, no one’s trying to kill off wypipo”.
And, they will, more or less, *be almost completely earnest in asserting this feeling*, because *they literally do not, **can not**, think in such terms*.
They are practically allergic to the idea of anyone ever simply, ‘directly’, *doing* something. This of course has manifold implications in the formation of political opinion, amongst other things. Whenever they conceive of some state of being in their head that they desire (we may set aside for the moment the matter of whatever felicity it may or may not actually have in coherence with Being), they feel an instinctual preference for the most circuitous, tangential, and proximate approaches to influencing some thing in order to bring it about; and heaven forbid anyone ever actually be *in charge* of the business.
Now why, might one think, would an otherwise less capacitous dasein feel attracted to producing needless complexifications in such approaches to governance? The reason is simple of course; they do not actually see the complexity involved. Such that would be encountered in, or created by, such approaches.
This is the reason for a certain ‘double valence’ in the patterns of behavior or assessment of events by the congenitally solipsistic; ‘penny wise and pound foolish’.
They can be, in more parochial contexts, almost anally retentive in their concerns or recalcitrance with regards to some risks (such as a person’s ability to, for example, responsibly own a firearm); yet at the same time, in more transcendent contexts, they can be unthinkingly foolhardy in pursuing or advocating for some such massively upsetting policies (such an alien immivasions, de-structing cultural superstructures, reformatting directly responsible governance into indirect irresponsible non-governance, and et cetera).
They, at the same time as phobically recoiling from instances of direct authority (responsibility), desire intensive micro-managing of particular affairs. More than once over time have more conscientious writers (sometimes called ‘conservative’) observed a contradiction here in this, between what is said in one context and done in another, which they so oft label as ‘hypocrisy’; all of it however and in fact, is springing from the same mode of thought.
When a solipsist criticises someone, *they are telling you about themselves*. When he nervously recriminates over all the trouble people could possibly get up to without ‘supervision’ (who’s supervision? *passive voice*), *he is not actually talking about them*. When he heedlessly advocates massively upsetting adventures on national scales, *the scales do not actually exist in his mind*. When he thinks about great wars, great economies, foreign nations, foreign peoples, *other people*, he is not actually thinking of these things, in terms of forming a world of such motions, that is more felicitously responsive too and coherent with the World. What he thinks of when he thinks of these things, rather, are *idols and caricatures*, which have their own private particular motions, their own nature in his mind, irrespective of relation to something in greater reality, that are nominally referred to by the same designations as a something in that greater reality. A truer relationship of such greater things is not something that he can truly produce, not something that can truly ‘fit’ within him.
He is heedless of the greatest of risks, of life and civilization in general, because he does not see them. And likewise, he is disproportionately concerned with trivial risks, because there, now, finally, tendrils of reality start coming down to levels he can begin to actually comprehend.
Because he cannot really see such much more transcendent contexts, he also cannot really see what feedback from reality on the matter may look like in the first place; the caricatures that exist in his mind can continue to exist impervious to devalidation. In great matters he feels endlessly confident, because in his mind it feels easy, and in his mind his answers are not contradicted; he may even fancy himself rather genius, with how effortlessly he may twirl what mental artifactions he would be fain to call [the-subject-in-question]; or perhaps a bright specialist rather, conveniently specialized in such certain higher things that are also most effusively difficult to verify, in the stead of any (and all) such things where chronic mistakenness would be all the more easier to verify and identify ahead of time.
(Contemplation of modernity is full of such ironies to appreciate; where persons who are *least* qualified for a certain matter, are also disproportionately attracted to it, to being *authorities* on it.
One might not help but be tempted to consider, if you say have someone who cannot even imagine how a planet’s axial tilt causes seasons, how could you expect them to come to good conclusions on somethings so much more massively involved in the courses of civilization?)
But come some less transcendent contexts, phenomena from Outside become increasingly intrusive in their presentation to himself, poking through the veils of narcissism; he can more ably *see* such things, see *contradictions* to conceits he may be holding in such matters, in ways he cannot so easily deny or dissimulate (to himself, most importantly). It reminds more conscious parts of him of something he would not like to be reminded; reminding him that he, on some level, perceives that the world – at least parts of it that he can see more easily (and such parts he is extra ordinarily concerned by) – is *not in fact* as easy as the caricatures he some times imagines; on some level, he *knows* it isn’t, and this is a source of constant cognitive dissonance for him. *He is deeply disturbed by the motions of a reality he can scarcely comprehend*, and this concern is exacerbated by, is sublimated into, an intense desire for control; the fear of (other) people having authority, and desire for micro-managing of (other) people, all deriving from the same impulse.
He is allergic to the idea of anyone having sole direct authority over anything, even on the merest of scales; because, in a part of himself he can hardly acknowledge, he imagines himself in the same situation with the same responsibility, *and finds himself wanting*.
That the United States Government is even considering any sort of confrontation with a nuclear armed superpower over which batch of kleptocrtats get to run Ukraine is quite possibly the most insane thing I have ever hear of…
Supervision in the abstract is the basis of ethical monotheism. We yearn for thunderbolts from heaven to smite our tormentors, and commandments carved in stone.
Whatever God exists is not so crude. Gnon seems to expect us to grow up and leave the nursery.
What I love about the Ukrainian people is that they fight their own battles.
I don’t give a damn for anyone’s clearly stated concerns. Pooty Poot has no right to Ukrainia, no matter what he says or thinks.
Hitler had clearly stated concerns in the Sudetenland. Screw Hitler too.
That said, it’s not our fight… yet.
Harry,
If it becomes your fight, then you and everything around you are destroyed. That is the expected consequence of the global nuclear war that you are sleepwalking into.
Russia does not want the Ukraine. Russia wants to have another happy prosperous neutral Finland on its borders.
As for the people in eastern Ukraine who have democratically voted for independence from the kleptocrats and Biden family members in Kiev, are they to be denied their democratic wishes? This is not a Black Hat-White Hat situation, Harry. This situation needs responsible countries to work towards dialing the violence in the Ukraine down, not crank it up.
>I don’t give a damn for anyone’s clearly stated concerns. Pooty Poot has no right to Ukrainia, no matter what he says or thinks.
And you, Mr. Jones? What matter does what you say or think about Ukraine have?
To say that you have a right to say who has a right over the place, is to say you already own the place. Do you own Ukraine? Does globohomo own Ukraine?
Such is the logic of late empire; it cannot imagine the idea that there is any place on earth it has no business in; and hence, it cannot stop itself from trying to extend itself, into anything and everything, ever further, until collapse.
Russian military doctrine calls a limited nuclear strike a de-escalation.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russian-military-doctrine-calls-a-limited-nuclear-strike-de-escalation-heres-why/
This is also what Schelling briefed JFK on during the Berlin Crisis – nuclear diplomacy with limited use of weapons to send a message. Game theory Schelling. 2 page brief.
https://assets.realclear.com/files/2022/03/1969_NEWSCHELLINGMEMO.pdf
“Limited and localized nuclear war is not, therefore, a “tactical” war. However few the nuclears used, and however selectively
they are used, their purpose should not be “tactical” because their consequences will not be tactical. With nuclears, it has
become a war of nuclear risks and threats at the highest strategic level. It is a war of nuclear bargaining.”
There is sufficient buzz and concern about nuclear weapons use to make me think it may indeed happen.
It’s getting too much buzz from the wrong places, and shall I say DC veterans in private.
Russia has an ample supply of tactical sunshine, but intercontinental strike assets are comparatively small; meaning, if the balloons do go up, the most likely targets won’t be counter-strikes against USG military assets around the globe, but the handful of it’s organizational centers of gravity – ie, New York, DC, and LA.
In which case, such strikes would honestly benefit America more than it harms it on balance.
Pseudo-Chrysostom,
the most likely targets won’t be counter-strikes against USG military assets around the globe, but the handful of it’s organizational centers of gravity – ie, New York, DC, and LA.
In which case, such strikes would honestly benefit America more than it harms it on balance…”
That’s a really, really horrible thing, but it’s true. It’s absolutely true. I wonder if this happened, just these targets, if we would just stop. Clean out what was left and stop the continual destruction of the country. Even as bad off as we are, if we would just stop and concentrate on getting our act together, it would not be long before we could build back.
Look at what the Germans did after Hitler came to power and removed the Jews from power. It was a huge leap in progress. Not that we’re as organized or capable as the Germans but Americans are not idiots. We just have to stop. What did that general say,”Let’s not get stuck on stupid”. Right now, we are stuck on stupid.
Harry Jones says:,”…Pooty Poot has no right to Ukrainia…That said, it’s not our fight… yet…”
Harry blowing smoke and throwing up dust again so that you will not pay attention to, the facts.
The US and Israel overthrew the government of Ukraine and then brought in a billionaire from Switzerland to be President and run Ukraine. What does a Jew billionaire from Switzerland have to do with Ukraine???
Gavin Longmuir says,”…As for the people in eastern Ukraine who have democratically voted for independence from the kleptocrats and Biden family members in Kiev, are they to be denied their democratic wishes?…”
I don’t believe that Jew running Ukraine actually won the vote. Ut’s extremely likely they stole that one just like they stole the US election.
Where are the peacemakers?
“The problem with the idea of a no-fly zone is its enforcement.”
Silly! Enforcement will be done by sparkleponies and flying moneys.