The Compulsion to Intervene - TomDispatch.com

The Compulsion to Intervene - TomDispatch.com Andrew Bacevich, Seduced by War -- Yet Again June 1, 2023 Let me just express my concern about the war in Ukraine by wondering what "victory" might actually mean for the Ukrainians. Let's assume for a moment that the coming, much-publicized Ukrainian counteroffensive will indeed punch serious holes in the lines of a battered and demoralized Russian military and that Ukrainian forces won't just bloodily win back significant parts of their territory (even, say, endangering the Russian position in Crimea), but cause that country's military to begin to collapse. Think of such developments as something like the ultimate victory scenario (or perhaps dream) of both Kyiv and Washington. My own worry is that, should such a thing happen -- and I'm not faintly predicting it -- how might Russian President Vladimir Putin respond? We're talking about the leader of one of the two most over-armed nuclear powers on the planet who has, in these months, implicitly threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, even if a Ukrainian nuclear plant doesn't go up in smoke in the fighting to come. It's been more than three-quarters of a century since such weaponry was used twice to utterly devastating effect to end a war, a period in which the great powers have nuclearized on an almost unimaginable scale. Worse yet, in recent years, all the nuclear agreements between the U.S. and Russia, the two countries with 90% of the planet's nuclear weapons, have essentially been canceled, even as both of those powers continue to "modernize" their arsenals to the tune of trillions of dollars. Now, we find ourselves at a moment when a future "victory" for Kyiv could, depending on how Putin responds, be a historic catastrophe for Ukrainians, Russians, and the rest of the world with the possible introduction of such weaponry on a European battlefield. It's both hard to imagine and all too conceivable. But as TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, points out today, Joe Biden's Washington is all too ready to take a chance on just such a future, rather than focusing on how to bring peace to a Europe in ever greater chaos. Tom