by Selwyn Duke, The New American:
Before going all in and betting the house on a poker hand, in the belief your opponent is bluffing, you’d better hope your judgment is sound. You should know that it’s not warped by self-delusion, by wishful thinking, or projection. You’d also better make sure the cost-benefit analysis justifies the risk, that you’re not betting your house against an illusion.
Of course, lose the hand and you still live to fight another day. This is not the case with our involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war and our assumption that Vladimir Putin is all talk, no action. And now as we inch closer to nuclear war, a foreign policy analyst becomes one of the latest to warn with regard to Moscow’s red-line threats, “Russia is not bluffing.”
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Writing at The National Interest, international affairs expert Benjamin Giltner laments that as the Ukraine conflict grinds on into its third year, all parties involved seem hell-bent on escalation. “In his annual ‘State of the Nation’ address,” Giltner says, “President Vladimir Putin warned NATO nations that they ‘must, in the end, understand all this truly threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization,’ if they continue to arm Ukraine and consider sending troops.”
Telling us not to worry, states Giltner, are people such as retired U.S. Army General Ben Hodges, ex-Congressman Adam Kinzinger (a possible sociopath), and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Are these the master poker players we should let wager the house of civilization?
Do note that our Ukraine involvement is unprecedented. The USSR sent 200,000 troops into Hungary in 1956 and rolled tanks into Czechoslovakia in ’68; in neither case did we send billions in arms to the Hungarians and Czechs, provide logistical support, allow them to strike Soviet territory with NATO weapons, and consider sending Western troops to fight on the ground.
If you’d asked Western leaders at the time, “Why not?” they’d have sized you up for a straitjacket. Sure, the Soviets were evil, tyrannical, and were invading what rightly should’ve been sovereign nations. But stomping around in the backyard of, and essentially waging a hot war against, another country that could destroy the world with nukes was a red line we’d never cross.
Until now.
Of course, we’re reassured that Putin is “All hat, no cattle,” but Giltner calls this folly. “As the famed military and nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie explained, countries … do not usually bluff when they make threats,” he writes. Just consider history.
When Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto devised the Pearl Harbor attack, he believed the assault “would destroy America’s morale, preventing America from countering Japan’s expansion of power throughout the Pacific,” Giltner explains. “Ultimately, Japanese military thinkers sought to use Pearl Harbor as a way to shock the United States into a negotiated settlement with Japan.” Instead, it drew us into WWII — the last thing the Japanese wanted.
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