Friday, February 6, 2015

Bloomberg View — Ukraine's Least Terrible Option


Handwringing, but realistic.

Implicit in the analysis is that Russia regard Ukraine among its vital interests while neither the US nor Western Europe do. That's a losing proposition for NATO, since Russia will be willing to act more decisively and escalate much more quickly and much, much further than NATO. Pushed into the war  Russian troops would at the Dnieper in a week or two and NATO could do nothing about it without risking a wider European war that would threaten Western Europe, which is already teetering economically. The Russian have already warned that if NATO uses smart weapons that give it conventional superiority, Russia will respond with tactical nukes.

It was incredibly stupid to get into this situation in the first place, listening to the neocons, GOP war hawks and Russophobes Brzezinski and Soros.

Bloomberg View
The Editors

4 comments:

Magpie said...

@Tom

"The Russian have already warned that if NATO uses smart weapons that give it conventional superiority, Russia will respond with tactical nukes".

I don't mean to imply that's not true, but is there any reliable information suggesting that?

After all, that is a serious matter if there ever was one.

Tom Hickey said...

@ Magpie

http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/russia-threatens-nuclear-strikes-over-crimea/

Tom Hickey said...

Similar to the US and NATO's "all options are on the table."

Actually the greatest threat now is the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war. Russia has interpreted this as the threat of a nuclear first strike.

Russia interpreted the ending of the ABM treaty unilaterally by the US and the forward advance of NATO as the attempt to put anti-ICBM missiles on Russia's border to be able to destroy a Russian attack at the launch stages when ICBM's are most vulnerable.

But in the end to defeat Russia, NATO would have to attack Russia with boots on the grounds. No sane military commander wants to go there after what happened to Napoleon and Hitler. Of courses, the neocons and GOP war hawks are not phased by this.

But look what happened to boots on the ground in the Vietnamese, Afghanistan and Iraq meat grinders. That would be minor compared with Russia. Moreover, the Chinese would never let NATO approach its borders through a conquered Russia.

The NATO military knows that it cannot win a land war in Asia. Moreover, it would be WWIII, and the whole world would go up in a horrendous conflagration that humanity would not recover from for a long, long time.

Ignacio said...

there is no modern military prepared to confront an other large military nowadays. Neither is the population prepared or on-board with this non-sense (lucky us!).

We would need a few years, or a decade, of escalation, propaganda, and economic disruption for TPTB even have a chance to trigger something like this. Even the idiots in charge are not such idiots to contemplate the use of nuclear weapons.

Russia would take the chance gladly to humiliate a west-patronage government in an open ground war the West cannot win (and NATO knows it).

If Ukrainians are hoping for west support they should look at how many times in the recent decades Europeans have failed people that were waiting for they help, and the same goes for USA. They should negotiate before they completely lose control and the state collapses (is underway right now already, but they may be able to stop the bleeding before they bleed completely yet).

Is obvious part of the Germany elites have some interests with the regional oligarchs, but they cannot justify intervention in any way, neither they can win the game. That's why Merkel is so anxious about Putin and Ukraine.

After all, Ukraine was the last chance at not being totally hostage to Russia when it comes to energy supplies and have some leverage in case is needed. But warmongers decided that instead of developing a good trading relationship they should go full retard and pursue confrontational policies.

Oh well Merkel, you are helpless idiot that is opening too many fronts and will end up losing them all. But I guess this is Karma for you.