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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

The thug also thinks his knife won't be needed.

Often I wonder which of our leaders has ever played poker. It seems like Putin has figured out that we won't push all-in, ever, so he steals another pot.

If the west really cared about this, the only way now is to retaliate way out of proportion to what's happened.

Before this happened, the west also didn't act like it wanted to contain the Russians, so the Russians got brave. If there had been some sort of response the Russians would have backed off. It's somewhat stable for both sides to bluster about this or that minor victory. Can't do that now.

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Re: containing Russia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/opinion/putin-ukraine-nat...

It's actually exactly the opposite and the guy who wrote the book on containment called it a tragedy. We don't need to rewrite history.

I upvoted, this is a worthwhile point of view.

But it's also the case that the west is straddling strategies here. Either do as Kennan says and just leave NATO the way it was and don't poke the wounded bear, or actually encircle Russia completely, stick nukes in their back yard and show them who is boss.

Don't pretend to do both and neither, that is the worst of all worlds.

> If there had been some sort of response the Russians would have backed off.

Are you sure about that? Are you really willing to risk your chips betting on a retreat? This sort of geopolitical chicken would be incredibly dangerous.

What if he never retreats and just keeps pushing? You have a o draw a hard line somewhere, and the longer you wait the harder it is to do it.

I mean, Nato does have a real, physical border.... So if you have to draw a hard line somewhere, I guess it's already been done.

Please explain why you think the West (Americans) ought to go die for Ukraine. If you want the west to go all in for this, I hope you've signed up to serve already.

That was something great about Trump; he could not be easily predicted, not even by his own circle. Although in this case I’m not sure he wouldn’t have sided with Putin.

I'll give him that, you don't know what DJT would have decided. Maybe he'd fold, maybe he'd go direct to nuke. That baseline unpredictability is actually useful strategically (there's even an essay about how being rational isn't necessarily a good game theoretic strategy, can't recall the name now).

There's at least one other world leader who clings to power because of this trait.

Recent mutterings suggest Trump thinks highly of Putin though, so it's hard to tell.

> Maybe he'd fold, maybe he'd go direct to nuke.

I don't think the president of the US has the authority to nuke anything by his own accord.

You are, unfortunately, mistaken. The President has sole authority over launch decisions. There is a requirement that those orders be verified as authentic by the Secretary of Defense, but assuming POTUS gave the orders, it's not within SecDef's authority to countermand them. What would actually happen if an insane POTUS were to give a launch order that made no sense is probably up to chance and the quality of those willing to break the law and refuse the order.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_football

Hey, wasn't this the EXACT argument Democrats made about removing Trump from office before the election? Floating the idea he'd risk WW3 instead of losing an election?

Turns out Trump's general hard line on everything was useful for something.

"However, the President's authority as Commander-in-Chief is not unlimited and US law dictates that the attack must be lawful and that military officers are required to refuse to execute unlawful orders, such as those that violate the Laws of Armed Conflict."

Those laws are very very vague and like you said, it's possible someone in the chain of command could argue it's against the law since a nuke would likely cause collateral damage one way or another. I think it's technically incorrect to definitively say that the US president has complete and total control over nuking a target.

the President can order nukes to launch. there's no law curtailing that power, and military orders are the purview of the Executive under the Constitution, so it's doubtful Congress could even prevent that.

the nuclear football is basically a fancy sat phone though, so it's less clear if the generals who get the war order would actually obey.

Thinking highly of opponents of the US and spouting off about how smart and savvy they are never seemed to stop Trump from treating them like opponents and using his power against them back when he was president, so I'm not convinced it would if he was still in charge - and it certainly wouldn't be safe for them to rely on that.

> Recent mutterings suggest Trump thinks highly of Putin though, so it's hard to tell.

Care to provide a source for this?

If you're referring to the podcast where Trump mentioned that Putin's move (annexation of Lugansk & Donetsk) is "genious", that's not some sort of fanboyism or admiration, but simply admitting that the move, tactically, was really good - a lot of people (myself included) did fall for it!

Here are some mutterings https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/trump-putin-pretty-sm...

>“He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher and video footage obtained by the pro-Democratic group American Bridge. “He’s taking over a country, really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, just walking right in.”

That's the quote I had in mind.

To anyone with basic reading comprehension, it's obvious that Trump isn't praising Putin, he's praising Putin's tactics, which, judging by the (lack of) response from the West, is pretty smart!

I think he'd fold, say it's not the US's problem, and also reap a big (maybe justified) I-told-you-so about NATO's low defense spending.

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