There is a Twitter satire account that said something I thought was subtly profound:
If you ever wondered what you would have done to stop Hitler, you're doing it now.
If you ever wondered what you would have done to stop Hitler, you're doing it now.
In that scenario, "I have nukes" becomes a joker you can pull out to achieve anything less bad than a global nuclear war. Peel off a bit of a neighbour? OK, less bad than nuclear war. What about a "minor" NATO country? What about, "pay me money or else"? And so on.
So either you accept that (no thank you from me) or you accept that sometimes you must set limits, even if the other side threatens nuclear war.
In that respect it's the same, just different scale. Allies could have said "no" to Hitler earlier, at risk of a devastating war, but chose to say "ah, go ahead" for fear of it. And got that war served up to them anyway.
The irony is that WWII could possibly be over in a few weeks, if Hitler's ambitions were stemmed earlier. In September 1939, it is unlikely he could fight on two fronts, and against the British and the French - the actual superpowers of the day.
The stasis, at least for now, is one of mutual defense pacts backed up by nuclear weapons leads to very hard boundaries given MAD. Ironically, the pitfall that led to WWI turned out to be a stabilizing force (at least for now) under MAD. Everything outside of those hard deterrence boundaries, if we're being honest, is fair game for proxy wars. Ukraine isn't in the boundaries. People who are arguing that we should start shifting those boundaries (ie, changing the 'rules' by directly engaging despite them being non-NATO) are playing with fire. As soon as the rules are broken, the fundamental premise of deterrence goes out the window, and all bets are off as to where it takes us. This is also why it's incredibly dangerous to admit countries into NATO with disputed, actively fought over territory like Ukraine, since we'd be exposing a new level of risk whereby there's a conflict between conventional rules of escalation running up against nuclear alliance deterrence.
I’m not sure. Rationally, Putin shouldn’t have started the war; he was told Russia will get sanctioned to oblivion, which it did and is genuinely hurting Russia, and he should have known his forces aren’t up to scratch. Due to some kind of delusion he pressed ahead. Hitler may have done so too. For example, hoping that the western powers won’t risk MAD over a bit of Central Europe, much as they didn’t care much for Western Czechoslovakia.
Of course sanctions aren’t MAD; but then nothing is, and no analogy is very close.
That's not a rule, and has never been suggested to be a rule until invoked as an excuse for inaction in this particular crisis, and is, in fact, contrary to the public claims and past actions of NATO as a regional security organization with a mutual defense commitment and not a pure mutual defense organization.
They spoke in Korean sometimes (but especially under stress, spoke Russian), and flew Soviet jets based in China and nominally assigned to Air Defense, not Frontal Aviation.
They weren't maintaining plausible deniability, but a transparent fig leaf. We knew they were Soviet pilots, and they knew we knew they were Soviet pilots.
And the Soviet anti-aircraft crews shooting down American jets in Vietnam didn't even have a transparent fig-leaf of not being Soviet troops.
Sure, the potential cost of getting it wrong is even higher, but the same answer is wrong for the same reasons.
“Letting Ukraine do all the (overt, at least) fighting but flooding them with arms and intel will be sufficient to check Russia” is, OTOH, somewhere between Sudetenland and Poland as a response, and it's a very high stakes gamble.
If Russia has really been cremating remains in Mariupol, people may remain missing forever.
If we were to take his nuclear threats to Ukraine seriously, he has all the potential to be one.