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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

Several things:

1 - Russia is tactically taking advantage of US caution. They amassed their forces on the border with Kharkiv in the wide open and used the head-start to launch an offensive there.

2 - At this point, the US has realized that Russia isn't going to come to their senses without a more decisive defeat. If anything, Russia is doubling down on their attack wish-list.

3 - Most importantly, Russia is launching espionage based attacks affecting Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

At this point, Russia has broken the red lines, and so NATO is opening theirs in a tit-for-tat fashion.

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Is a nuclear escalation inevitable?

Not at all.

Russia is not interested in that--they'd be one of the worst losers in that scenario. Russia is interested in leveraging the fear of escalation to take every penny and inch of land it can get, though.

Letting Russia get away with bullying now is *more* likely to lead to escalation as it muddies the waters on how much they can get away with and when and if there would be a response.

To the contrary, historical facts show that NATO is the bully and the Russian people are simply defending themselves.

In your dream maybe

That sounds so ridiculous that I feel embarrassed for you that you could say something so nonsensical.

I don't see any merit in this line of thinking as it lacks strategic depth and comes across as wishful thinking.

Ukraine is not in NATO which means that the Russians have and will maintain escalation dominance. They can detonate nuclear weapons in Ukraine without immediately triggering Article 5 guarantees. I presume that if that takes place, the US will find it very hard to retaliate.

That would be a colossal disaster for Ukraine but also horrible for Europe, and yet, this is where continuous escalation leads to.

To the contrary, retaliation is game-theoretically sound. You can't allow an adversary to take what they want and win every battle "because they have nuclear weapons" without capitulating world domination to that adversary. This is like playing poker and folding every hand--you will quickly lose everything. World War 2, and the Sudetenland proved this very well--you can't forestall war by gifting land to greedy dictators, it just makes them hungrier.

The US has to retaliate, as without doing so, it will hand world-domination to Russia, China and any two-bit dictatorship willing to use nukes. Moreover, Russia has repeatedly threatened European NATO members, and those members would rather the battle be fought in Ukraine than on their own turf.

> You can't allow an adversary to take what they want and win every battle "because they have nuclear weapons" without capitulating world domination to that adversary.

Strawman. Ukraine is not in NATO and is thus forced to keep neighboring Russia happy. That's just realpolitik. US can not and will not retaliate as that would be WW3. On the flip side, Russia will not attack NATO countries as that would also be WW3.

The only real losers here are primarily Ukraine which is being destroyed and Europe which has to keep doing what US wants since it's dependent on the latter for defense.

> The only real losers here are primarily Ukraine which is being destroyed and Europe which has to keep doing what US wants since it's dependent on the latter for defense.

Your thinking in this area lacks depth. Think about what happens next after Russia is handed Ukraine. And after that.

>Strawman. Ukraine is not in NATO and is thus forced to keep neighboring Russia happy. That's just realpolitik. US can not and will not retaliate as that would be WW3. On the flip side, Russia will not attack NATO countries as that would also be WW3.

And yet USA has had no issue fighting against the soviets during Vietnam and Korean war.

You can try and be armchair president all day long but the truth doesn't favor your argument.

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