With Reckless Attack, Ukrainians Hope to Drag USA into WWIII
Ukraine's assault on Russia's nuclear triad and the inevitable backlash are designed to force Trump's hand and drag America into war. U.S. should declare neutrality.
The New York Post boasted in a headline on Sunday that, “Ukraine’s surprise strike deep in Russia — an excellent way to push Putin to talk peace.” The headline might be the dumbest in the tabloid’s 124 year history.
The Post and other parts of the uniparty’s pro-war bandwagon have long sought a bigger war and ever-greater U.S. involvement in order to stick it to Russia. On Sunday, they got their wish, with Ukraine executing a long-planned operation that reportedly disabled dozens of nuclear bombers deep inside Russia that comprise a crucial part of Moscow’s nuclear triad—the same combination of submarines, missiles, and bombers that the United States uses to deter nuclear war.
It would be as if a foreign power armed with Russian materiel and intelligence destroyed a significant portion of America’s nuclear-capable B-2 and B-52 bombers. How would we react? Would we reach for the peace pipe or respond with fury?
Upsetting this balance of deterrence is extremely reckless and harmful to the interests of the United States. Russian military doctrine provides for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons if an adversary appears to be using conventional means to undermine its first and second-strike nuclear capabilities.
Russia will react aggressively—perhaps with greater ferocity than it has employed since World War II. Contrary to the New York Post’s make-believe about what Russia does when it is attacked, the decision by Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky to authorize this assault has made a peace deal more difficult to reach than ever—which was probably his motive in the first place.
Undermining Russia’s nuclear deterrence doesn’t help Ukraine on the battlefield where it is slowly losing a battle of attrition with Russia. Instead it is another political move—similar to but more more provocative than Ukraine’s failed and enormously costly invasion of Russia’s Kursk region.
How will Russia react? Thankfully, there is still a relatively low probability that Russia will use one or more nuclear weapons against Ukraine or the NATO countries that supply Ukraine like Germany and Poland. But the probability is greater than zero.
The means are also in place. Russia could put nuclear warheads on its new hypersonic missiles for which no deployed countermeasure exists. U.S. officials must make no mistake: however remote, this nuclear option is on the table as Moscow debates its next move. And those officials ought to ask themselves why we have allowed Ukrainians to bring us to the brink of such an outcome in what is basically a civil war in a region where no clearly definable U.S. national interests are at stake.
More likely, Russia will retaliate with massive assaults on Ukrainian cities where civilians will pay the highest price. Zelensky has probably also calculated that this will force the hand of President Donald Trump to reopen to the full channel of Biden-era payola to Kiev to continue the war indefinitely.
The Brits, Germans, and French will make Zelensky’s case. After much begging and pressure, Germany’s highly unpopular Chancellor Friedrich Merz—only 21% of his own people think he is trustworthy—is set to visit the White House on June 5—somewhat inappropriately given that the following day is the anniversary of D-Day, when Americans and other allies faced slaughter in opening the western front liberation of Europe from the second massive European war Germany started (or the third if you count the Franco-Prussian War).
Merz has vowed Germany and the United States will give Ukrainians more weapons to strike deeply into Russia. He will lie to Trump about how Germany is devoting $569 billion in new funds to bolster European defense, defined so broadly that it can be spent on climate nonsense and will materialize only over 10-12 years (but actually never). Germany previously vowed $114 billion in additional military spending when the Ukraine War started but welshed on its promise. His new offer is just as fictitious from a country in political and economic crisis. Berlin has every expectation Washington will continue to cash the military checks it writes just as Germany and the rest of the European Union continue to screw the United States on trade.
Back in Washington, Trump said the United States did not have foreknowledge of Ukraine’s attack. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a phone conversation with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. These are comforting developments, especially since the administration has previously let a succession of officials swing away at parts of the U.S.-Russia relationship, including Steve Witkoff, fresh off of failing to “solve” Gaza, and Keith Kellogg, the dotard former general who has advocated reckless escalation with Russia of the sort that Zelensky put into motion on Sunday.
There is no quick path to resolution of the Ukraine War in which the United States has no vital interests at stake. This is why I have argued in the past:
Putting America first at this point means preventing an escalation to nuclear war and minimizing the risk of the conventional war pulling in the United States. From a practical perspective, this means standing aside as Russia inevitably retaliates harshly against Ukraine while quietly warning Moscow of the total isolation Russia will face, including from its allies China and Iran, if it were to use nuclear weapons.
Beyond that, instead of seeking an elusive and now-impossible ceasefire from Ukraine and Russia, Washington should adopt a policy of indefinite neutrality toward the conflict. That means no sales or donations of arms, no sharing of intelligence, and no direct payments to the belligerents.
This incidentally was the exact policy that served America well during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) which also involved no clear U.S. vital national interests and loathsome action on both sides (American pinkos lionized the pro-Soviet “republicans” and demonized nationalist leader Francisco Franco, but the conflict was where Hemingway and Orwell learned to hate the commies thanks to “republican” atrocities.) That seminal war also forecast many of the combat features of World War II, which the Ukraine War is doing with the hideous blossoming of drone warfare—something we should observe and learn from but keep out of in this instance.
After establishing neutrality, Washington will be in a much better position to negotiate an end to the war—or to walk away without putting Americans at risk of nuclear war or a conventional fight with Russia. To borrow General Omar Bradley’s description of a potential war with China as the Korean War escalated in 1951, a U.S.-Russia conflict today would be the “wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."
Ukraine just destroyed 1/3 of Russia's heavy bomber fleet. This hardly puts Russia in a position to start WWIII.
This shows the depth of Whiten's "analytical skills": "It would be as if a foreign power armed with Russian military materiel and intelligence destroyed a significant portion of America’s nuclear-capable B-2 and B-52 bombers."
Oh? Maybe more like, its as if the US unilaterally attacked Canada to take it over and after 2 ½ years of its cities being combarded, Canada attacked some of our bombers.