Posturing, Dangerously

WHEN PUTIN let everyone know that he had placed his "deterrents" on high alert, this included the Russian nuclear arsenal, nearly half the world's nukes, and of course he knew that we all knew this. An indirect, veiled threat is nonetheless a threat. On high alert they remain, as we speak. The response by the United States and Europe seemed measured, guarded, careful, canned, too reserved, falsely reserved. Thinly veiled is the justfiably high alarm and fear rippling through the alliance of democracies. "Escalatory" is a fine word, one which most of us might otherwise never have used nor even heard of, but somehow falls far short. (The word was used by Biden's spokesperson). A barrage of respectful words, words like "recklessly dangerous" and "irresponsible" were used to describe Putin's high alert veiled threat to use atomic bombs against us. But none of these words, especially "escalatory" even begins to adequately convey the great danger and potential disaster to the world psoed by a single person, an autocrat, a man wholly in charge of a very powerful country, a country whose unpredictable, unstable autocratic ruler feels threatened by forces aligned against it. Putin has effectively backed Russia into a very dangerous corner, already bogged down in a quagmire of a war, with nearly all the world's economiclaly developed countires arrayed, economically, against him. Escalatlory? Certainly. And then some. Economic warfare has of course been used since groups of nomads wielding spears and clubs trapped rival groups in caves and tried to starve or burn them out. But our modern forms of warfare, including economic warfare, which we respectfully, with dignity and distraction, call "sanctions" is more brutal and barbaric than anything history has to offer. The mouse in the corner will, with all other possibilities exhausted, fight the cat. Arguably, it almost seems as if modern economic warfare is too barbaric to even conisder, that it imposes too great a hardship upon far too many innocent people, that it backs a country and its leader, no matter how evil or criminally insane, as Putin seems to be, into too tight a corner. His reminder to the world that he has numerous nuclear bombs is nothing other than a reminder that, if backed far enough into too deep, dark a corner, he, like the terrified mouse, will come out fighting, with everything he has. It is quite possible, maybe even likely, under current circumstances, that within a few days the world will be smitten with cities reduced to ashes, tens of millions dead, and nuclear radiation apreading across the entire globe. Confronted with that, a preferable alternative for the United States and NATO might be to respond to Putin's convential military aggression with conventional military force; to simply send soldiers to fight with the Ukrainians, along with the small arms and ammunition, tank killers, and assorted forms of assistance already flowing into the Ukraine. The benefit of that would be that the tens of millions of Russian civilian population would be spared the extreme economic hardship that inevitably awaits them, including useless currency, and shortages of necessities, including food, and the people who chose to earn a living by serving as fighting men and women would get to earn their pay, both Russian, american, and NATO. If nothing else, this solution would be much better than starvation, or nuclear holocaust.