Biden Plans His Next Escalation In The Ukraine War. This Could Go Nuclear.

After thirty years of relative complacency on the topic of nuclear war, it’s back in the headlines. Yet, during the Cold War (1946-1991), it was front and center as a topic of study and geopolitical strategy.

I was a student of international relations beginning in the late 1960s continuing through graduate school in 1974 and made a close study of nuclear warfighting. These studies were rooted in the scholarship of the late 1950s and early 1960s by experts including Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, Paul Nitze, and Albert Wohlstetter.

While there were many views and strategies put forward, all scholars and experts agreed on one thing – if a nuclear war ever happened, it would be the result of a series of escalatory steps. No national leader or dictator would start with a plan for nuclear war. But a country could end up there through a more traditional dispute in which one side escalated, the other side escalated further, and so on until one side felt cornered and had no choice but to use nuclear weapons.

The irony is that in such a situation, the less threatened party might use nuclear weapons first in anticipation of a strike by the other side. That’s where the game-theoretic dynamic took over from restraint and common sense.

All experts agreed that the way to avoid nuclear war is to avoid escalation. If an escalatory dynamic takes hold, leaders should deescalate as quickly as possible. That was the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis and it has been applied ever since.

Until now.

Biden and the Pentagon seem to have no understanding of the dangers of escalation and no capacity to act with the needed restraint. We’ve seen this play out already in Ukraine where the U.S. has first supplied weapons, then money, then intelligence, then financial sanctions, and more.

Russia has responded in kind with its own counter-sanctions and its own advanced weaponry including anti-drone missiles and precision artillery strikes. The latest move in the wrong direction comes from Biden, as reported here.

The U.S. is now considering sending special forces to guard the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. U.S. embassies around the world have routinely been guarded by the U.S. Marine Corps who are highly experienced and capable in this duty. Special forces include units such as Delta Force, Green Berets, and Navy SEALS.

They are not needed for protection but are quite capable of going on offense and conducting sabotage and training. This assignment is another form of escalation and gets the U.S. more deeply entangled in a face-to-face war with Russia.

This is another step on the escalatory path to nuclear war. Let’s hope the U.S. sees reason and deescalates before it’s too late.

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