We Are Not On The Path To Nuclear War
No previous proxy conflict between the United States and Russia produced Armageddon, and the conflict in Ukraine is no different.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Benjamin Parker, a close friend who keeps teaching me a lot. Make sure to follow his work, which you can do by clicking on his author’s page here and by going to his author’s page at The Bulwark.
Fashion from the 1980s is cool again—tragically when it comes to clothing, and more tragically when it comes to breathless predictions of imminent nuclear war. The latest example is courtesy of Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official, who writes at War on the Rocks that “Ukraine has become a proxy war between Washington and Moscow.” Some Brits, Europeans, Canadians, Koreans, Australians, and others would doubtless beg to differ. But here’s the kicker: “The two sides are locked in an escalatory cycle that, along current trends, will eventually bring them into direct conflict and then go nuclear, killing millions of people and destroying much of the world.” He admits, “This is obviously a bold prediction”—on that we can agree.
Shapiro notes, “if I’m right [about impending nuclear armageddon], I’m unlikely to be around [to] take credit for it.” Perhaps so. But what will future historians say about those of us who think that Shapiro should count slowly to 10 and then breathe into a paper bag for a couple minutes?
At the heart of Shapiro’s argument is an assumption without substantiation: “uncontrolled escalation is the path that we are currently on.” All of the evidence he attempts to adduce for this proposition points in the other direction. Are the Russians out of control? Shapiro nearly acknowledges that they are not:
As the war has moved against the Russians, they have drawn numerous red lines to warn the West against escalation. The Russians called the provision of long-range rocket systems near the Russian border “intolerable,” warned against the admission of Sweden and Finland to NATO, and threatened that any attack on Crimea would “ignite judgment day.” In each case, the crossing of these Russian red lines by Ukraine, the United States, or Europe generated some sort of response but fell well short of Russian threats.
Are the Americans and our partners and allies out of control?
Under the pressure of war, [the United States and Europeans] decided to deliver weapons and intelligence that just a few months ago they believed carried too great an escalation risk to provide. They have similarly incrementally increased economic sanctions to the degree that they now appear intended to permanently weaken Russia and destroy the Russian regime, as Biden has said is necessary to end the war.
That sounds like an administration that’s bending over backwards to ensure it doesn’t “escalate” too much too fast—a far cry from the runaway train Shapiro would have us believe is determining American policy.