In one of the great foreign policy blunders of modern times, U.S. and European leaders repeatedly disregarded Vladimir Putin’s warnings that Russia would - Ted Galen Carpenter for Antiwar.com
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Western officials implicitly assumed that Russia could be intimidated and eventually compelled to accept Ukraine as part of NATO. They dismissed the Kremlin’s increasingly pointed warnings that efforts to make Kyiv an Alliance asset would cross a
red line that violated Russia’s security. Their assumption that Moscow would tamely accept a NATO presence inside Russia’s core security zone proved to be spectacularly wrong, and Ukraine is now paying a very high price in treasure and blood for their miscalculation.
One might hope that NATO leaders would have learned an important lesson from such a costly mistake. However, they are stubbornly ignoring a new set of ominous warnings from Moscow, and this time, the price of such tone-deaf arrogance could be utterly catastrophic. Indeed, it is creating the risk of a nuclear clash between Russia and the United States. In his first speech announcing the "special military operation" in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin
warned all outside parties (clearly meaning NATO members) not to interfere. "Anyone who tries to interfere with us . . . must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to
such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history."
Yet the Biden administration and other NATO governments boast about how much the Alliance is supporting Ukraine’s military resistance to Russia’s invasion. The centerpiece of the effort to this point has been a surge of weapons shipments to Ukraine, including a focus on
heavier and more powerful systems. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin vows that the United States will
"move Heaven and Earth" to keep arming Ukraine.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman gushes that the United States has again become the
"arsenal of democracy," as it had been in World War II
The policy constitutes an extremely risky venture that could make the United States a belligerent in a perilous war. Moscow has declared on multiple occasions that convoys carrying weapons from NATO countries into Ukraine are
legitimate targets of war. Putin could easily interpret the U.S.-orchestrated cascade of NATO weaponry to support Ukraine’s military resistance as unacceptable interference. The same is true of another Biden administration measure –
sharing intelligence data with Kyiv, even providing Ukrainian forces with
real-time targeting information. In one case, that intelligence sharing apparently enabled Ukraine to shoot down a Russian plane
with several hundred troops aboard.
As they did during the prewar period, NATO countries are
ignoring the warnings coming out of Moscow. Adopting a defiant stance, they instead are boosting their military aid and creating a full-fledged proxy war against Russia. The Kremlin’s warnings are becoming more strident. Putin himself recently admonished NATO members
not to test Russia’s patience by continuing to escalate their support for Ukraine. Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-in chief of both
RT and
Sputnik and a close associate of the Russian president, stated that
Russia might have little choice except to use nuclear weapons if Western policy continues on its current course.
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