Ignore the Bluff: Why Nuclear Blackmail Is the Aggressor's Empty Card
There is a sentence that gets repeated in Western capitals as if it were a law of physics: if we give Ukraine too much, Russia will use nuclear weapons. It is spoken gravely, by serious people, and it is meant to end the conversation. I want to begin by pointing out what that sentence actually commits you to. If “too much aid” triggers annihilation, then somewhere below “too much” there is a safe amount — and you can never know where the line is, because the man drawing it has every incentive to keep moving it toward zero. The only point on that scale that is guaranteed not to provoke the apocalypse is the point where you give nothing at all. Take the premise seriously and it does not counsel caution; it counsels surrender, today and every day after. A senior American official is reported to have warned that excessive support for Ukraine could prompt a Russian nuclear strike. The honest name for a policy built on that fear is not prudence. It is suicide — the slow kind, where you talk yourself out of defending what you believe in because someone has told you the alternative is the end of the world. ...