Russian bluster after Ukraine strikes Crimea isn’t the start of WWIII, just a new round of chicken with Joe
Moscow directly blamed the United States for a Ukrainian attack on Kremlin assets in Crimea on Sunday, claiming US forces supplied the missiles and even aimed them — proving yet again that Vladimir Putin’s main weapon to keep America from fully supporting Kyiv is … bluster.
Sadly, the Biden White House and the isolationist right fall for it every time.
Ukrainian troops used US-provided long-range ATACMS missile systems to strike targets near Sevastopol; a Russian interceptor blew one of them up over the city, killing at least four.
That is, Russia bears immediate responsibility for the deaths — to say nothing of the fact that it invaded Ukraine to begin with, and Crimea is Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.
Cue the bluster, with Kremlin flack Dmitry Peskov puffing that this “cannot but have consequences” for the United States and Putin pet Dmitry Medvedev threatening America with “earthly fire.”
In other words — more of the same.
Putin is aggressive and bloodthirsty, yes.
But he’s not going to start a nuclear war: That’d be disastrous for him, too.
He’s simply playing chicken with the White House because he knows Biden will always blink first and social media armchair geopolitical experts will cry “World War Three.”
Our president refuses to learn from the example set by all previous successful US deterrence of Russia.
Namely, standing strong against anyone interested in upending the postwar global order.
Consider the ATACMS question in isolation: Joe dithered for more than a year about letting Ukraine have the weapons at all, and then handed them over with conditions on their use — no striking targets within Russia, even though Russia strikes all across Ukraine — that rendered them nearly pointless.
No: Putin’s so dead scared of Biden growing a spine and revoking that condition that he’s having his minions roar out empty threats. (He’s likely also worried about domestic blowback over the death of civilians his regime encouraged to vacation near key military targets.)
And Putin’s worries there are a good thing: Indeed, a wiser US president would let it be the start of a new deterrence.
Yet internet “experts” were quick to rally around the idea that this latest round of threats marks the start of a global apocalypse, rather than merely the next phase in Putin’s bluffing of Biden — and the White House will doubtless cite that same bogus worry to justify the lameness of whatever response it decides upon.
Ronald Reagan put it best: “War comes not when the forces of freedom are strong but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted.”
Biden would do well to remember that.