CNN America - full article here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/11/politics/putin-biden-jfk-russia-ukraine/index.html(CNN)Reflecting on the Cuban missile crisis, President John Kennedy once warned that nuclear powers "must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war."
The showdown with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine does not yet mirror the one-minute-to-midnight brinkmanship that brought the Soviet Union and the West to the cusp of Armageddon in October 1962.
But Kennedy's superpower logic is resounding poignantly as Putin gets backed into a corner by the strategic disaster of his war, Ukraine's heroic resistance and an extraordinary multibillion-dollar allied conveyor of arms and ammunition.
President Joe Biden, who has always stated his twin aims are to help Ukraine defend itself and to avoid a direct escalation with Putin that could risk nuclear war, seems to have been mulling JFK's warning. At a fundraiser in Potomac, Maryland, on Monday night, Biden confided that he was concerned Putin had yet to devise an exit from the war, despite the former KGB officer's "calculating" nature. Senior national security officials, meanwhile, admit they do not yet know what kind of incremental Russian success in eastern and southern Ukraine would allow Putin to declare a victory of sorts and de-escalate the war, CNN's Kaitlan Collins reported.
This is all a worry. But it's one that seems somewhat discordant with US policy. After all, Washington's explicitly stated aim in supporting Ukraine is that Putin loses the war. Biden has asked Congress for $33 billion to send military and other aid to Ukraine, and the House on Tuesday voted to pass a roughly $40 billion bill. Washington is flooding the battlefield with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, radars, drones, artillery rounds and howitzers. This aggressive Western approach, the slow progress of Putin's war of attrition and the lack of any diplomatic effort to end the war mean that it is almost certain the Russian leader will get further backed into a dangerous corner. Putin's only exit option right now appears to be a capitulation, and a tacit admission that the Western effort, combined with fierce Ukrainian courage, got the better of him -- a position that would be politically impossible to adopt.
There is no real consensus on what Putin might do if he's desperate. While he doesn't share Washington's logical and accurate view that he's losing the war, there's no indication he's suicidal and would risk a full-scale nuclear confrontation by testing Western resolve. Several senior US officials have publicly voiced the fear that Putin might reach for tactical, lower-yield battlefield nuclear arms as an alternative to a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. There was some relief on that score on Tuesday, when Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a congressional committee that the US view is there is not "an imminent potential for Putin to use nuclear weapons." And the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, said that assessment also encompasses tactical or battlefield devices.
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My one take away from this is that at least its been written in the public domain. To my mind (and most similarly less knowledgeable people) Ukraine could not have won the war. The fact that they can and that America went into this on that basis, makes me question what they expected Putin to do in such a scenario. it boggles my mind that America went into this on the assumption that Ukraine would win, but without fully fleshing out how Russia would extricate itself from the war. Putting it on to Putin to figure that out, when America has not figured it out themselves, is a bit risky.
any thoughts ? / anyone else ?
This post was edited by ferdia on May 11 2022 08:10am