“Unpredictable consequences”

Posted this morning by Michael Tomasky in his newsletter. No further comment necessary:

I don’t know about you, but I have been worrying since this war started that we, the United States, were somehow going to end up officially fighting it. Joe Biden has done a good job of keeping us out of it and saying there’s no way we’re sending troops to defend Ukraine.

But history tells us that these things snowball. When I was young, I read a book called Why Nations Go to War by John Stoessinger that had a pretty profound impact on me. It discussed the start of World War I. It quoted extensively from the famous “Willy-Nicky letters,” the notes passed back and forth after the Sarajevo incident by the Kaiser and the Czar, who were cousins (Britain’s George V was also their cousin: incredible that the world was run that way!). As I recall, those letters were at first cordial and filled with demurrals; why, no, cousin, war is out of the question! And yet, within a month or so, they were writing to each other that alas, there was no alternative.

Has the world changed in a hundred years? Yes—and no. Specifically, Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem so different from the czars, in terms of imperial ambition. And we have no idea what he’s capable of. Remember that Fiona Hill, who has spent a good chunk of her life studying Putin, said, when hostilities started: “Basically, what President Putin has said quite explicitly in recent days is that if anybody interferes in Ukraine, they will be met with a response that they’ve ‘never had in [their] history.’ And he has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. So he’s making it very clear that nuclear is on the table.”

And now, reports The Washington Post, Putin has issued an ominous warning: “Russia this week sent a formal diplomatic note to the United States warning that U.S. and NATO shipments of the ‘most sensitive’ weapons systems to Ukraine were ‘adding fuel’ to the conflict there and could bring ‘unpredictable consequences.’”

Unpredictable consequences … as if Putin can’t predict them; as if these consequences are somehow beyond his control, divine in some way, directed by fate. It won’t be him pressing the button, you see. It will be God. Just as, in the Willy-Nicky letters, it was God and fate that caused World War I to start.

If he gets desperate, he may well decide that his best move is to drag everyone into world war. If the Russian economy is going to tank, why not tank the world economy? If Russians are dying, why not have Americans die, too? From the point of view of a cornered imperialist whose imperial dreams are going off the rails, it’s the logical play.

I feel certain that Biden doesn’t want war. Why on earth would he? But if Putin does something crazy—uses a nuke, or makes an incursion into a NATO country—what is Biden to do? If this doesn’t keep you up at night, you’re not paying enough attention.