On Sunday, news broke that President Joe Biden has authorized Ukraine to use long-range American
missiles to strike deeper into Russian territory.
After the U.S. gave Ukraine the green light to strike targets on the Russian side of the
border earlier this year, the Ukrainian government and its biggest cheerleaders in
Washington have been pressuring the president to support longer-range strikes, especially
after Ukraine launched its invasion of Russia's Kursk region.
Sunday they got their wish.
On Tuesday, the first missile was launched at a target in Russia's Bryansk region.
The move has many in the West concerned.
Back in September, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a change to Russia's nuclear
doctrine.
According to the changes, the Kremlin now considers an attack on Russia carried out
by a non-nuclear state with the support of a nuclear armed power to be a joint attack.
Also under the new doctrine, a conventional attack that poses a, quote, critical threat
to Russian sovereignty now meets the official threshold to trigger a Russian nuclear response.
Yesterday, those changes were made official.
The American weapon system the Ukrainians are now using is the Army Tactical Missile
System or ATACOMS.
They have a range of 190 miles and, importantly, require the U.S. or its allies to provide
the targeting coordinates every time it's shot.
So the U.S. is not merely allowing the Ukrainians to fire missiles deeper into
Russia, it's actively helping them do so.
Six days ago, China opened a deepwater port in Chiang Kai, Peru, 3,472 miles away from
Washington, D.C.
U.S. officials and hawkish commentators condemned the move, calling it a security
threat to the U.S., because they consider this to be in, quote, America's back
yard.
Yet the same group is now cheering on as the Biden administration orders the U.S.
military to help Ukraine launch missiles at targets in Russia a little over 100 miles
away from Moscow, with no apparent concern about the Russian reaction.
The official position of the U.S. government appears to be that Putin is a psychotic
maniac who views himself as a quasi-religious figure in conflict with the West, and that
he is expected to keep a totally cool head as he watches the U.S. violate the line
laid out in Russia's nuclear doctrine by helping to launch missiles deeper and
deeper into Russian territory.
The other factor that makes this escalation frustrating is that Biden's political
heir, Kamala Harris, just lost the election and popular vote to Donald Trump, who
ran to a significant degree on transitioning the ongoing conflict with
Russia from the battlefield back to the negotiation table.
Biden appointees and other top-level foreign policy officials have been very
explicit that they want to Trump-proof their Ukraine policy.
This policy change may be an attempt to do that.
In other words, Biden officials and unelected bureaucrats are working to
undermine the next administration's ability to carry out what voters want,
all in the name of protecting democracy.
Thankfully, the imminent transfer of power in Washington does give the Russians
less of a reason to escalate in response to these strikes, especially
considering that the months of consideration Biden gave to this
move reportedly provided that Russians time to move critical military
assets out of the range of Ukrainian attack arms.
As provocative as this move is, the likelihood it alone will trigger World War
III remains very low.
That said, a world war between two governments armed with thousands of
city-killing thermonuclear weapons is so unfathomably dangerous that any
increase in the risk of one breaking out, no matter how small, must be
deemed unacceptable.
The best, most up-to-date account of how nuclear war can break out and
would play out comes from Annie Jacobson's haunting book from earlier
this year, Nuclear War, A Scenario.
Even just reading the prologue, which is available for free in the Amazon
preview, where Jacobson explains what would happen in the minutes after a
single thermonuclear bomb is detonated above an American city, makes it
clear that such an event would be a catastrophe so far beyond any of
the various threats the establishment is trying to scare us about, it's
almost comical that we spend any time worrying about anything else.
Most experts who study nuclear deterrence agree that a limited use
of nuclear weapons is likely to quickly accelerate to a full-on nuclear
exchange.
And in a full-on nuclear exchange, American cities are not expected to be
struck by a single bomb, but by dozens of them.
With hundreds of smaller towns targeted as well, and radioactive winds set to
bring painful deaths to those who were initially spared.
So it is absolutely crazy that Joe Biden is kicking off his lame-duck
period by explicitly crossing a red line the Russians said would
justify a nuclear response.
US officials spent decades scoffing at Putin's red lines about Ukraine,
berating him for being all talk and no action until suddenly, in February of
2022, he invaded.
Now they are again playing that same game with much higher stakes.
If the government's primary job were, as we're taught, to protect the
lives and property of the American people, then avoiding a nuclear
exchange would be its single greatest priority.
The Biden administration's decision on Sunday reiterates that our so-called
leaders have other priorities.