Nervous Calls Multiply To Pull Back from the Nuclear Brink Over Ukraine

Dec. 9, 2021 (EIRNS)—Some in the United States, albeit still clinging to some otherwise wildly flawed axioms, are now scared enough to speak out about the war propaganda against Russia and urge the Biden administration to find a way to step back from its talk of NATO defending Ukraine.

“Yes, Putin Might Invade Ukraine. But That’s Ukraine’s Problem, Not Ours,” MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen wrote in the New Republic “Soapbox” yesterday. His main point: “Does Washington really want to risk war with a nuclear power over a country thousands of miles from the U.S. homeland and with little strategic importance to the U.S.?” He acknowledges that Russia’s concern is that “Ukraine is being converted into a big American aircraft carrier,” as RAND Corporation analyst Samuel Charap told him. Cohen urges the Biden administration help find “an off-ramp” for the Ukraine-Russian conflict, by (1) making clear to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the U.S. will not defend Ukraine if Russia attacks, and (2) getting the U.S. and its NATO allies “to think seriously about taking NATO membership off the table for Ukraine and Georgia.”

“The U.S. Can’t Deter a Russian Invasion of Ukraine—And Shouldn’t Even Try,” wrote Andrew Latham, a professor at Minnesota’s Macalester College and non-resident fellow at D.C.’s Defense Priorities, in an op-ed on The Hill on Dec. 7. He, too, recognizes that “the prospects for escalation to nuclear war cannot be discounted ... and are real,” if the U.S. attempts to defend Ukraine. He argues that “a neutralized Kiev—or even one firmly in Russia’s geopolitical orbit—poses no threat to American prosperity, security or freedom,” and, in fact, “such an outcome might actually reduce tensions between the two powers.”

The American Conservative senior editor Rod Dreher went after Sen. Roger Wicker’s insanity directly, in his Dec. 8 column, “ ‘Forget Afghanistan, On To Ukraine!’ ”

“America has no business getting involved in provoking a war over Ukraine. It is not our business. Yet the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, actually suggested the possibility of using U.S. nuclear weapons to defend an independent nation that has been part of Russia for many centuries, and was part of the Soviet Union until only 30 years ago,” he wrote in amazement. Dreher, clearly no friend of Russia, calls himself a “realist.”

He heartily endorsed Tucker Carlson’s Dec. 7 attack on the insanity of the war drive over Ukraine, and wrote, “I see no realistic sense in which Russia can allow Ukraine to become part of NATO. “ Dreher instead argues for “the Finlandization of Ukraine.”

Freelance journalist Joel Mathis, writing in the magazine, The Week, hopes Biden will handle the Ukrainian situation the way JFK handled the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which “Sensible deal-making, not bluster and threats, kept them [Kennedy and Khrushchev] from waging a nuclear war that would end civilization.”