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Ukraine should have kept their nuclear weapons.
This is going to prove to other countries that you need nukes to keep the belligerent ones out of your sandbox.
11 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
A bad idea comes around again.
https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/peacefield/61f9e4619d9e380022bdd931/no-ukraine-should-not-have-kept-nuclear-weapons/
The Russians are on the verge of dramatically expanding their previous invasion of Ukraine, this time with enough forces that they could roll through the streets of Kyiv. I will admit that when the Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago, I did not expect that the new Russian Federation—poor, militarily weak, but finally free—could be, or would want to be, a threat to its neighbors. This was a failure of imagination on my part. But about one thing I was certain, and remain so: It’s a good thing that Ukraine never became a nuclear-weapons state. Now that the Russians are poised to invade, this bad idea is coming around again.
There are sensible people I respect who disagree about this, and so I think it’s worth a little time to consider that no matter how bad things might get, they would only be worse if Ukrainian nuclear weapons were involved. A series of historical and political circumstances have brought us to this point, going all the way back to how the USSR was created in the first place. (There are reasons, for example, that the Ukrainian state exists in its current borders and for why Crimea ended up a bone of contention, but that’s a subject I’ll explain in an additional newsletter later this week.) Today, let’s just ask a basic question: Would nuclear weapons have protected Ukraine now?
American “realists” like Professor John Mearsheimer, among others, think so. This is a simplistic answer, as realist answers so often are. It is a view of the world as something like a big game of Risk, in which all the countries are basically alike except for how many pretty colored chips they control. This approach leads foreign-policy analysts to say things that sound deep and logical, but make no sense when real countries, with real histories, governed by real people, get involved.
It also assumes that nuclear weapons are magical talismans that protect anyone who holds them. They’re talismans, alright. Like a Monkey’s Paw. Mearsheimer, for those unfamiliar with him, is the University of Chicago scholar who said back in 1990 that European stability might improve if Germany became an independent nuclear power. This is no slam on the Germans, but nobody—including the Germans—wanted that. He then said it about Ukraine in 1993 and 2014.
snip
https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/peacefield/61f9e4619d9e380022bdd931/no-ukraine-should-not-have-kept-nuclear-weapons/
The Russians are on the verge of dramatically expanding their previous invasion of Ukraine, this time with enough forces that they could roll through the streets of Kyiv. I will admit that when the Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago, I did not expect that the new Russian Federation—poor, militarily weak, but finally free—could be, or would want to be, a threat to its neighbors. This was a failure of imagination on my part. But about one thing I was certain, and remain so: It’s a good thing that Ukraine never became a nuclear-weapons state. Now that the Russians are poised to invade, this bad idea is coming around again.
There are sensible people I respect who disagree about this, and so I think it’s worth a little time to consider that no matter how bad things might get, they would only be worse if Ukrainian nuclear weapons were involved. A series of historical and political circumstances have brought us to this point, going all the way back to how the USSR was created in the first place. (There are reasons, for example, that the Ukrainian state exists in its current borders and for why Crimea ended up a bone of contention, but that’s a subject I’ll explain in an additional newsletter later this week.) Today, let’s just ask a basic question: Would nuclear weapons have protected Ukraine now?
American “realists” like Professor John Mearsheimer, among others, think so. This is a simplistic answer, as realist answers so often are. It is a view of the world as something like a big game of Risk, in which all the countries are basically alike except for how many pretty colored chips they control. This approach leads foreign-policy analysts to say things that sound deep and logical, but make no sense when real countries, with real histories, governed by real people, get involved.
It also assumes that nuclear weapons are magical talismans that protect anyone who holds them. They’re talismans, alright. Like a Monkey’s Paw. Mearsheimer, for those unfamiliar with him, is the University of Chicago scholar who said back in 1990 that European stability might improve if Germany became an independent nuclear power. This is no slam on the Germans, but nobody—including the Germans—wanted that. He then said it about Ukraine in 1993 and 2014.
snip
