The National Interest has published (https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia-not-bluffing-211655) a useful piece by Benjamin Giltner on June 29, which pushes back against some of the mindless war-hype currently passing for thoughtful opinion in the West. Giltner starts by reminding readers that Putin warned NATO nations that they “must, in the end, understand all this truly threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization,” if they continue to arm Ukraine and infringe on their security interests.
Giltner then attacks the notion that “Putin is bluffing” and will never react to further pressure. “This assumption is false,” he says, and then describes three cases throughout history “that show how this misunderstanding of escalation has led to disastrous results.”
He starts with the case of Japan: “Japanese military thinkers sought to use Pearl Harbor as a way to shock the United States into a negotiated settlement with Japan. Of course, these expectations were way off the mark.” On the case of Korea and China, he writes: “MacArthur’s assessment proved wrong, with Chinese forces pouring into Korea in October 1950, marking one of the turning points in the Korean War.” Then the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Khruschev assumed Kennedy was bluffing, but “what followed from Khruschev’s missteps was the Cuban Missile Crisis—a tense thirteen-day period where two nuclear superpowers brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.”
