If Vladimir Putin had truly believed that 10 to 20 medium range missiles would smack into various structures of the Kremlin within one week of his invasion of Ukraine, would he still have invaded? What about China? If the Communist Chinese leadership truly believed that part of Taiwan’s response to a communist invasion would be to fire 100 missiles at the central headquarters of the communist party in Beijing, would China still want to invade the successful Democracy of Taiwan? I very much doubt it. The threat of imminent retaliation against the nerve center of autocratic powers should become part of our deterrence model. But the weapons have to be provided ahead of time, not after the conflict starts.
Fundamentally, it was the hesitancy, reluctance, and slowness of the Obama and Biden Administrations to provide punishing weapons systems to Ukraine early enough that caused deterrence to fail in Ukraine twice. Bizarrely, although leftists think Congress impeached Trump for allegedly delaying shipments of lethal aid to Ukraine, President Obama refused to provide any lethal aid to Ukraine during his entire presidency. This is what caused Putin to invade Crimea, Ukraine in 2014. The Ukrainians had few weapons with which to defend themselves, thanks to Obama, who was only willing to provide blankets and packaged meals called MREs – meals ready to eat. The case for impeachment against Obama for selling out the Ukrainians, would have been much stronger. But Obama like Biden, viewed his real enemies as Americans who disagree with him.
The lack of long range weapon systems in Ukraine early on is what caused Biden’s deterrence policies to fail miserably. Biden’s painfully slow delivery of weapon’s systems to Ukraine, along with his tremulous hesitancy to show any backbone, and perhaps reinforced by the Millions the Biden family has received from China and Russia in corrupt payoffs, all combine to make Biden’s efforts and deterrence fail. Ultimately, Biden’s deterrence efforts miscarried so badly, that he began lying about the efforts – falsely claiming that deterrence was never the point.
After botching deterrence, Biden then began to feed weapons systems into Ukraine gradually. But this approach was doomed to fail. First, it delivered all the weapons systems to the Ukrainians too late to favorably control the battlefield and to completely obliterate Russian forces. Second, each time Biden then attempted to increase the lethality in effectiveness of the lethal aid, Putin would accuse the US of “widening” the conflict and would threaten nuclear war or other retaliation. If the more effective weapons systems had already been in Ukraine before the Russian invasion, this “Biden in a box” scenario – with cowardly mincing gradualism – would never have happened.
Before my fairly modest and commonsensical suggestion of earlier and more effective lethal aid (as deterrence) is greeted with hysterics, let me acknowledge that I am not talking about ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons (including tactical nuclear weapons), or anything like that. In the case of Ukraine for example, providing the airplanes the Ukrainians requested long ago but never received, along with cruise missiles capable of launching from aircraft, along with perhaps 100 medium range missiles, would have been enough to create real fireworks in the Kremlin the week of the invasion. The invasion probably would have never occurred. The situation in Taiwan is similar. The Taiwan straits are only 100 miles wide. If we give Taiwan 200 medium range missiles, the crusty, old, corrupt Chinese Communist leaders will have a fun time dodging fireworks in Beijing when they invade Taiwan. The distance between Taipei and Beijing is about 1000 miles. The range of a typical medium ranged missile can easily reach 1500 miles. In the future if you want to deter evil, autocratic powers from invading their neighbors, make sure that the power centers of the autocratic invaders will have the shit blown out of them when they launch their invasion. Provide the weapons early, long before the conflict starts so the West cannot be accused of escalating the conflict.
Copyright 2022 By Paul H. Beattie. All rights reserved. “Notes from the Right” is a Trademark of Paul H. Beattie
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