An Enormously Consequential War, That the U.S. Cannot Directly Fight

The night the Russian attack on Ukraine started, Michael observed, “strikes me that this is the first time we’re really seeing air power live on television that isn’t our own.” Indeed, watching the flying Russian missiles, helicopters, jet fighters, and columns of advancing Russian tanks – and sympathizing with the Ukrainians – generates different feelings than listening to Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett describe the aerial attack on Baghdad on 1991.

Similarly, this is the first time since the end of the Cold War that the U.S. response is constrained by the presence of a hostile nuclear power. Panama, Iraq 1991, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq 2003, Libya — in almost every U.S. military operation in the past forty years, the U.S. and its allies did not have to worry about a nuclear-armed foe like Russia or China stepping in and fighting alongside our opponents. (The closest we came was in Kosovo in 1999, and a four-hour battle with Russian mercenaries in Syria in 2018.)