The case for direct military intervention in Ukraine

The advantage of choosing defeat is that the West will reduce the risk of an immediate confrontation with Russia. However, choosing defeat will also create enormous adverse consequences and will not enable the West to escape from an eventual confrontation with Russia anyway, and on worse terms.

Choosing defeat means that Russia will have successfully waged a brutal war against a country in which the West invested enormous amounts of diplomatic and political capital. The lesson that other hostile regimes will draw is that the West won’t directly interfere in such conquests in the face of a threat to use nuclear weapons. This defeat will therefore encourage both nuclear proliferation and brutal conquests, the combination of which will lead to a far more hostile world for the West and Western ideas.

Choosing defeat will leave Putin triumphant. He will have conquered Ukraine and prevailed over the full diplomatic, political and economic might of the West. Putin has vast ambitions, aiming to do nothing less than ‘relitigate the end of the Cold War, revise the current Euro-Atlantic security system and recreate a sphere of influence in the states of the former Warsaw Pact’. Winning the war in Ukraine while humiliating the West isn’t going to temper them. Putin’s Russia is not going to stop with Ukraine.