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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring plausibly accidental transgressions is preferable to war. Article 5 only gets triggered if NATO members want it to be, and even then the nature of their response is left to the member nations to decide for themselves. NATO isn't some sort of automatic deadhand system meant to start WW3 over an accident like in Doctor Strangelove.

Incidentally, Russia is behaving in roughly the same way; they talk a lot of shit about, for instance, western weapons being used against targets in Russian territory, but then when that happens anyway they issue more threats instead of starting WW3 in earnest like they threatened before. They don't really want that war either; if they did they're able to start it anytime they want, but they've got kids too.

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Not kids, only personal safety. Russia is burying those male kids in the ukrainian soil in scale incomparable with any prior USSR/russian wars excepting only WW2.

There is a point after which doing nothing makes the war more likely.

I'd argue we crossed it around 2014.

That’s called appeasement, btw.

More like conflict management. That Chinese boat, for example, was apprehended. Responses are being ramped up in a controlled manner.

What do you think appeasement was?

It was trying to be reasonable and avoid/manage conflict with a fundamentally unreasonable ‘partner’.

No, appeasement is something else. Trying to buy peace by giving them free shipments of grain would be appeasement. NATO isn't trying to buy peace, they're trying to bleed Russia to death at a manageable level of conflict intensity.

That is one form, but ignoring acts of violence and escalation (or not responding to them in a way that really discourages them) is another.

They're not being ignored, but neither are they starting a thermonuclear war over it. NATO is walking a knife edge of low intensity conflict, trying to avoid the two disasters of Russia steamrolling eastern Europe and/or total war that probably leads to a nuclear exchange.

You really probably want to read up on what Chamberlain was actually doing before the war.

You really need to get off reddit and get a grip is you think NATO's approach to the Russian threat is comparable to Chamberlain. Thank goodness much smarter and more levelheaded people than you are calling the shots, trying to avoid the sort of cataclysmic disaster you would boldly walk right into.

There's nothing smart about the current approach. The snowball keeps getting larger and larger. What started with "little green men" in Crimea in 2014 has snowballed into a war that has razed entire cities, turned millions into refugees, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and contaminated vast areas for centuries, as Iranian missiles rain on European cities and North Korean slaves kill Europeans in their home - with no end in sight.

The unwillingness to take a stand and make a credible threat of nuclear exchange unless Russians get out of Ukraine has only invited further attacks on Europe. In practical terms, the foolish "escalation management" serves no other purpose than giving the initiative to Russians. By knowing that NATO will try to defuse any dangerous situation, they can safely keep tuning the temperature to their liking. The most level-headed people have warned about this for a long time.

The people calling the shots are the same people who have been dismantling Europes militaries, during a time when Russia has invaded two European countries(Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014).

They are not particularly level headed, unless level headed has changed meaning to "stupid".

They are trying to avoid war. And so, inevitably, war is what they will get.

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