The Ignorance and Naivety of Anti-Russia Maximalists

Not only is this article unhinged, but it's a perfect illustration of how the anti-Russia maximalists, while convinced that anyone who refuses to accept their policy recommendations does so out of ignorance and naivety, are in fact profoundly ignorant and naive themselves. 1/n https://t.co/ZLfZyiCVpp

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

The article repeats the claim that, in 1994, the US gave security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for agreeing to relinquish the nuclear weapons it still had on its territory and then didn't honor its word in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, but this is a myth. 2/n pic.twitter.com/cBtUVH3EMK

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

The US never gave any security guarantees to Ukraine beyond a vague committment to seek UNSC action in case Ukrainian sovereignty was violated and is under no legal obligation whatsoever to provide military aid. It didn't violated any Budapest commitment, only Russia did. 3/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

This is a myth that would be instantly dispelled if people just took 5 minutes to actually read the Budapest Memorandum (https://t.co/wJNvrIexcv), but apparently that's too much to ask even for people like the author of that article whose job it is to know these things 🤷‍♂️ 4/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

The Ukrainian government, by the way, understood that very well at the time and that's not why it accepted the transfer of remaining Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia. Nor is it because it was naive, as people like Rubin, the author of that article, seem to believe. 5/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

It's a long story I plan to write about in more details later, but in a nutshell, Ukraine made that decision because their deterrent value was not as high as people like Rubin assumes and the alternative was extremely unattractive for economic and political reasons. 6/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

Rubin proposes that, in order to deter Russia from using nukes in Ukraine, the US should make a firm commitment to provide Kiev with nuclear weapons in the event that it does "without any controls on where and how Ukraine might use them". 7/n pic.twitter.com/nKtyZBruTh

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

He thinks that, despite what the "non-proliferation mafia" will say, this policy will be effective and is geared toward reality, but it's actually completely unrealistic and the only reason why he thinks otherwise is because he has a very simplistic view of nuclear strategy. 8/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

Indeed, even if the US announced that it will do that in the event that Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine, it would be unlikely to have any effect on Russian leadership's decision-making for the simple reason that it would not be credible. 9/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

Who would believe, even if the US said that, that Biden would actually give nuclear weapons and relinquish any control over their use to a country it has no treaty commitment to defend and risk annihilation? The US doesn't even do that for NATO allies! 10/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

This is the kind of things that only people who have never read anything about nuclear strategy and know that nobody is ever going to call them at 3 in the morning and give them 5 minutes to decide whether they want to incinerate 200 million people say... 11/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

The lack of credibility of such a policy is just a particularly obvious example of a more general credibility problem with mutually assured destruction, which has been identified decades ago and abundantly discussed since then. 12/n https://t.co/l0G8d0RqsB

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

The problem with that doctrine is that the consequences of a full-blown nuclear war between the US and Russia would be so disastrous and retaliation so pointless that the credibility of threatening it has often been called into question. 13/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

This is why, for instance, the US was so worried about Soviet conventional superiority in Europe during the Cold War. It feared that the Soviets might launch a conventional attack on Western Europe, calculating that it wouldn't face annihilation by using nukes in response. 14/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

This is a complicated debate, and more generally so is the debate about how to respond to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but you would be hard pressed to find any trace of that complexity in Rubin's article and many others of the same ilk. 15/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023

This is a general problem with the anti-Russia crowd. They think everything is very simple, and that if not everybody is on board with their maximalist policies, it's at best because they are naive about Russia and at worse because they're "traitors" or some such nonsense. 16/n

— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) June 13, 2023