Yesterday VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) posted a letter to President Biden that warned of the risks inherent in President Macron’s proposal to possibly send French troops into Ukraine. The VIPS letter said in part:
France is reportedly preparing to dispatch a force of some 2,000 troops … into Ukraine … France appears to be betting – naively – that its membership in NATO would prevent Russia from attacking French troops. Rather, it is highly likely that Russia would attack any French/Baltic contingent in Ukraine and quickly destroy/degrade its combat viability. … The American people need to understand that Europe is leading them to the cusp of nuclear annihilation.
Given the background of VIPS’ members, we need to pay more attention to its concern. For example, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson served as Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The war in Ukraine is a humanitarian disaster that currently has no end in sight. To bring relief to Ukraine, as well as to reduce the risk of a nuclear war, we need to take both Ukraine’s and Russia’s legitimate security interests into account. This does not mean abandoning Ukraine. On the contrary, it demands that we consider that nation’s legitimate security interests.
Taking both nations’ legitimate security interests into account requires us to first get past the current, overly simplified narrative. As evidence of that over-simplification, a University of Chicago poll four months after Russia’s invasion found that, while 85% of Ukrainians blamed Russia for the war, 70% saw their own government as bearing responsibility and 58% said that about America. (For details, see pages 9-10 of this poll.)
The latter two numbers surprise most Americans, which indicates that we need to look more deeply into the issues before we find ourselves, in VIPS’ words, on “the cusp of nuclear annihilation.”
Defusing the Nuclear Threat 