The “rebuttal” is that unless you are going to remove Putin then you are eventually going to have to fight him somewhere and the cost gets higher every time you let him “succeed”. The sanctions don’t hurt him, they hurt his people. The sanctions don’t remove him from power. The sanctions do nothing to change the status quo, they just box him more into a corner where he becomes increasingly likely to do something desperate to retain his position.
Are we really going to have to fight him eventually? You could have made that argument dozens of times based on Soviet aggression during the Cold War, yet we never ended up taking direct military action, and that was the right call; the USSR collapsed due to internal weaknesses and we didn't have to risk nuclear war to win. Putin is not acting from a position of strength here. Allowing his removal to happen "organically" is likely the prudent choice.
There's this stubborn portion of the commentariat for whom every war is WWII, every authoritarian is Hitler, and every European conflict is 1939 again. Nukes, NATO, and Russia's relative weakness make those comparison's completely off mark.
Economic sanctions will just box Putin in and make him desperate, but mobilizing NATO to fight him directly won't?
The only point I'm making is that the families being blown up in Ukraine right now probably aren't sleeping any easier at night because US inaction is preventing Putin from going nuclear.
Your point was that I'm OK with Ukrainian kids getting killed as long as its not my own. Those who've suffered through reading my posts in the Politics and Theology threads over the last decade should be able to attest that I'm all about the strong protecting the weak and sacrificing for the Common Good. When you're dealing with an aggressor who has nukes, there are no good options.
I don't have the policy answers so don't call me an armchair Marvel stan, but I suspect that just mayyybe there are additional military options beyond irrelevant sanctions (to Putin), seizing yachts from rich people, and Twitter hashtags that we can take to support Ukraine without shitting our pants that Putin will murder us all and end the Western world.
I'd love to hear them. I hope we're exploring all avenues--Putin's assassination, crippling Russia's nuclear capabilities in a coordinated strike, incentivizing a reform-minded Russia to overthrow Putin in the interest of opening back up to the West and making the Russian people prosperous again, etc.
But a lot of people are flippantly insisting that we do something no Western nation has dared do before in the nuclear age. It's reckless.
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