Strangeloves Of The SofaBy Rod Dreher
February 27, 2022
You wanna know why I’ve been so anxious about Western warmongering, even as I support the Ukrainian resistance to Russia aggression? Check out what US Rep Adam Kinzinger says, and how Douthat responds:
Look, I”m 55 years old. That means I was 24 years old when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. I spent my entire youth in the shadow of the Cold War. I remember the day it all suddenly became real to me. I was 12, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had put nuclear conflict in my mind. I remember exactly where I was sitting — in the passenger seat of my dad’s muddy orange Ford Bronco, bucking along over a pasture after a morning of deer hunting — when I pointed out to him a thought I had just had: it would take 19 minutes for Soviet missiles to reach us in Louisiana, so at any given moment, we were only 19 minutes away from fiery annihilation.
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And then it was over. It ended in part because of the resolve of Ronald Reagan, a man that everyone on the Left hated at the time, because they believed he was going to cause nuclear war. As grateful as I am to Reagan, it cannot be forgotten that under his leadership, and the radically unstable leadership in the dying Soviet Union, the world got awful damn close. A US government report discovered that in 1983, during the Able Archer exercise, the USSR and the US came a lot closer to nuclear war than we realized at the time. Back then, the Russian leadership, which was in turmoil in the post-Brezhnev era, was genuinely convinced that the US was going to attack them. And Washington wanted to keep them off-guard, as the report showed. Plus, at the time Reagan administration officials were publicly talking about how nuclear war was survivable and winnable. This is the context in which The Day After appeared.
When I read people today saying that the Russians are fools to think that NATO is an offensive alliance, not a defensive one, I think about how the world looked from the Kremlin in the early 1980s. There’s no way the US would have launched a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union — but that’s not the way the Soviets saw it. Similarly, the good intentions of NATO today don’t matter; what matters is what the Russian senior command thinks. It could be quite wrong, but that could still lead to nuclear war.
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Rep. Adam Kinzinger was 13 when the USSR folded — about the same age I was when the reality of what nuclear war would mean dawned on me. He never really knew what that felt like. So when I hear him fatmouthing about how the US ought to risk nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine, it chills me to the bone. He’s not the only one on the American scene making this kind of noise. Many of these people sneer at older folks, like me, who remember what that was like, and who are trying to figure out what we need to do to show resolve in the face of Russian military aggression, without pushing things too far. Again, I remind you: NATO would not have launched a first strike on the Soviets back in the day, but that is not how the paranoid Russian leadership saw it. Similarly, if Vladimir Putin, age 70, runs into trouble subduing Ukraine, and faces the prospect of being ousted by an internal coup, don’t you think his paranoia is going to ramp up? And then what?
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/nuclear-war-russia-us-ukraine-kinzinger-strangelove-of-the-sofa/
