This is making apparent that they have put us in an actual war with the antonym of "allies" on the other side _ which puts Russia a lone figure on the other side.
Unlike previous wars where opposing parties had only conventional weapons, what we are witnessing here is a severely wounded lethal party engaged in unbalanced war against allies of relatively unaffected parties.
The current escalation and development of events would put Russia in a difficult situation of not using everything at its disposal including nukes.
Just looking at Zelenskyy trying everything at his disposal to drag US and allies into the war leading Russia into a desperate situation, I would assume Putin would do the same and force Russia use everything at its disposal as the war escalates. This would put the whole region in danger.
Do you think other administration might do things differently to de-escalate the situation?
What's your take?
The American-Vietnamese war, the Korean war, the Angolan civil war, the Lebanon civil war, and the Soviet Afghanistan occupation can all be thought of as proxy wars between the US and USSR. There were even a handful that can be thought of as a proxy war between the USSR and China, like the Sino-Vietnamese war.
Some of these directly involved Soviet and American soldiers and equipment. Soviet pilots in Soviet MiGs with North Korean markings dogfighting over Korea with American pilots. Soviet and Chinese "advisors" directly engaging American soldiers in Vietnam. Much how American "advisors" engaged with Cuban forces in Angola at one point, IIRC.
Of course everyone was at the time, and probably correctly, worried those conflicts could spiral out of control and lead to a nuclear war. Indeed in some of those conflicts, you see a sort of unwillingness on both sides to just use overwhelming force, even when they could, so as not to escalate and freak out the other side. Unfortunately that means this kind of conflict tends to degrade into a long guerilla slog, with a steady but relatively small stream of equipment keeping the conflict going for years and years, neither side willing to actually push to end it militarily.
Same thing if Russia dares to fire a nuke. It is a mutually assured distraction.
Plus we are already having a climate change issue.
Should we keep giving Ukrain training and heavy missiles including nukes?
But if you don't agree with any of that, then there needs to be a pre-discussion to decide what we're even talking about, before there could be a discussion on de-escalation.
Assuming you do agree, then I think it's clear having NATO combatants in Ukraine is untenable. NATO is strictly a defensive organization, and in order to maintain any credibility that it's not a threat to Russia, unless Russia attacks a NATO country first, NATO can't get involved directly. I also think the language has improved, blaming Putin rather than Russia. There's a strong inclination in nation-state systems to blame countries more than heads of state, to indicate the responsibility of the nationals and their stake in the decisions of their leaders. I don't think that's effective this time.
We should continue pinning the blame on Putin. The problem and risk is, how to communicate there is no way back for him without it sounding like regime change, even though that's what's necessary? Putin and his stooges want Cold War 2.0, and that is not in the interest of literally anyone else. The first stage of getting there? Ukraine has to win this war. It's increasingly looking like there's only one way for Putin to win, and that's to do a Chechnya+Allepo style obliteration - hundreds of thousands of dead per day. He absolutely will do it.
Question is how to stop it. You can't really say wars of conquest are wrong, and then say to the bully, "well here's 1/4 of our country you can have if you stop obliterating the rest." Because the war monger has already reneged on past agreements of utmost international importance. If you give him 1/4 now to save 3/4's, he just comes back for more later, and you tacitly said that this is the on-going deal. This is how we avoid nuclear war? Bullies get what they're asking for, in the end? Really? That's the end of the U.N. Charter and puts us right on the path to WW3.
We cannot have countries using threat of nuclear bombs in order to commit atrocities with conventional weapons, and wage wars of expansion.