Cowardly Russian useful idiot genocide apologist finally says the usually quiet part out loud: Ukraine should stop stubbornly insisting on existing so his nuclear fear panic button won't be discomfited. So we see Russia's exterminationist war reduced to a cost-benefit analysis. 40 million Ukrainians will have to be erased, deported, lustrated, filtrated purged, reeducated, gulag-ed, see its children kidnapped into forced adoption and Russification, its cities bombed to oblivion so Mr. Dunn, sheltered in the safety of the North American hinterland, can stop clutching his nuclear pearls. Dunn's geopolitically sociopathic need for certainty doesn't cancel out the thousand books and journal articles historians like me have read, not to mention the tens of thousands more read by Tim Snyder, Anne Applebaum and my UCLA classmate read in Soviet archives in Leningrad in 1983. His contempt for knowledge in asserting that his deescalation customer service skill set counts for more than what we have learned is pure narcissistic hubris. I'm certain that he wouldn't apply the same criteria about expert knowledge to his next surgical operation. That's why he ignores that the correlation between Russia's genocidal behavior and western policy is a very simple number: zero. Russia's exterminationist language and cultural repression against Ukraine is more than three centuries old. The Holodomor that cost the lives of 4 million Ukrainians had no western component, except for Russian usefuil idiots like the Webbs, Lincoln Steffens and the NY Times' "journalist" in Moscow, Walter Duranty hiding it from view because he was blackmailed by the NKVD due to his affair with a Russian woman.
Never mind that Modi and Xi have already warned Putin against a suicidal break of the nuclear taboo and its Chinese "friend without limits" has a very simple number of weapons to Russia: zero, which reduces it to begging from Iran and North Korea.
Don't doubt that if Germany had had a nuclear weapon in a Man in the High Castle version of 1941, Mr. Dunn would have been against passage of the Lend Lease Act that defeated the Nazis ("A toast to American war production, without which the war could not be won."--Stalin, Tehran, November 1943).
What Mr. Dunn doesn't get is that the partition that Russia insists on as a precondition for negotiations turns Ukraine into a failed state. All the Ukrainians I've met abroad, and there are many in Latvia and Porto, want to return home, not be permanent refugees with a sovereignty-less Ukraine turned into Russia's DMZ.
Also, he can't do basic GDP math. The $750 billion cost of rebuilding Ukraine is a bit more than the $70tn GDP of the countries supporting Ukraine and only 2x the value of the frozen Russian assets deposited in western banks and central banks.
If you need to know how to prepare for the breakup of the genocidal Russian empire, ask the Hudson Institute, whose Kleptocracy Project foresaw the threat posed by the export of Russia's mafia with a flag authoritarian and hybrid warfare business model: https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/preparing-final-collapse-soviet-union-dissolution-russian-federation .
What he doesn't get is that this isn't the flip the switch version of the trolley problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem), but the will you push the fat man off the bridge to save the four guys on the track below version. Mr. Dunn belongs to the 2-10% of those surveyed who are ready to push the fat man off the bridge to stop the out of control trolley:
"Trolley problems highlight the difference between deontological and consequentialist ethical systems.[13] The central question that these dilemmas bring to light is on whether or not it is right to actively inhibit the utility of an individual if doing so produces a greater utility for other individuals.
The basic Switch form of the trolley problem also supports comparison to other, related dilemmas:
The Fat Man
As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?
Resistance to this course of action seems strong; when asked, a majority of people will approve of pulling the switch to save a net of four lives, but will disapprove of pushing the fat man to save a net of four lives.[37] This has led to attempts to find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases.
One possible distinction could be that in the first case, one does not intend harm towards anyone – harming the one is just a side effect of switching the trolley away from the five. However, in the second case, harming the one is an integral part of the plan to save the five. This solution is essentially an application of the doctrine of double effect, which says that one may take action that has bad side effects, but deliberately intending harm (even for good causes) is wrong. This is an argument which Shelly Kagan considers (and ultimately rejects) in his first book The Limits of Morality."
