Don't take it from me that Putin and Lavrov’s nuke threats are a bluff whose red lines NATO has already crossed repeatedly. Watch this from minute 4:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxOO0hCCSk4&t=254s

about how Putin and Lavrov are pushing your fear button with a bluff. You're panicking and folding your hand, which is playing their game. You see them holding a royal flush when all they have is a pair of fives.

Would you also cave on NATO Article 5 and allow a Russian invasion of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to proceed with no response? Would you tell them to surrender to genocidal mass deportations again, like in 1940 and 1949?

Once Finland and Swecen are in NATO Russian aggression against EE, LV and LT would trigger their response against Russia. From the 1939-40 Winter War, the Russians know what would happen to their army in a fight against the Finns. Are you suggesting the Finns not intervene to defend the Baltic States, as Article 5 requires, to avoid a nuclear war? That American troops not be stationed in the Baltics? These are specific policy choice questions that demand specific answers when you write about geopolitics.

So what policy choice in Ukraine are you advocating?

To pull the plug on all weapons supply to Ukraine due and allow Russia's genocidal erasure of Ukraine to succeed because you believe Putin is as mad as he is bad?

44m vs 5 billion: This is not a trolley problem. Would you apply this cost-benefit equation to triggering NATO’s Article 5? The Baltics have only 6m people, so let’s not bother. But Article 5 gets triggered by an attack on Poland since it has 38m people. Russian forces land in Iceland? Nah, don’t bother. Only 330000 people. If demographics drive collective security and defense commitments, this is what you get.

We failed the test in 1938 with the Czechs and Spaniards and got war with dishonor instead of peace in our time. The Munich analogy was abused in Vietnam and Iraq. But not this time.