"That force doesn't exist"--A year ago you recommended Ukraine surrender to genocide. Just before Kharkiv and Kherson you forecast Russian victory and Ukraine didn't have the military force to counter Russia. How did those forecasts work out? But you never, ever hold yourself accountable for previous wrongheaded forecasts. You're a Darwin Prize of geopolitical and military forecasting; a contrarian indicator as good as Business Week's 1979 Death of Equities magazine cover or Worth magazine's John Chambers/Cisco dot.com bubble peak cover of February 2000 that said "Buy This Man's Company" when it hit $80/share. If the Russian army could be securitized and shorted, your articles would be the perfect indicator of when best to do so.

That force exists and you will be as surprised as last September and November when it hits Russia's decrepit buy your own kit mobiki army when Ukraine's mud season ends.

You've never defined "escalation". You've never said what support for Ukraine's continued existence does not constitute escalation. Therefore, your readers should conclude that you support letting Russia defeat and occupy more of Ukraine, yielding more mass graves as in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and Izyum. But this would turn the war into an Afghanistan-style counterinsurgency war like that against the Soviets from 1980-89. The alternative to fully supporting Ukrainian victory with long range HIMARS, F-16s, ATACMS, Abrams and Leopards is this kind of war, not peace.

What I advocate is that the West not negotiate with itself with restraint in weapons supply for victory that hasn't yielded a single change in Russia's strategy. What Ukrainian resistance has done is provide much more security for the Baltic States, the former Warsaw Pact members of NATO and Taiwan for the equivalent of a rounding error in the Pentagon budget.