Matt Yglesias

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Forget Russia Has the Bomb

In a lot of ways, Sarah Palin’s answer to the question about going to war with Russia wasn’t as bad as ABC News’ teaser made it out to be. And in other ways, her answer did nothing more than reflect a bad policy idea that, unfortunately, is shared by members of both parties. It made you wish that more supporters of NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine — Democrats and Republicans both — would get the question about going to war with Russia. Because watching the exchange between her and Charlie Gibson as they kind of offhandedly mention that war with Russia could be an Article V treaty obligation and then skip ahead to the next issue without dwelling at all on the fact that US-Russia war could mean a full scale nuclear exchange and the death of billions of people was a bit shocking.

The hope, of course, would be that an unconditional US security guarantee to Georgia would deter Russia from doing anything rash. But of course it might not. And based on what we know about the origins of the latest round of fighting, an unconditional US security guarantee to Georgia might well prompt the Georgians to do something rash. Even before the recent fighting, there were Russian military forces stationed inside the sovereign borders of both Georgia (as “peacekeepers” in South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and Ukraine (on a military base near Sebastopol) in a way that leaves some ambiguity as to what would constitute an attack by who on whom. It’s a dangerous situation, and politicians really ought to be asked to contemplate the enormity of a US-Russian military conflict in a serious way.