Joe Biden's broken promise to avoid war with Russia could lead to Armageddon
SalonOn March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. It seems likely that, under that doctrine, Russia's leaders would interpret losing a war to the U.S. and NATO on their own borders as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. In an NPR report about the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert at Harvard University, estimated the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to 20 percent. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declared that the West's goal in the war was now to "weaken" Russia to the point that it would no longer have the military power to invade Ukraine again. A Times editorial, titled "The Ukraine War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not Ready," asked serious, probing questions about the new U.S. policy: Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia?