There's certainly a risk that military involvement pushes him to escalate, but here's where I'm going with this: Putin will eventually escalate no matter what we do. Why? Because he assumes he's in control, and he assumes he can use his bombs - and our fear of them - as his golden key to do pretty much anything he desires to do. People make the argument that if we back him into a corner militarily he'll use weapons, but guess what? Economic sanctions and political isolation will also back him into a corner and make him desperate.
I've been saying some of those points also. We need to look for that 'middle' that says, we won't push him into a corner where he is militarily under threat unless he uses nukes - in which case he will, perhaps local tactical nukes, which can easily escalate. On the other hand, we've decided that if he's simply a reckless madman, he could just launch nukes right now; so we're counting on his having some deterrence, and there's a long history of 'the rules' we agree to, which allow proxy wars and economic sanctions but not military conflict.
Your point is right, that we've decided the economic sanctions need to not be the 'we sent a message' type we've done but stronger, and the dilemma is that as they are effective at really pressuring him, he does have that option to turn to nuclear blackmail to demand anything he wants. That's why this is so delicate. On the one hand we need to prevent destroying the world, on the other to not dimply let him destroy much of it with nuclear blackmail. And in my opinion, that means even sacrificing a country like Ukraine, but we can't say that for political reasons. People would be appalled. But we have little choice, but need to instead recognize him as unfit to wield nuclear weapons and look for ways to change that discreetly enough not to make him use them in response.
I'm obviously not saying we should fly into Russian airspace without provocation, but we have to take the gloves off. Our adversaries don't fear us because they assume that we're bound by rules and that we're too concerned with our stock markets and other economic indicators to wage a war. They heard about Obama's red line, and saw absolutely nothing in response. They saw Obama tell Putin to 'cut it out' after meddling in our elections - as he was days away from leaving office, lol. Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un all looked at our pullout of Afghanistan and saw a country that's tired of war. They looked at the 2016 election and saw a country that wanted to withdraw from the geopolitical scene. Our adversaries are unafraid of us. That needs to change.
Not exactly. Two sides acting 'tough' at each other trying to win that way is playing chicken with nuclear war and that is not the way to do it. That's the way to have nuclear war.
I posted a thread on this with lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis that show the challenges as JFK dealt with his political needs for an unreasonable public that demanded too much, while preventing nuclear war, which VERY nearly still happened despite the two leaders being determined not to.
But how could Khrushchev not follow your advice, and let the US put missiles on his border while he couldn't do the same? He needed to follow your advice and have some more fairness. See the problem?
We need to scare the shit out of our adversaries.
You don't know what we need, sorry to have to put it that way. But you are showing some of the danger of why we need to get rid of nuclear weapons, because they're a constant risk to two sides who do things like 'feeling they need to scare the shit out of their adversaries' leading to their use.
You're thinking we're the 'weak' ones here. Think about that for a minute. Think that maybe Putin feels like he's the one who hasn't done enough to look strong to his adversaries? Things have been going our way, as NATO has expanded to his border and former Soviet buffer countries are all joining the west. In other words, your logic fits HIS situation a lot better than ours.
Countries who 'feel' like you talk about are how you get nuclear war. Who push things into a corner and can't get out of escalation.
JFK and Khrushchev had private communications and each confided in the other that they had right-wing military pressures that might get out of control. Khrushchev said it was like pulling a knit tighter and tighter until it couldn't be loosened. Human tendencies about "we need to scare the shit out of our adversaries" are unacceptable in nuclear chicken. But people who 'feel' that way have a hard time with that.