Until recently, I thought that the risk of a nuclear war in the 21st century, while not zero, was nevertheless very low and the marginal bit of effort spent reducing it further was probably not a good use of resources. But in the past two weeks, a series of articles on Vox.com have led me to rethink that view. The most detailed of them is worth reading for full context, but I think the key points are these:
- Some experts are starting to worry that recent events in eastern Europe have raised the risk of a NATO-Russia nuclear war.
- This is because Putin is feeling vulnerable and threatened, and is using nuclear saber-rattling to compensate, doing some things even Cold War-era Soviet leaders avoided (because they felt more secure in their position).
- While nobody wants an all-out nuclear war, a particularly worrisome scenario is that Putin does something which, he expects, will scare NATO into backing off, but instead leads to a spiral of escalation.
Hmmm... let me put it this way: I suspect the right approach to dealing with the current situation in Ukraine is to back off there, while taking a hard line re: willingness to defend Baltic NATO states like Estonia. Truly sharp red lines are established by things like the NATO treaty, not [hawkish politician X] shooting his mouth off.
Ok, so it sounds like you basically agree with what I said; that increasing the West's willingness to compromise over the Baltics would be actively bad.
However, I think you over-estimate how valuable treaties are in the absense of the institutional will to defend them. We had a Memorandum to defend Ukraine, but that neither prevented Putin from invading nor caused us to defend Ukraine. Treaties are credible only because there are hawkish politicians and voters who assign terminal value to honour, even if in retrospect they wish they could avoid having to fight.