There's a powerful lobby pushing for a "no-fly zone" over Ukraine.
If Biden listens to them, he will start a shooting war with Russia.
This is not a drill. It's the closest we've been to World War 3 since the Cuban Missile Crisis. 🧵
First, it's important to understand the history of "no-fly zones" as a concept.
They are a purely modern phenomenon – one that was *never* employed by the U.S. during the Cold War – because enforcing an NFZ against the USSR would have risked nuclear war.
The first NFZ was established over Iraq after the Gulf War, in order to prevent Saddam from further gassing the Kurds from the air.
It was a half-measure between war and peace.
America and its partners would not invade, but it would deny Iraq the use of its own airspace.
What made the creation of the first NFZ viable?
The fact that coalition forces enjoyed complete air superiority over the Iraqi military.
There was no realistic prospect that Saddam could mount an air war against America and its allies.
The risk of escalation was zero.
No-fly zones were subsequently used by the West in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Libya.
In every case, the target of the NFZ was a non-peer military.
This made NFZs a politically palatable option: they allowed kinetic force to be used without risking major U.S. casualties.
But somewhere along the way, Western policymakers forgot the limited conditions where NFZs work.
They started thinking of them like a "magic bullet" that can be used to coerce any rival of the United States.
They forgot that, against a peer competitor, an NFZ means total war.
I sounded the alarm about this problem in 2016, with an article in @ForeignPolicy.
At the time, Hillary Clinton was advocating a no-fly zone over Syria.
I warned this was a "polite euphemism" for starting a shooting war with Russia, since Putin would not ground his planes.
It's possible that we are all alive today because Obama did not listen to Clinton then.
If the U.S. starts shooting down Russian planes, Russia will retaliate.
Nobody can predict how far up the chain of escalation we would advance.
Today, Biden is being pressured to take similar actions against Russia.
The point person for this lobby is Obama's Assistant Secretary of Defense, Evelyn Farkas.
She wants the U.S. to declare a no-fly zone over the portions of Ukraine that are not yet occupied by Russia.
Her tweet yesterday wasn't something she posted randomly with no thought.
She's also advocated for a Ukraine no-fly zone in @politico.
Keep in mind, this isn't an obscure person.
Farkas was the Obama administration's most senior Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine.
And her proposal hasn't been met with contempt and derision. Other prominent Russia hawks are lining up behind it.
Today, Biden said, "We have no intention of fighting Russia."
But NFZ proponents will insist that it *isn't* fighting Russia.
That is always what has made NFZs so seductive – they are a form of coercion short of outright war.
Russia's current force posture and diplomatic position provide a particularly tempting target for an NFZ.
It has deployed forces into the separatist-held territory of the Donbas – but not into the portions of Lugansk and Donetsk held by the Ukrainian military.
It is now deliberating whether to recognize the entirety of the Donbas as the sovereign territory of the breakaway republics
– or whether to restrict that claim to the land they militarily control.
U.S. policymakers may believe an NFZ could sway Russia to choose the latter.
Unfortunately, that thesis is inconsistent with the security goals that President Putin laid out in his address to the Russian nation yesterday.
His avowed national-security objectives can only be met by direct intervention in Ukraine.
Indeed, if the U.S. chooses to establish a no-fly zone, it will only aggravate the security concerns that Putin articulated.
It would be an extreme provocation that could induce him to take even more aggressive actions than he was otherwise planning.
We should only establish an NFZ in Ukraine if we are willing to enforce it.
And in this case, enforcing it would mean shooting down Russian planes and bombing Russia's ground-based air-defense systems.
The people advocating the NFZ want that to happen. Do you?
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