That hasn’t happened.

Putin unleashed missile attacks on Ukraine’s cities and its electrical grid, but the Ukrainians repaired their transformers and fought on.

Putin unleashed a mercenary force, the Wagner Group, which used convicts to try to take the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. They’re still trying.

Putin cut natural gas supplies to the West, hoping to freeze comfortable Europeans into abandoning Ukraine. But Europe’s winter has been one of the warmest on record; gas prices are lower than they were before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Instead of abandoning Ukraine, the United States and its allies are sending more aid: Patriot missiles and Bradley fighting vehicles from the U.S., Challenger tanks from Britain, armored vehicles from Germany and France.

That doesn’t mean Ukraine is winning. The winter war has settled into a stalemate, with little territory changing hands.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s promise that victory is coming may be good for morale, but remains premature.

Putin has told foreign visitors that he’s planning for a two- or three-year war. He says he’s confident his larger forces can outlast Ukraine and its allies.

Both sides are preparing for new offensives this spring.

U.S. officials don’t believe Ukraine is likely to retake all of the land Russia has occupied; they’re not counting on the Russian army to collapse.

Instead, they hope Ukrainian successes on the battlefield will convince Putin that the war has become a losing proposition and that it’s time to negotiate a truce.

But there’s a problem with that optimistic scenario: Neither Russia nor Ukraine appears eager to compromise.

All of which leads some foreign policy experts to conclude that the most likely outcome isn’t military victory or a negotiated peace, but a “frozen conflict.”

“Rather than assuming that the war can be ended through triumph or talks, the West needs to contemplate a world in which the conflict continues with neither victory nor peace in sight,” Ivo Daalder of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and James Goldgeier of American University wrote in Foreign Affairs last week.

“Not all wars end — or end in permanent peace settlements,” they noted.

As examples, they cite the Korean War, which has officially continued despite a 1953 armistice; the 1973 war between Israel and Syria, which produced only “disengagement agreements”; and Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and other parts of Ukraine, a clash that had become largely frozen before last year’s invasion.

It would mean the United States and its allies would need to continue massive support for Ukraine — both to enable it to defend against the next Russian invasion and to rebuild its economy. Daalder and Goldgeier propose a formal NATO security guarantee for Ukraine, even if the country isn’t admitted to the alliance as a member.

Their proposal adds up to a strategy of stabilizing Ukraine and containing Russia, much like the containment policy the United States applied to the Soviet Union during 45 years of Cold War. With luck, Ukraine and the West will be able to wait Putin out and seek a settlement with his successors.

Such a strategy would be costly, and even risky. Frozen conflicts aren’t always trouble-free; just look at Korea, Syria and Crimea.

The plan would ask Americans to support aid to Ukraine for years or decades, even as Republicans, once the party of anti-Soviet resolve, complain about the cost.

But foreign policy is often a choice among options that are less than ideal — and a cold war is less destructive, and probably cheaper, than a hot one.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2023 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Just as in 2020, we’re in for a drawn-out election week, followed by election month — or even months.

One reason is the popularity of mail-in ballots and the infuriating oddity that some states wait until all the polls are closed to begin counting them.

But this year’s results are also likely to be delayed by a pernicious practice: election denialism among Republican candidates loyal to former President Donald Trump.

For them, it’s not enough to endorse Trump’s baseless insistence that he was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election — a bogus claim that has become a tenet of GOP faith.

Some election deniers sound ready to emulate their exiled leader if they, too, come up short.

When reporters ask these candidates whether they’ll accept the results if they lose, they evade or obfuscate.

“I sure hope I can,” said Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who’s in a tight race for reelection. “But I can’t predict what the Democrats might have planned,” he added, suggesting they may try “to make it easier to cheat.”

That’s not exactly a “yes.”

Kari Lake, the Trump-backed candidate for governor of Arizona, added a Trump-style caveat.

“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” she said.

Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem was more direct: “Ain’t going to be no concession speech coming from this guy.”

On one level, it sounds as if all of these candidates are simply modeling themselves after Trump, who refused to commit to accepting election results in 2016 and 2020. (He eventually accepted the 2016 outcome, which he won, but still insisted that the vote had been rigged against him.)

But their preemptive refusals also prepare the way for a blizzard of postelection challenges in the courts — which is, of course, every candidate’s legal right. GOP officials, leaving nothing to chance, say they have already recruited more election lawyers than ever before.

After the 2020 election, Trump and his lawyers filed more than 60 lawsuits to try to overturn the results — and lost all but one.

This time, the political climate could influence the outcomes, University of California, Irvine law professor Richard L. Hasen worries.

“Pressure may come to bear on state judges and state supreme court justices, many of whom are elected officials and know that the Republican base is full of election deniers,” Hasen wrote in the Atlantic last week.

Another election expert, Rachel Orey of the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, worries about a different scenario: GOP-dominated election boards at the county or state level could simply refuse to certify results they don’t like.

That happened in New Mexico and Pennsylvania after this year’s primary elections, although state supreme courts reversed the boards’ actions.

Not all Republicans have refused to say they would accept defeat. Senate candidates Herschel Walker in Georgia and Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania have both said they would accept the voters’ verdict.

In Colorado, GOP Senate candidate Joe O’Dea said not only that he would take defeat like a grown-up, but that Trump should, too.

“We’ve become a nation of whiners and crybabies,” he said in a written statement. “Donald Trump still can’t admit he lost.”

“Republicans who concede their races risk being derided as RINOs, while those who challenge the results, even when there’s no credible evidence of fraud, may be rewarded by their party.

And that’s dangerous, Orey warns.

“The incentives are misaligned. Trump taught candidates that election denialism is [an] effective fundraising and campaign tactic,” Orey said. “Candidates who refuse to accept election results with no evidence are putting temporary political gain above the future of American democracy.”

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

“No one’s wearing masks,” he added, gesturing toward the convention center crowd. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

But the COVID epidemic isn’t over. It has arguably lost its status as a disease that was utterly beyond control. But it’s still causing more than 400 deaths a day, roughly three times as many as a bad season of influenza. New variants are still emerging; a wave of infections this winter could turn Biden’s optimistic claim to ashes; and long COVID, a debilitating chronic condition, affects an estimated 16 million Americans.

“We are not where we need to be if we are going to, quote, ‘live with the virus,’” Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, said a day after the president’s statement was broadcast on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” The number of COVID deaths, Fauci said, is still “unacceptably high.”

Biden has a long history of gaffes, statements that misfire or land badly. Most are inconsequential. This wasn’t.

The president’s statement was bad on two levels, public health and politics.

First, public health. For months, Biden and his aides have struggled to persuade Americans to get vaccinated against COVID — and to get boosters, especially if they are 60 or older. The results have been disappointing: Less than half the eligible population has accepted even a single booster. This month, the government rolled out a third booster, optimized for new COVID variants, but fewer than 2% of eligible patients showed up.

“I wish he hadn’t said it,” Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said of Biden’s statement. “It’s not helpful at a time when we’re still trying to get people vaccinated.”

Public health officials are already swapping reports of people who heard Biden’s statement and decided to forgo another vaccination.

Biden’s aides spent much of last week trying to explain. “Look at his whole statement,” White House chief of staff Ron Klain said. “The sentence after ‘the pandemic is over’ is ‘we have a lot of work to do.’”

But that nuance was lost in Biden’s upbeat delivery, which sounded like a claim of victory. That’s why Klain was still explaining a week later.

Almost as bad was the political impact. Republicans in Congress crowed that if Biden believes the pandemic has waned, there’s no reason they should vote for more COVID spending.

Biden and his aides have asked Congress for $22.5 billion to pay for vaccines, testing and therapeutic drugs. The request was already stalled in the Senate; the president’s statement made its prospects even dimmer.

Optimism can be a good trait in a president. Franklin D. Roosevelt reassured Americans that they could prevail over the Depression and World War II. Ronald Reagan made optimism a hallmark of his vote-winning conservatism.

In Biden’s case, though, overpromising has often backfired.

I once asked Biden, when he was vice president, how to recover from a gaffe. (I figured he knew how by then.) “Own it,” he said emphatically. “Own it.”

That’s what the president ought to do now to repair the damage.

The president was right to celebrate the good news: Thanks to vaccines and therapeutic drugs, COVID isn’t as dangerous as it was two years ago. But without more vaccinations and more research, the disease will still cause tens of thousands of needless deaths.

Biden needs to correct his message, and he shouldn’t wait for the midterm election to do it.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

The Chinese economy’s projected growth this year has slowed to about 3%, missing the government’s target of 5.5% by an embarrassingly wide margin.

After decades of galloping expansion, that would be the second-worst performance in more than 40 years. Only 2020, with its COVID-induced recession, was worse.

Unemployment among young workers has ballooned to 20%. Fuel prices are rising thanks to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The overbuilt housing industry is teetering. And President Xi Jinping’s draconian “COVID Zero” lockdowns have created havoc, most recently in technology-heavy Chengdu (population 21 million).

Remember when Americans fretted about China overtaking the United States to claim the title of world’s largest economy? That date has been postponed to 2033 or later, and a few economists suggest it might not happen at all.

Some of those problems may be short term, driven by a slowing global economy and Xi’s refusal to import foreign COVID-19 vaccines.

But China also faces long-term challenges that won’t go away, beginning with an onrushing demographic decline.

The United Nations projects that China’s population will shrink roughly 40% by the end of the century, from 1.4 billion to a mere 800 million or so. Some demographers say the decline will be steeper; either way, India will soon take over as No. 1.

The population decline stems from a low birthrate, which also means China’s population is aging and its workforce shrinking. By 2050, more than a quarter of the population will be older than 65, Australia’s Lowy Institute projects. Lowy expects China’s growth rate to slow to an average of less than 3% over the next three decades as a result.

China-watchers agree on those doleful forecasts. They disagree, though, on what that means for the country’s future and for U.S. policy. How does a rising superpower react when the foundations of its strength appear to be eroding?

Two foreign policy scholars, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins and Michael Beckley of Tufts, have offered a frightening thesis: China’s leaders know their power is about to diminish, and that will make them more likely to take risks in the short run — to invade Taiwan, for example.

China “is losing confidence that time is on its side,” they write in a recent book, “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China.”

“China will have strong incentives to use force against its neighbors … even at risk of war with the United States,” they warn. The “moment of maximum danger,” they suggest, is this decade: the 2020s.

A chorus of other China scholars have disagreed.

First, they note, there’s no evidence that Xi or other leaders believe their power is declining; they continue to predict the rise of China and the decline of the West.

Even if China’s economy slows down, it will be growing — still the second-largest in the world.

“Countries can muddle along with a great deal of poor economic performance and still be a major force in international politics,” noted Aaron L. Friedberg of Princeton, author of “Getting China Wrong.”

Besides, Xi and other Chinese leaders have a strategy for solving their economic challenge, he argued. “They see advances in technology as the key to solving all their problems,” he told me. “That’s how they plan to achieve higher productivity and reasonably high economic growth.”

“We have to do more … to slow down China’s technological development,” he said, beginning with tighter controls on the export to Beijing of U.S. and other Western technology.

A rosier scenario, Friedberg and others noted, is that a slowing economy could induce China’s leaders to devote less spending to military strength and more to improving the lives of the Chinese people.

“We should not assume that a weaker China would be aggressive,” Bonnie S. Glaser of the German Marshall Fund argued. “China could turn inward. Maybe China isn’t as intent on unification with Taiwan as it is on internal stability.”

So the 21st century may not be Chinese after all. China’s rise to global power is neither inevitable nor foreordained.

But even an aging China with a slow-growing economy will be a powerful commercial, technological and military competitor. At least until the end of Xi’s third term in 2027, its leaders will still be ambitious, still bent on absorbing Taiwan, still intent on supplanting the United States as the dominant power in Asia.

China’s challenge is changing its shape, but it isn’t going away.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Trump claimed the law, which sets the rules under which Congress counts electoral votes, allowed then-Vice President Mike Pence to block votes from states that Joe Biden won. Pence refused, which is why the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”

Trump also argued that the law empowers state legislatures to set aside the popular vote at will. He lobbied GOP leaders in swing states to appoint rogue slates of Trump electors, but none played along.

Most legal scholars said Trump misinterpreted the law, but that didn’t stop the former president from nearly touching off a constitutional crisis, if not a coup d’etat.

After Jan. 6, there was broad bipartisan consensus in Congress that the law should be revamped before 2024 to prevent Trump or other candidates from trying those gambits again.

The bipartisan Senate proposal fixes the most glaring flaws in the old statute. It specifies that states must appoint presidential electors based on the laws in place on Election Day — no changing the rules after the game. It requires each state to designate one official (most often the governor) to certify a single legitimate slate of electors — no rogue slates. It allows presidential candidates to challenge any state’s electoral slate in federal court under a fast-track process.

And it sets down in writing what Pence and nearly everyone already believed: The vice president has no power to reject any state’s electoral votes.

You might have expected a commonsense proposal like that to win broad and immediate support beyond the nine Republicans (led by Sen. Susan Collins of Maine) and six Democrats (led by Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia) who negotiated it.

No such luck. In today’s polarized Washington, no outcome is guaranteed — even on a measure to protect the next presidential election from another coup attempt.

On the left, progressive Democrats don’t want to admit that their yearlong effort to pass broader voting rights legislation is dead, and that fixing the Electoral Count Act might be the best they can do. Some bristle at backing a bill written by Collins and Manchin, two of the left’s least-loved senators.

On the right, many Republicans — especially those who face primary elections this year — fear drawing Trump’s wrath if they endorse a bill aimed so squarely at his groundless campaign to delegitimize the 2020 election. The former president denounced the 16 senators last week as “Democrats and RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only).

So it’s already clear that this bill, worthy though it is, will have to wait until after the midterm elections for action.

There are substantive arguments over the bill’s details too. Most involve a long-standing difference between the two parties: In general, Democrats want clearer, detailed rules to govern what states can do, while Republicans want to preserve state autonomy.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., chair of the Senate Rules Committee, has announced that her panel will hold hearings on the legislation soon. Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, are working on their own proposal on behalf of the House Jan. 6 committee — provenance that is almost guaranteed to draw Trump’s ire.

Congress needs to pass some version of this bill by the end of the year; the job will only get harder once the 2024 presidential campaign gets under way. And if the House of Representatives comes under the control of pro-Trump Republicans in November, the bill might simply die. This is no time to let the best be the enemy of the good.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Last month it got a boost from a new source: a conservative Supreme Court majority pushing hot-button issues back to the states — abortion, gun control and environmental regulation, with others likely to come.

Americans were already divided over abortion rights; now, thanks to the court, they get to debate the issue in a dozen or more state legislatures.

The result is a Pandora’s box of new questions: Can a state prohibit its citizens from traveling elsewhere to seek an abortion? From buying mifepristone pills through the U.S. mail? From merely seeking information about abortion options?

The battle won’t be confined within state boundaries. It’s already turning into a virtual war between the states. Texas passed a law allowing its citizens to sue abortion providers in other states if they treat Texan women. California, in return, not only passed a law protecting its citizens from liability for aiding an abortion, but Gov. Gavin Newsom also promised to provide “sanctuary” for out-of-state women seeking the procedure in his state.

Nor is abortion the only question states are contesting. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he’s willing to argue a Roe-style challenge to the 2015 Supreme Court decision that guarantees the right to same-sex marriage. New York’s Legislature passed new gun control regulations last week to counter the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down its restrictive concealed-carry law.

In the Midwest, Democratic Illinois is blaming Republican Indiana for Chicago’s flood of bootleg guns. And despite the court’s decision to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, California plans to press ahead with tougher state regulations.

“It’s very hard to find any area where divisions among states are not growing,” Donald F. Kettl of the University of Maryland, a leading scholar of federalism, said last week. “It’s increasingly the case that the government we get depends on where we live.”

Those widening divergences have prompted some pundits, and even a few scholars, to suggest that the United States is sliding toward a second civil war.

“We clearly are closer to civil war than we were 50 years ago,” Robert D. Putnam of Harvard, an eminent and even-tempered sociologist, told me. “The only comparable period in our history, I think, is 1850-1860” — the decade that led to the Civil War.

One especially troubling factor: Our divisions have become self-reinforcing. Primary elections in gerrymandered districts reward politicians who run as ideological purists, not moderate compromise-seekers. More Americans are telling pollsters they distrust people on the other side of the political divide. Some even decide where to live based partly on political allegiances, a trend first noted by Texas journalist Bill Bishop in his 2008 book “The Big Sort.”

The good news is that protests, litigation and moving to new states are nonviolent actions. They don’t add up to civil war in the Fort Sumter sense.

But smaller-scale political violence is already on the rise, mostly on the extreme right, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. About 1 in 3 Republicans and 1 in 5 Democrats agreed with the statement that “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government,” a poll released last week by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics found.

Few if any reputable scholars think a shooting war is likely soon.

“Our ability to muddle through and find an equilibrium has eroded,” Kettl said. “The danger is that we will slip back into the kind of tensions between the states that occurred in the 1850s. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I’m pretty worried.”

Perhaps the only way to soften these divisions will be through old-fashioned political competition — not only in national elections, but critically also in the state and local elections that Republicans have learned to dominate. It took a generation or more for the tide of polarization to build. Reversing it will be the work of a generation too.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

“We’ve made a commitment,” Biden told reporters at a news conference in Tokyo.

Including military action?

“Yes,” he replied.

That isn’t what U.S. policy on Taiwan says — not officially, at least.

The White House and State Department hurriedly tried to walk back the president’s words.

“Our policy has not changed,” they insisted.

Biden critics called it a gaffe, but the statement wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Biden has used the same language about Taiwan three times in nine months. When a president offers his personal version of policy three times in a row, that pretty much makes it official.

What Biden did was to say openly what has been implicit for several years: The United States is willing to threaten force to deter China from invading Taiwan.

Until now, those hints were couched in a policy known as “strategic ambiguity.” The president made it less ambiguous.

China hawks hailed the rhetorical shift as a welcome burst of clarity. Others worried that it might provoke China toward reckless action.

The Chinese reaction was anger.

Why such a storm over the word “commitment”? A bit of history may help.

China considers Taiwan to be part of its national territory, and so, for many years, did the rulers of Taiwan, the U.S.-backed losers of China’s civil war who fled to the island when the Communists took power in 1949.

In 1979, when President Jimmy Carter recognized Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act. It committed the United States to supply weapons to the island’s government. However, it did not commit the United States to intervene militarily against a Chinese invasion; that was left ambiguous. The idea was to deter China without directly opposing its aspiration to reabsorb Taiwan.

That balance was relatively easy to maintain when China was weaker.

But over the last two decades, China has strengthened and become an assertive regional power.

Chinese officials have derided the United States as a declining power. After the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, one of Beijing’s official newspapers said the lesson for Taiwan was that if war broke out, “the U.S. military won’t come to help.”

That’s when Biden first said publicly that the United States had a commitment to defend Taiwan, much like the U.S. obligation to its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

His intention, then and now, was clear: to make China’s President Xi Jinping think long and hard before considering an invasion.

But by announcing the commitment the way he did, he created consternation in his own foreign policy bureaucracy.

So to make his commitment to Taiwan stick, Biden has work to do. He has already marshaled support from Japan, Australia and other allies. His administration has been prodding Taiwan to upgrade its defenses, taking lessons from Ukraine’s success in fending off a larger invader. And Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is expected to seek more forces in the Pacific.

Paradoxically, though, even as he strengthens deterrence, Biden needs to reassure China that the United States is not covertly encouraging Taiwan to declare independence. That means reaffirming the “One China” policy he mentioned only briefly in his remarks last week and assuring Xi that he means it when he says he doesn’t want to change the status quo.

If he can do all that, last week’s unscripted statement might one day be remembered as a step toward deterring war in Asia — not the moment when Biden inadvertently provoked one.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

It wasn’t the first time.

“If anyone decides to meddle (in Ukraine) and create unacceptable strategic threats for Russia, they must know our response will be lightning-quick,” Putin said Wednesday. “We have all the tools for this … and we will use them if we have to.”

Two days earlier, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered the same message a little more diplomatically.

“The risk is serious, real. It should not be underestimated,” Lavrov said. “Under no circumstances should a third World War be allowed to happen.”

Nuclear saber-rattling is an unattractive habit, and Putin and his aides resort to it often. In 2008, they warned Poland that it would risk annihilation if it joined a U.S.-sponsored missile-defense program. (The Poles joined anyway.) In 2014, they warned that an attempt to push Russia out of Crimea, which they had grabbed from Ukraine, could trigger a nuclear response.

And in February, as he launched his invasion of Ukraine, Putin ordered his unhappy-looking defense minister to raise Russia’s nuclear forces to “strategic combat readiness.”

The elaborate threat appeared intended to frighten the United States and its European allies away from the war. Once again, the threat didn’t work.

U.S. officials said they didn’t take Putin’s threat literally, perhaps because they had heard it before. CIA Director William Burns dismissed it as “rhetorical posturing,” noting that Russia hadn’t visibly readied its nuclear forces.

There is one form of nuclear warfare, however, that Burns and others consider a more imminent threat: tactical nuclear weapons, relatively small warheads designed mainly to be used on a battlefield, not to level an entire city.

“Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Burns said last month.

Russia has more than 2,000 battlefield nuclear weapons, and their use is a routine part of Moscow’s war planning and military training.

Many “low-yield” nukes are almost as powerful as the bomb the United States dropped in 1945 on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000. Some are larger.

The scenario U.S. officials and outside experts worry most about is this:

If Putin faces a humiliating defeat in Ukraine, he might order the use of tactical nuclear weapons against military units or cities to try to shock the Ukrainians into surrendering.

Even if a “low-yield” detonation did not compel Ukraine to surrender, it would break a globally observed taboo on nuclear warfighting that has held, almost miraculously, since 1945.

So President Joe Biden has issued a warning to Putin in return — but it has been deliberately quieter than the Russian threats.

“With respect to any use of weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical, biological — Russia would pay a severe price,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in March.

One diplomat told me he believes Biden has asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Putin’s most important global ally, to send the same message.

Stanford nuclear scholar Scott Sagan has suggested another step — private warnings to Russian military leaders that they would be held responsible for war crimes if they used tactical nuclear weapons against civilian targets.

“The United States has a long history of hunting down war criminals,” he told me. “Russian generals may be reluctant to cross the nuclear threshold … and the United States should reinforce that reluctance by adding very personal reasons for restraint.”

Just as in the bad old days of the Cold War, we are being forced to think the unthinkable.

Part of the answer may be counterintuitive: If Russia uses nuclear weapons, the United States need not — and should not — respond in kind.

U.S. nuclear retaliation could launch a tit-for-tat cycle of escalation and lead to a global holocaust.

And it wouldn’t be necessary. The United States and its allies have conventional weapons that could destroy Russia’s ability to continue the war in Ukraine.

“The response to a tactical nuclear weapon does not have to be nuclear,” Sagan said. “There are lots of conventional responses that would be very harmful to the Russian military. … The Russian base where their nuclear attack originated could be suddenly destroyed, or many Russian warships could be suddenly sunk.”

With luck, those hard questions won’t need to be confronted.

But if Putin is backed into a corner — even though it will be a product of his own brutal mistakes — he’ll be even more dangerous than he is today.

That’s the warning he’s been sending all along.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Russia’s huge but incompetent army has been stymied in its attempts to seize the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and other cities. Ukraine’s defenders have put up a heroic fight, but civilians in besieged towns are suffering a terrible toll. Neither army appears ready to quit.

That, diplomats say, is why the chances for a cease-fire look so dim — even though, oddly enough, the ingredients of a deal to end the war are in plain sight.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy has offered one public concession: He’s willing to abandon his quest for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Putin initially said was the reason for the war.

He has suggested that Ukraine could accept formal “neutrality,” but only if the United States and other countries guarantee its security against another invasion.

Putin may have tacitly lowered his ambitions, too. He initially demanded the “denazification” of Ukraine’s government — his pejorative term for replacing the democratically elected Zelenskyy with a pro-Russian president. In recent weeks, Russian officials have stopped mentioning that demand.

But Putin has other, steeper demands. He has insisted that Zelenskyy accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which Russian troops seized in 2014, and recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Zelenskyy and his aides have rejected those land grabs and have demanded that Russia withdraw from all of Ukraine. But they have offered what one former diplomat called a creative compromise: While they won’t agree formally to Russia’s annexation of any part of their country, they will promise to pursue reunification only by peaceful means.

The underlying problem, current and former U.S. officials said, is that Putin still appears to believe his forces can win.

“Putin doesn’t sound as if he’s decided to settle,” Alexander R. Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, told me.

Ukraine’s forces are running low on the antiaircraft and antitank missiles they used to great effect in the war’s opening weeks.

“The Ukrainians have been heroic, but they can’t go on forever,” he said. “They need a faster supply process. … That, more than anything else, will contribute to a decision by Putin to negotiate.”

It’s not too early, he said, for U.S. diplomats to consider what the elements of a peace settlement should be — because some of them will involve pledges from our side.

“The hardest part will be security guarantees for Ukraine,” he said.

The United States and its allies won’t provide the sort of defense guarantee that NATO membership brings, he said, but they should consider formalizing their current security relationship with Ukraine: guarantees of military supplies, intelligence help and economic aid.

“It could include limits: no foreign bases in Ukraine, no offensive weapons that could threaten Russia. But the Ukrainians should have the right to a robust army that will receive assistance from other countries when they need it.”

Aid to Ukraine, as well as sanctions on Moscow, may be needed for years — a daunting prospect for European countries that depend on Russia for gas and oil.

But a full-scale peace agreement will be difficult to negotiate, in part because of those insoluble territorial disputes, Vershbow warned.

“They might just revert to a state of no war, no peace. … It could leave the two countries in a long-term, low-level conflict. That’s the most depressing scenario, but maybe the most likely one.”

Neither side will triumph. Both sides will be damaged, battered, angry and resentful. The hard part will be ensuring that whatever truce they negotiate can be made to stick — to ensure that this isn’t just the first chapter in a much longer war.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. 

Invasions may be harder than they look.

It’s unwise to go to war with an army that hasn’t had much practice against serious opponents.

The United States and its allies may appear divided, but they can still pull together in a crisis.

And when ordinary people decide to defend their homes, they can put up a surprisingly good fight.

Those lessons could have practical impact half a world away from Ukraine in the standoff between China and Taiwan.

Regaining Taiwan has been a major goal of China’s ruling Communist Party since it took power in 1949. China’s president, Xi Jinping, regularly reconfirms that he intends to return Taiwan to the motherland — by peaceful means if possible, by unpeaceful means if not.

So it’s reasonable to assume Xi and his aides have been paying close attention to the problems their quasi-ally Vladimir Putin has encountered in his brutal campaign to restore Russia’s control over its smaller neighbor, Ukraine.

In some ways, Taiwan looks like an easier target than Ukraine. It is smaller — 24 million people, not 44 million. Its military is one-tenth the size of China’s, and it hasn’t built the kind of territorial defense force Ukraine is using to great effect right now. Meanwhile,

But Taiwan has advantages Ukraine didn’t have.

The Taiwan Strait is more than 100 miles wide, which would make an amphibious invasion daunting.

Taiwan has a security commitment from the United States — not as strong as the treaty that pledges the United States to defend NATO allies, but more than Ukraine had. (President Joe Biden made a point of mentioning it in his conversation with Xi on Friday.)

Finally, the United States has a more direct economic interest in Taiwan than in Ukraine; Taipei is a major trading partner, the source of more than half of the world’s high-end microchips.

The biggest surprise in Ukraine beyond the poor performance of Russia’s army has been the success of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, its army of reservists and unevenly trained civilians.

“That’s the real lesson of Ukraine for Taiwan: You need civilians who know how to use a rifle,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund. “Taiwan could easily do something like that, but they haven’t.”

Taiwan cut the size of its regular army and reduced the training of its reserves. It invested in high-end weapons beloved by military brass, like F-16s and Abrams tanks, instead of more mundane tools that might deter a shipborne invader: anti-aircraft weapons, anti-ship missiles and advanced mines.

Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, has embraced the U.S. argument, at least rhetorically.

But progress has been slow. Tsai has promised to increase defense spending to 3% of gross domestic project from the current 2.1% (the U.S. spends about 3.5%). But even after Taiwan’s legislature approved more defense spending, it will take more than five years to get there.

So U.S. officials have privately been pressing another lesson from Ukraine: The United States and other countries can help Taiwan defend itself, but only if the Taiwanese show that they are ready and willing to fight.

The longer Ukraine shows that a determined population can make an invasion costly, it is giving small countries like Taiwan a model of how to defend themselves — and with luck, deter the next invasion before it begins.

If so, the terrible toll of Ukraine’s war might yield at least one positive side effect: It’s just possible that this conflict may have reduced the chances of a conflict in Asia.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist  ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.