What If the Nazis Had Nukes?
Or, How Allowing Appeasement 2.0 Is Especially Dangerous in the Nuclear Age
First, before I discuss Ukraine, let me say a quick word about Trump, Israel, and Gaza. In my last article on the subject, you may recall that I said the following:
“Maybe Trump’s crazy proposal [of an American takeover of Gaza] was tailor-made to make Netanyahu’s seem tame by comparison. Maybe the notion of having the U.S. take over Gaza was and is a distraction to make an Israeli takeover of Gaza sound more plausible.”
True to form, Trump recently has said he’s only going to “recommend” his plan to expel Gazans from Gaza. More importantly, though, he openly wondered why Israel would ever “give up” such a “great location.”
Trump is not only a puppet of Putin, he’s a puppet of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich as well. Even if—and it is still an if, sadly—Trump never goes through with a forcible U.S. takeover of Gaza, he has laid the foundation for a full Israeli takeover.
Okay, we’ll leave more on that for later. Let’s talk about Ukraine. I am sure you all heard the news: under Trump and Musk and Vance’s “leadership,” America has taken a hard turn towards appeasement.
Why should you care? Well, of course, I could give you all a run down of the quite eerie parallels between Putin’s bogus reasons for invading Ukraine and Adolf Hitler’s bogus reasons for invading Czechoslovakia in 1938. And maybe, if I spelled out those parallels in enough detail, I could convince many of you to accept the high stakes of the moment we are in.
But I will leave that for historian Timothy Snyder. He has beaten me to the punch, so to speak.
So instead, I wanted to ask you all a simple question: what if the Nazis had nukes?
Too often, I have seen my Instagram feed filled with posts making the new argument for appeasement. Don’t cross those damned Russians, they say. No matter what they are doing, they still have nukes. Why should we “start World War III” to fight for the Ukrainians and their rights? We’ve got enough to worry about.
I understand that many American voters may agree with that sentiment. Which is why I ask again, what if the Nazis had nukes in 1938?
If you had lived in such a world, when would you have said, “enough is enough?” When the Nazi forces invaded Czechoslovakia? Austria? Poland? When the Nazi government started rounding up the Jews and labeled them with Stars of David? When they started crowding all the Jews in their “custody” into ghettos?
When the Nazis took over France? When they readied themselves to take over Britain and probably the rest of free Europe with it?
Or perhaps after the horrific Nazi response to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? After the Nazis began making the preparations for the Final Solution? After the first mass killings of the Final Solution began at Bergen-Belsen? Or at Auschwitz-Birkenau? Buchenwald? Dachau?
Where would you draw the line? How many Jews and Roma and disabled people and political prisoners would need to die?
Where would have Roosevelt, Churchill, or the many unsung heroes of World War II have drawn the line? Would they have rather risked nuclear war, or would they have rather risked living in a world so oppressive and evil that we could only wish it were a nuclear wasteland?
Luckily, the heroes of the past did not have to answer those questions. Yet that does not mean we have to accept the rule of madmen like Putin who want to recreate the Russian Empire and enforce their will on all the rest of us. That does not mean that we must let our 21st century Hitler run roughshod over the right of every man and every people to live in freedom and dignity.
Fortunately, no matter how hard Trump tries to act as Putin’s mouthpiece, Russia is weaker than it lets on. Much weaker. Much, much weaker. Their economy is broken, their army has suffered enormous losses approaching 1 million casualties, they faced international isolation pre-Trump, and they had to beg North Korea for weapons and troops. All this to gain approximately 20% of Ukraine after 3 years of warfare while outnumbering Ukrainian forces 10-to-1. Keep in mind the original goal was to overrun 100% of Ukraine within days.
At the end of the day, that probably means we will not have to give up our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren to stop Putin’s aggression. That is, should we still choose to let Ukraine fight their war on their terms.
Otherwise, we may find ourselves letting Putin dictate his terms for avoiding World War III. When he’s blasting through the villages and cities of our NATO allies, requiring American boots to be on the ground under Article V of NATO.
In fact, recent reporting and intelligence reports from Denmark’s Intelligence Service and Estonia’s foreign ministry suggests that the preparations for a Putin attack against NATO are already happening. And “the length and outcome of the Ukraine war would be determining factors in whether that wider war [is] pursued.”
That is our choice: try to stop Putin now or risk wider war in Europe and beyond. Nukes or no nukes, “here we stand; we can do no other.”