Avoiding nuclear war is not appeasment, it is compromise and statesmanship. We (the US) used to understand that.

We had decades of detente with the Soviet Union. Why? Because the had fucking nuclear weapons. It both is and isn't rocket science. Same thing with China, even North fucking Korea.

But since the fall of the Soviet Uniion. insanely stupid and arrogant people seem to think that because Russia is not as conventionally strong as the Soviet Union was, their 6000 fucking nuclear missles just don't matter. That is, again, insanely stupid.

Russia has been angered by NATO expansion since the 1990s. Putin explicitly called Ukraine a red line starting in 2008. Nuclear powers get a sphere of influence. That is just fucking reality.

If Hitler had had nukes in 1942 before the US, you can be sure that there would have been no Normandy landing, and Europe would have flown the Nazi flag until the government collapsed under the weight of its own corruption, as eventually happened in the USSR, and arguably is happening in the US right now.

I certainly understand that the Ukrainians will die for their own country. I, for one, am not willing to die for Ukraine.