It’s so strange to me when articles talk about Poland being invaded by Russia without even mentioning NATO. It’s a whole lot harder to imagine Russia invading Poland than a non-NATO nation like Ukraine.
I have zero doubt we’d invoke Article V immediately and even if we were lucky and nuclear war was not the result, Russia’s conventional forces are at an order of magnitude more of a disadvantage to the west.
From the russian view they are fighting an exiatential threat here though. They need to get off the plain to a shrunken border they can defend and that means being in poland and also going a bit further south to natural chokepoints. The alternative is joining the wwstern party and that means elections and reforms that would inevitably remove most of the current elite from power and decimate their earnings. Further their demographics are waning to the point they wont be able to field much of an army in the coming decades vs now so that outs more pressure on them to respond now. To me its strange to think it will stop here now that russia has paid such a high price. Its do or die time for their elites.
If there's an existential threat to Russia, it's not military, and for the same reason. They have over 5,000 nuclear warheads too. Nobody is invading them. They know that. They are still showing off bigger, scarier missiles.
They won't go pay an exponentially higher price by invading a nuclear state, which, thanks to NATO, is what they'd be doing invading Poland. It's strange to think there's not a substantial difference between invading a non-NATO, non-nuclear state and one that is.
I also believe that. People locally are quite more wary understandably so, given history, but I also believe Poland, a EU and NATO country would not be invaded as lightly. Even from the logistical point of view, Poland has borders with many friendly countries and shipments of weapons and personnel would be to easy for the relatively weak Russian conventional forces. All this unless a Ribbentrop-Molotov happens again but I dont see it.
Right. And I totally understand why the people of Poland would not just blindly assume NATO would keep them safe. Nobody should leave their security to others.
It’s just strange to me when people act like it isn’t a huge part of the calculus, or that invading a NATO nation is an obvious next move for Russia, when 70 years of history indicates otherwise.
The contingency feared by Western planners is Russia invading while the US is unable or unwilling to come to Poland's aid. The two most obvious scenarios are Trump getting elected and withdrawing the US from NATO (either officially, or by using his authority as commander in chief to refuse to deploy US forces in support of Article V), or US forces being tied up in a war with China. European nations would probably help, but European militaries don't have the same expeditionary capabilities as the US so they'd probably be limited in how much they could practically do.
I have zero doubt we’d invoke Article V immediately and even if we were lucky and nuclear war was not the result, Russia’s conventional forces are at an order of magnitude more of a disadvantage to the west.