Well when you have
i) Dead Russian servicemen
ii) Excesses against a despised minority. This being Europe it’s a guarantee is going to happen. Even if they are limited like say to the levels of Bloody Sunday of 1972 in N Ireland. Now imagine Bloody Sunday, in the era of Social media…
Events might get out of even Vlad the Bad’s hands.
ETA reply to Ravenman’s post no 39 above.
I don’t know precisely what you mean by ‘in the past’, but it was a very common rationale for both American and Soviet interventions during the Cold War (which certainly counts as the nuclear era).
Civil wars are also much more common than international wars, so if there is a sort of crisis that NATO feels like they might need to respond to its more likely to involve a Vietnam-type civil war than a Korean War style invasion of one country by another.
I’ve just explained why losing Crimea would be a threat to them. Losing the Black Sea base to NATO would be a significant threat.
Crimea was a part of Russia up to to 1954, when it was handed to Ukraine for administrative reasons only. It has always been seen as part of Russia, so from a Russian point of view it wasn’t ‘annexing’ part a foreign country, but preventing what had always been Russian from being lost.
It has not always been part of Russia, since Ukraine has been a fully independent country since 1990, and well before that. Putin and other nationalists put out lies to justify aggression for a piece of land they want – you can say all you want about how people can understand where the Russians are coming from, but what they did is still naked aggression. There were people who could understand where the Germans were coming from with respect to the Sudetenland, too.
And it was Turkish before it was Russian (admittedly mostly as a place to get Sultan some buxom bedwarmers, but it was Turkish), so lets just hand it to Erdogan.
There are perfectly understandable strategic reasons why Russian felt it acted the way it did. And even more understandable strategic reasons why the US and NATO reacted the way they did. No need to bring morality into it.
A major difference is that pre-WWI both sides had reason to believe they would win and had their own desires to go to war. In the current situation, a full scale conflict between Russia and NATO inevitably ends in Russia’s defeat. And, NATO doesn’t have any desire or goal that could be achieved through war. In short, Russia has no incentive to go to war because they would lose badly and NATO has no incentive to go to war because there is nothing for them to gain.
For what reason(s) would it inevitably ends in Russia’s defeat? Russia’s military is not up to par with NATO in general terms but it may not need to be. It spent decades planning for war in central Europe, would largely be defending, have short supply lines and has been busy minimizing the effects of NATO’s air superiority.
I would say that hundreds of nuclear missiles raining down on Moscow counts as a loss for the Russkis, even if Washington DC and London and Paris also get a light dusting of nuclear isotopes.
I don’t agree that a NATO-Russia war should be expected to end in nuclear war. It really depends on the scenario. For example, let’s say Russia does the little green men invasion of the Baltics. If NATO responds and starts creaming those guys left and right, but NATO doesn’t go into Russian territory, would Russia want to escalate the war to the point that nuclear weapons start being used? I have a hard time seeing that.
Even if Russia rolls into Poland in a big way, let’s say they don’t use tactical nukes to soften up NATO defenses. If/when NATO pushes them back, and NATO doesn’t seek to go beyond Poland’s borders, would Russia want to launch nukes? Doesn’t make sense to me – why destroy your own country in the exchange when the stakes are entirely about the hypothetical Russian domination of Poland?
This is a massive exaggeration. Are NATO members committed to mutual defense under Article 5? Yes. Does this mean the slightest provocation leads to all-out global nuclear holocaust? No.
If Russia sent an armored vehicle into Estonia by mistake, what would likely happen would be that the vehicle would be intercepted by Estonian forces, who would tell it to …go back to Russia.
There might be a small diplomatic row, but nothing more.
Ok, the scenario is the vehicle crosses the border by accident. The Estonians intercept it, but due to a misunderstanding and itchy trigger fingers, the BMP guns down the Estonian troops. They engage it with more troops and eventually destroy it but it manages to get across the border before getting destroyed by a missile. Putin gets mad, claims the russian servicemen in the vehicle were killed for no reason, and fires an artillery barrage at Estonia to get revenge. The Estonians shoot back and scream for NATO to send reinforcements. Thousands of U.S. troops are airlifted in, and in the artillery fire exchange, some of them are killed…
Meanwhile, in reality, a Russian missile shot down a commercial airliner departing a NATO country, for no reason whatsoever, and nothing happened.
And putting the shoe on the other foot, the Turkish military fairly recently deliberately and knowingly shot down a Russian fighter killing one crewman. And nothing happened.
A lot of people seem to think that escalation is automatic, kneejerk, and inevitable. Is it possible? Yes. Is it automatic or inevitable? Nope.
I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops
Well, Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey “coincidentally” started getting the latest Russian MANPADS a few months later.
Agreed.
As well, there was a Western reaction to the MH17 shootdown. Which was a combo of sanctions and diplomacy and probably some black ops inside Ukraine.
What there was *not * in either case was prompt escalation in the two-tits-for-a-tat style that some folks up-thread were suggesting leads directly and inevitably to WWIII.
To be sure, the use of aggressive “hybrid warfare” by non-*status quo *powers such as Putin’s Russia poses hard dilemmas for mostly conventional mostly *status quo *powers such as the US and NATO.
Even the more functional parts of the UN and the foreign affairs punditocracy doesn’t really have a good vocabulary, much less a good response, for overt but vaguely deniable and loudly denied aggressive acts by supposedly irregular forces plus internet vigilantes.
One of the iron laws of competition is that a tactic that lacks a good countertactic will keep being used more and more until and unless a countertactic is developed.
I’d definitely be buying “hybrid warfare futures” if somebody was selling them. I’d make a killing. Probably in more ways than one. 
NATO collectively spends 10x what Russia does on defense. There’s just no comparison in terms of equipment and training quality.
No, that’s a dilemma. A Hobson’s choice is take what is offered or nothing at all.