No, you’re bringing morality into this when it doesn’t belong. You’re confusing your feelings of moral justification for strategic justification.

Lol, now you’re sounding like fucking Brookings institute. Strategically speaking, one of the risk of starting a war on your border is the inevitable blowback on the home soil. Especially when that nation is being supplied by western nations.

If a geopolitical rival provides that invaded country with the means to launch missile strikes into your territory, the response will be the same.

According to whom? Ukraine has already made strikes on Russian territory with the help of western weapons, what was the rebuttal? It’s strategic gamesmanship, there are no rules set in stone.

Your tendency to base major decisions on feelings of moral outrage or self righteousness are not how war planning is or should be done. It reeks of the condescending assumption that it is the job of America to be world police, and punish the wrongdoers.

Lol, I don’t plan wars… nor is this a moral policing action by America. Russia is competition to US interest, they are taking out a competitor. It’s not a moral decision, it’s an economic one. I’m just pointing out two wrongs don’t make a right.

Officer America thinks Putin has been caught being naughty. Your desire to punish him will always have to be weighed against the possibility of nuclear Armageddon

I’m not saying they’ve been caught being naughty… I’m saying that America has been itching to do away one of the main competitions to us foreign interest for decades. Russia has largely avoided this confrontation by projecting their hard power via irregular military forces in locations the American public don’t care about.

This scenario is different, as it is being done with regular military in a country with a large immigrant population in the US, who are perceived as white, and Christian. Putin overplayed his hand and is now engaged in a sunk cost fallacy of his own making.

Your desire to punish him will always have to be weighed against the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.

As his desire for expansion needs to be weighed against the possibility of nuclear Armageddon… mutually assured destruction implies a mutual responsibility to maintain the status quo. You are basically arguing in favor for Nixon’s madman theory of foreign diplomacy, which didn’t work for him either.