One-sided avoidance of war can be counterproductive and make everything worse. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Ukraine since 2022 because the respo

One-sided avoidance of war can be counterproductive and make everything worse. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Ukraine since 2022 because the response to the initial invasion in 2014 focused too much on avoiding confrontation, which was taken as a sign of weakness to exploit. Up until the day of the invasion in February 2022, something as simple as deploying US airborne forces to Kyiv for exercises could have prevented the war. Biden chose to avoid confrontation, and here we are now, in the fourth year of the war.