This is in response to an article from Max Boot, who is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and regular contributor to The Washington Post; in fact from that newspaper’s edition of December 15 entitled To deter a Russian attack, Ukraine needs to prepare for guerrilla warfare. Boot is also the author of a near-idolatrous biography of the notorious Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken. Like new Cold War fellow travellers Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan and others he has gravitated from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party in recent years.

In his recent article he states that Europe is threatened with “the prospect of its biggest war since 1945.” The explicit intent of such alarmist hyperbole, of course, is to evoke the “if Hitler had been stopped in time” theme and all its attendant physical and moral panic.

After musing pro forma on efforts short of war to address the above issue, for example targeting (his ambiguous term) the Nord Stream 2 project, “go[ing] after the ill-gotten gains that Putin and his cronies have stashed in the West” and kicking Russia out (his words again) of the SWIFT international bank transactions system, he rejects them all as not sufficiently effective, which is to say not bellicose enough, and instead advocates the military option. As though that conclusion wasn’t eminently predictable the second one read his name appended to the piece in question.

He regrets that the Biden administration has ruled out the deployment of American troops to fight their Russian opposite numbers on or near the Ukrainian border; he more accurately could have written that Biden has not directly said he would order such a deployment, or not just at this moment. Though Boot does acknowledge, however inadequate such contributions are in his view, that Washington has already provided its client regime in Kiev with $2.5 billion in military aid and has 150 troops in Ukraine training the nation’s NATO-interoperable armed forces. How woefully short of Boot’s expectations such half-measures are anyone remotely familiar with his biography will realize.

Quoting NBC News, he asserts that the Pentagon could immediately (“tomorrow”) ship “air defense systems, antiship missiles, more Javelin antitank missiles, electronic jamming gear, radar systems, ammunition, upgraded artillery munitions and medical supplies” to the war zone near Russia’s border.

But as even such a Pentagon-armed nation would likely not win a major military conflict with Russia, he urges a scenario in which “Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers.”

He assures readers that “They have done it before,” celebrating the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in fighting Soviet Russia from 1942 well into post-war years. Boot, who is Jewish, acknowledged that his heroes “cooperated with Nazi invaders,” but hastily absolved them by claiming they later withdrew from the alliance, though he was also forced to concede that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was guilty of “massacring and ethnically cleansing the Polish population in western Ukraine.” But such minor peccadilloes in no manner diminish the author’s advocacy of it as a prototype of what he recommends now.

As a more successful model of what he advocates, Boot cites the Afghan Mujahideen, which he is pleased to remind his readers were handsomely funded, armed and trained by Washington. America’s backing of armed Islamic extremists in Afghanistan might appear to be both ill-timed and ill-advised at the moment, but then so too is praising the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Everything is justifiable in his view, is morally mandatory, when it’s a question of combating Russia, after all.

He also cites a Ukrainian general claiming that there are a full half million Ukrainians with military training and combat experience (in some instances veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) among the civilian population that could be armed as the backbone of a guerrilla force to be used against Russia – and of course against the Donetsk and Lugansk republics and Belarus.

Again, nothing is ever bellicose enough for Boot. He rhetorically asks: “But why wait for a Russian invasion to make these preparations? The Ukrainian government needs to start distributing weapons now and, with the help of U.S. and other Western military advisers, training personnel to carry out guerrilla warfare.”

Indeed, why wait for another nation to start an avoidable war when you can do it yourself? To return to his advocacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) model of World War II, he further recommends that the U.S. and NATO caretaker regime of Volodymyr Zelensky amass and construct arms caches and depots, tunnels, bomb shelters and bunkers “in wooded areas and in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, a UPA stronghold in the 1940s.”

Someone decidedly appears nostalgic for the way World War II might have ended rather than the way it did.

And in the manner that the Mujahideen were provided arms and training in Pakistan from the late 1970s until they took control of Kabul in 1992, Boot urges Ukraine’s NATO neighbors – Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia – to provide havens, training camps, arms depots, advisors, etc. – to the new Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In what is more than a parallel, an Afghan friend of several decades standing suggests that in the event of the sort of protracted guerrilla warfare scenario Boot envisions being implemented in Ukraine, Islamic extremists could be deployed there after the manner of Turkey employing mercenaries trained in Syria for use in the wars in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. That is, in addition to those who have been fighting in the war in Donbass since its inception.

In fact Turkey regularly condemns alleged Russian persecution of ethnic Tatars in Crimea and annually commemorates what it calls the Tatar genocide of World War II and its aftermath. Just as fighting erupted in the Russian North Caucasus (Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia) not long after Afghanistan fell to the Mujahideen in 1992 and the Taliban in 1996, so now thousands of jihadis in Afghanistan have been freed up to be redeployed against Russia as needed. Boot’s coupling of World War II-era Nazi collaborators and Afghan-based Islamist fighters is not such a farfetched proposition.

In his Washington Post feature, the concluding words are: “The threat of guerrilla warfare is the most potent deterrent to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it is one that Ukraine and its supporters in the West need to play up to make Putin think twice before he launches another war of aggression.”

That such words appear in one of the two major newspapers in the U.S., one which is an all-but-official mouthpiece of the government, should serve as a wake-up call for the far-too-complacent Russian government and for a somnolent world that is sleepwalking into a potential nuclear catastrophe.