Germany offers to send fighters to Poland as U.S. bombers fly over Korea

(Originally published Nov. 21 in “What in the World“) Germany will provide Poland with one of Raytheon’s Patriot anti-missile systems after a stray missile landed in a village along Ukraine’s border. While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization maintains the missile was an errant Ukrainian air-defense missile, Berlin has also offered to send Luftwaffe fighter jets to help patrol Polish airspace against Russian incursion.

Ukraine’s allies have thus used the incident, an explosion they maintain was caused by “friendly fire,” to justify a further buildup of NATO forces in Eastern Europe, which is the principal rationale Russian President Vladimir Putin used for invading Ukraine in the first place.

It was 83 years ago that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, saying the Poles were persecuting ethnic Germans and were planning to help the West dismember Germany. Putin invaded Ukraine to stop what he said was the persecution of Russian speakers there and head off NATO’s eastward expansion and the threat posed to Russia by its decadent progressive cultural values.

The West is busy playing its own golden oldies, having revived the domino theory from its treasure chest of Cold War tropes to frame the struggle in Ukraine. We fight in Ukraine to defend democracy everywhere against dictators, who U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned at the Halifax International Security Forum Saturday (before then jumping on a plane and burning the fossil fuels required to fly 15,600km to Indonesia) might be inspired by Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons there to seek atomic bombs of their own.

“They could well conclude that getting nuclear weapons would give them a hunting license of their own,” Austin said. “And that could drive a dangerous spiral of nuclear proliferation.”

Never mind that most of the world’s baddies already have nukes or are already in the process of developing them. North Korea, for example, fired an intercontinental ballistic missile on Friday into the Sea of Japan, the latest in a record-setting year in Pyongyang’s ongoing war against the ocean.

What imagined provocation set North Korea off this time? Apparently, it was the summit meeting last weekend in Cambodia between South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and U.S. President Joe Biden. It should be disturbing that these launches are now so frequent—more than 30 this year and counting—that they’re becoming old hat. After the launch, the U.S. scrambled B-1B bombers over South Korea, a demonstration of power that would have been more impressive had it not just done the same thing two weeks ago without apparently making a dent in Pyongyang’s desire to bombard the sea.

The more ordinary these auto-combative acts become, the more North Korea hones its ability to delivery deadly payloads on real human targets. Friday’s ICBM apparently has enough range to hit targets in the United States and made North Korean leader Kim Jong-un so proud that he used the test launch as a debut for his daughter, who had never before been seen in public.

Iran, which has long been trying to develop its own nuclear weapons, has agreed to provide Russia with designs and components so it can start building more kamikaze Iranian drones in Russia for use against Ukraine.