Liberal governing elites in the West have for over a century argued that militant activists should not use violence against corporations or the government, because these elites claim that physical force is only justified if there is a direct threat that can only be stopped by using violence in order to protect innocent people against an imminent attack. If a conflict is large and complex however, they argue that political violence is not justified, since it may lead to unforeseen consequences that are very harmful in the long run. The Ukraine War is an extremely complex situation, so NATO better have a very good theory of why it's necessary to risk WW3, a nuclear holocaust, when interfering militarily in this conflict, a conflict that originally started as a small civil war in the eastern part of Ukraine.
NATO claims that it was necessary to intervene militarily, by giving smart weapons and battlefield intelligence to Ukraine, when Russia attacked Ukraine in Feb 2022, but this ignores the very long run-up to this tragic war, a conflict that started when NATO began to expand eastward in 1999. A development which political realists said was risky and dangerous, a fateful error, in the words of George Kennan in 1997. I'm not going to repeat all the realist arguments presented elsewhere here on drone-surveillance.info, but a quick summary of the realist position is clarifying:
1) NATO should not have expanded to begin with in the late 1990s, because it had a very destabilizing effect in Europe, as proven by the Ukraine War, 2) after the overthrow of the democratically elected president Yanukovych in 2014, Ukraine should have remained a genuinely neutral country, like Switzerland, without any security guarantees from Western major powers, because such guarantees are in reality a pro-Western alliance, not true neutrality, 3) once the war started, NATO countries should have deescalated this unnecessary war that could have been easily avoided if Western diplomats had been sensible prior to Russia's clearly unethical invasion of Ukraine, 4) now the war has escalated to a point where political realists think it's unlikely that a diplomatic solution is possible, since both Russia and NATO have invested so much in the war that both refuse to back down, and 5) political realists only warn against NATO's involvement in the Ukraine War because it can lead to a nuclear holocaust, which means that realists would basically not have cared about this war unless there was a risk of WW3, similar to how we would not have cared much if NATO had interfered in less consequential wars, in Ethiopia or Yemen for example, so the realist position is not anti-NATO in itself but instead very skeptical when NATO's expansionism goes so far that it can trigger a nuclear war.
To learn more about the realist narrative watch this excellent presentation:
John J. Mearsheimer: Great Power Politics in the 21st Century & The Implications for Hungary
NATO is using violence, when sending smart weapons that escalate the war in Ukraine, so NATO has the burden of proof when claiming that this belligerent policy is the best one. NATO however can't prove that its own policy is the best in Ukraine as long as neocons/neoliberals are unable to refute the narrative presented by political realists. This competing narrative is not easily refuted, as proven by the fact that political realism is one of the two main schools in political science, and Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chigaco, is invited to debates organized by Western elites, as seen here for example. It sows doubt about NATO's policy in Ukraine when neocons/neoliberals are not able to refute the realist narrative, and this unavoidable doubt is (arguably) sufficient to show that NATO should not use violence in Ukraine, since the conflict is large and very complex with unforeseen consequences that can be extremely harmful: nuclear war.
US-led NATO has clearly shown its incompetency, in the Middle East after 2001, so if you still believe that NATO has a right to violently interfere in complex and large conflicts, then it follows logically that militant activists may have the same right to use violence beyond the clear limits set by the judicial rules of necessity and self-defense in Western penal codes.
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