Yeah no, it would be bananas to engage Russia directly. We engaged in plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War, we never went direct.

> We engaged in plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War, we never went direct.

In fact, we went direct fairly regularly, but only in circumstances where we (or they, or, in a few cases both) maintained superficial (not always really plausible, as both sides would often protect the fiction to avoid escalation) deniability.

That is why, for instance, radio intercepts of North Korean pilots in the Korean War showed they tended to switch from Korean to Russian a lot under stress.

Haha interesting! I thought that we usually stopped at providing weapons, training, etc. I wonder if there’s something similar possible here.