Maybe, though it is still to be seen. One of the more "interesting" sub-games in the bigger war is how much support NATO is willing to give to Ukraine. The English sending MANPADS is apparently fine, even though Russia said beforehand that they would regard the delivery of weapons an act of war. The Polish jets were a step too far. USA sending over drones (sorry, "loitering munitions") and anti tank weapons is apparently still OK.

The same logic that works against the West has also been working against Putin: "what are you going to do about it; escalate into WW3?"

The problem with the Polish jets was apparently that they planned to fuel and load them from a German airbase. It wouldn't really matter that the planes only were flown by Ukraine pilots. The German airbase would still be a legitime military target.

And then NATO would have to respond when cruise missiles started flying into some of their member states.

The problem with the jets is that everyone involved thinks that they are a bad idea whose military utility isn't worth the degree of provocation no matter what route they are supplies through, but no one wanting to be the country to say no to Ukraine about it; all the maneuvering was about countries making it so someone else would have to be the one to say no.

The US finally said no to the specific plan, and put forth the general rationale for the more general no when it did so.

(OTOH, the tolerance for acts that might be seen as provocation by Russia among NATO countries—at least those on the Eastern flank—is going up rapidly, with Estonia and Lithuania calling for a NATO-enforces No Fly Zone, and Poland hold-my-beering them and calling for a NATO peacekeeping force in Ukraine.)

Except US was the initiator of the whole idea with Blinken doing press rounds for over a week telling everyone how he negotiated this deal with Polish gov.

The problem with Polish MIGs was deferring the decisions entirely into US hands and exposing all talk and no will, at least when no profits are to be made by US arms manufacturers /1. All of a sudden something "obvious and imminent" became "complicated and untenable".

/1 Of the declared $800mil Anti armor launchers account for ~$400mil, then the other $400mil pays for some small arms, personal armor, ammo and 100 drones? Its pure mil complex walfare program.

AFAIK it was an American base in Germany. Americans were ok with Poland donating their planes to Ukraine, but not ok with Poland donating their planes to the US to donate to Ukraine.

Yes, because of a simple reason - NATO will only defend its members if they didn't "provoke" the other side to attack. Poland is in a far too precarious position to risk anything that could be read as provoking Russia and therefore losing the protection of NATO - Putin would happily take Poland next after Ukraine. Giving the jets to US and then US giving them to Ukraine would avoid that particular issue, but US decided against it.

Poland is already a NATO state, the Russians could just bomb the Polish airbase instead even if they didn't go through Germany.

The significance was that they needed to be based in a NATO country, and not in Ukraine. I agree that it wouldn’t make much of a difference if it was Poland or Germany.

>The same logic that works against the West has also been working against Putin: "what are you going to do about it; escalate into WW3?"

It's not so much that putin doesn't have the balls to escalate into WW3, it's that supplying weapons isn't considered very escalatory (for all sides involved), so putin is more likely to let it slide rather than escalate himself. It's not something that can universally extended (eg. to no fly zone or boots on the ground).

> It's not so much that putin doesn't have the balls to escalate into WW3, it's that supplying weapons isn't considered very escalatory

It wasn't seen as too likely to effect the conflict, but as the conflict drags out it becomes a greater irritant. Russia is recently openly threatening to attack “supply lines” of those arms if they continue; since anything in Ukraine is already clearly subject to attack this at least implicitly is a threat to potentially attack convoys and logistics points outside of Ukraine.