This is the Catered Daily podcast for Wednesday, December 4th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The war in Ukraine has become vastly more complicated than when it began nearly two years ago.

U.S. involvement has escalated in that time as forces from both North and South Korea have now entered the picture.

Itters Eric Gomez evaluates a state of play in light of the looming transition of the U.S. presidential administration.

Eric, I think you and I have talked about this maybe a couple of times now. And the introduction of several different

military forces into the same military theater poses a lot of risks for all of them.

The possibility of miscommunication, of not having all your ducks in a row, as it were, creates the opportunity for disastrous miscommunication and the kinds of things that, dare I say it, led the United States into World War I?

Is that a fair parallel?

I think it's a decent parallel.

Yeah, I actually spent some time earlier this year learning a lot about American involvement in World War I.

And I think there's definitely some similarities to the Ukraine conflict.

You know, this, we've been somewhat successful so far over the last almost three years now

in supporting Ukraine in a careful way, but I think that the longer

this conflict goes, the harder that tightrope is going to be to walk. And then over the last,

you know, very short period of time time we've seen the North Koreans enter this

conflict with troops on the ground. That's a very big deal. The use of, you know, Biden authorizing

the use of American weapons to hit targets deeper into Russia, the Brits doing the same thing,

and then the Russians responding almost immediately with the use of an intermediate range

missile to hit targets in Ukraine with a pretty clear signal that, hey, you know, if you keep

doing this, then the West is going to be

accepting a lot more nuclear risk.

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