In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait in a naked war of territorial aggression. The next year, the US and an allied coalition intervened under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council, repulsing the Iraqi invasion. Today, as Russia is engaged in a similar aggressive war against Ukraine, there is no similar American effort in the offing — even as Ukrainian leaders have pleaded for Western assistance.
There are many dissimilarities between the situations in 1991 and 2022, but the biggest one is this: Saddam Hussein, rather famously, did not have nuclear weapons. Vladimir Putin…
