Howard Stoffer of the University of New Haven argued that "if someone's in the no-fly zone, you can't just chase them out, you have to shoot them down", further asking if "we really have the national commitment to go to war with Russia, and I don't think we do."[23] Joshua Pollack of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies argued that "in all likelihood, NATO's conventional superiority would soon present Putin with a stark choice: Either accept a humiliating defeat or unleash some version of the nuclear option that he is already brandishing," and that "if we are to safeguard the values of free societies, those societies must continue to exist."[24]