Trump’s Team Should Shake Off Biden-Era Anxiety About Russian Nukes

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 04, 2025

 

As I wrote on Monday, there is a tendency among foreign policy sophisticates to react with doom and gloom whenever our partners abroad demonstrate any guile in their fight against our shared adversaries. Ukraine’s spectacularly impressive attacks deep inside the Russian Federation on Moscow’s long-range strategic aircraft have proven no exception.

 

“I’m telling you, the risk levels are going way up,” Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, recently told Fox News. “When you attack an opponent’s part of their national survival system, which is their triad — the nuclear triad — that means your risk level goes up because you don’t know what the other side’s going to do.”

 

In these remarks, Kellogg appeared to confirm reports that the Ukrainian blitz inside Russia also targeted the headquarters of Moscow’s northern fleet, perhaps in the effort to disable elements of its nuclear-capable submarine fleet. “If that’s the case, when you attack two legs of the triad,” Kellogg continued, “its very clear the risk levels will go up.”

 

These are informed, sober, and prudent remarks. Kellogg’s warnings reflect the wisdom imparted to any student of the Cold War and the deterrent dynamics that kept everyone’s nukes in their silos. They were concerns I myself expressed a little more than one week into Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, by which point it had become clear that the “special military operation” would not be the cakewalk that the Kremlin and Russia watchers in the West expected it to be.

 

At the outset of the war, the conventional wisdom was that the Russian nuclear arsenal was on a hair trigger. The Biden administration agreed, as events shook the foundations of the foreign policy framework to which its members were beholden. The Biden team never learned any lessons from that experience. Trump’s advisers should avoid repeating the mistakes of their predecessors.

 

It wasn’t long after Russian forces poured across Ukraine’s borders that Biden adopted a posture of self-deterrence. Putin “is not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons,” the president told a group of Democratic donors in the fall of 2022. The crisis in Europe had become “the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have the direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path that they are going.”

 

The president’s fears were genuine, if Bob Woodward’s reporting is accurate. His last book indicated that U.S. intelligence believed that there was a 50 percent chance that Vladimir Putin could order a tactical nuclear strike on Ukrainian territory to spare Russian forces from encirclement and mass surrender. According to Woodward, however, the administration conveyed to the Kremlin that “catastrophic consequences” would follow if the prohibition on the battlefield use of nuclear arms was broken, and the message was received. In other words, the logic of nuclear deterrence worked.

 

Strategic deterrence is a two-way street. Western military observers tend to focus on what we cannot do lest we invite miscalculation or aggression from our adversaries, sometimes to the exclusion of what they cannot do.

 

One of the popular misconceptions about the history of the Cold War is that a strategic doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” prevailed throughout. It did not. Rather, both NATO and Soviet nuclear warfighting strategies evolved over the course of the war as both sought advantage over the other. By the late 1970s, Nuclear Targeting Policy Review Director Leon Sloss observed that it had “become clear that at least the leadership was planning seriously to survive a nuclear war.” The “countervailing strategy” that emerged in response to this dangerous condition was designed to communicate in no uncertain terms that Soviet leadership would be the first to go amid the outbreak of catastrophic hostilities. Putin is aware of this dynamic. So far, it has stayed his hand.

 

Some analysts believe that this equation would change if Putin used a low-yield nuclear weapon on the battlefield or even conducted a demonstrative atmospheric weapon test. Maybe, but that’s all theoretical. No one knows how to climb down off the escalatory ladder in those circumstances, so prudence certainly militates against that sort of experimentation. And so far, Moscow has avoided the prospect of direct confrontation with the United States despite the supposed violation of so many of its self-set red lines.

 

Putin and his credulous boosters in the West maintained that the introduction of M1 Abrams tanks and fixed-wing aircraft into the Ukrainian theater would cross “a red line.” We were told that a foreign power invading and occupying Russian territory could trigger a nuclear response. But when Ukrainian forces did just that, Putin responded by downplaying the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast, thereby minimizing his own setbacks. Ultimately, Putin violated his own red line by inviting North Korean troops — dreaded foreign forces that must observe neutrality in this conflict — to shore up his own posture. The targeting of Russian forces on Russian soil with Western-provided long-range rockets was explicitly branded an act that could beget a nuclear response. And now, we’re told that the attack on elements of the Russian bomber fleet by the target of Russian aggression (apparently without much Western support) will supposedly lead the Kremlin to wager its own survival on World War III.

 

Russia’s threats had their intended effect on their target: Joe Biden. His administration hemmed and hawed in the face of Russian nuclear blackmail. Over and over, Biden dithered in his support for the Ukrainian war effort because the provision of Western weapons platforms might beget nuclear conflagration. More often than not, the Biden White House broadcast that its hesitancy was unwarranted, but only long after the point when the provision of those provocative weapons platforms would have been maximally beneficial for the Ukrainians. Still, the weapons flowed, “red lines” were violated, and Russia’s response was muted.

 

The Biden administration was uniquely receptive to Moscow’s nuclear hostage-taking tactics. The Trump administration should strike a more stolid posture. Of course, the conditions that could beget a nuclear standoff are conceivable, but they are unlikely to arise from mere tactical setbacks. And that’s what this attack on one portion of one leg of the Russian nuclear triad amounts to.

 

The Ukrainian operation gives us plenty to worry about — the vulnerability of our own strategic aircraft to a similarly daring and asymmetrical attack most of all. But despondency is unwarranted. By neutralizing some of its offensive capabilities, Ukraine has made Russia a less threatening adversary. A rational assessment of its reduced capabilities could indeed make Russia jumpier. Or it could impose some sobriety on the Kremlin as it continues to prosecute its expansionist war in Europe. “Russia holds all the cards,” Trump once insisted. Well, today, it has fewer cards than it had last week, and that fact provides the West and its partners with exploitable leverage.

 

These are welcome developments unless you’re convinced that nuclear war is right around the corner. The Biden administration was convinced. That misconception deprived it of the victories it might have enjoyed in the absence of crippling self-doubt. The Trump administration shouldn’t succumb to an equally deadening fatalism.