By Jim Geraghty
Friday, September 23, 2022
You figured something like this was happening behind the scenes, but it’s still a little unnerving to see it in black-and-white, in the Washington Post:
The United States for several months has been sending private communications to Moscow warning Russia’s leadership of the grave consequences that would follow the use of a nuclear weapon, according to U.S. officials, who said the messages underscore what President Biden and his aides have articulated publicly.
The Post also reports that “Biden administration officials have emphasized that this isn’t the first time the Russian leadership has threatened to use nuclear weapons since the start of the war on Feb. 24 and have said there is no indication Russia is moving its nuclear weapons in preparation for an imminent strike.”
But if the U.S. is sending these messages both publicly and privately, it means the U.S. government, watching Russia closely, thinks Vladimir Putin and the Russian government need to hear these warnings. In other words, people within our government aren’t quite convinced this is just routine saber-rattling. (For more background on how Russia could use a small-yield tactical nuclear weapon, see the March 16 edition of the Morning Jolt. A nuke set off in any way is horrific if you’re in the neighborhood of the blast, but the effects can vary quite a bit depending on whether the nuclear weapon is detonated underground, at ground level, in the air, or at a high altitude.)
It’s easy to see why Russia might be getting desperate enough to think the unthinkable. A war that was supposed to end within a few days or at most weeks is now in its eighth month, and the Ukrainians are still advancing. The allegedly new and improved Red Army is the same as the old, slow, poorly equipped, insufficiently trained, tactically flawed Red Army. The Russian economy hasn’t collapsed from sanctions, but it is slowly and steadily being worn down. As of July, CIA director William Burns estimated that the Russian military had suffered about 15,000 killed and about 45,000 wounded.
Clearly, the mood in Russia is changing rapidly. Putin’s mobilization of 300,000 “reserves” — with serious questions about how well-trained and experienced those reserves are — has a lot of Russians terrified that a draft is coming. It sounds like a significant number of Russian men are fleeing the country. The BBC reports that, “on the border with Georgia, miles-long queues of vehicles have formed including men trying to escape the war. Some of those heading into the neighboring country have used bicycles to bypass lines of cars and evade a ban on crossing on foot.” (Just think, all this time the Georgian defense ministry feared a different surge of Russian men coming across the border.) The BBC also reports that “the call-up sparked protests in major Russian cities including Moscow and St Petersburg on Tuesday, resulting in a reported 1,300 arrests.”
The president, discussing Russia on 60 Minutes this past weekend:
Scott Pelley: As Ukraine succeeds on the battlefield, Vladimir Putin is becoming embarrassed and pushed into a corner. And I wonder, Mr. President, what you would say to him if he is considering using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons.
Joe Biden: Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. You will change the face of war unlike anything since World War II.
Pelley: And the consequences of that would be what?
Biden: I am not going to speculate —
Pelley: What would the U.S. response be?
Biden: You think I would tell you if I knew exactly what it would be? Of course, I’m not gonna tell you. It’ll be consequential. They’ll become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been. And depending on the extent of what they do will determine what response would occur.
Our Mark Wright is underwhelmed: “‘If I knew’ . . . ‘depending on the extent’ . . . ‘consequential.’ If you can explain to me what that means and, more importantly, what that means to the Kremlin, please do.”
Putin and Russia are already pariahs. How much of a deterrent is “becom[ing] more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been”? The real fear is that Putin — whose thinking was opaque even at the best of times, before the two years of extreme isolation that some world leaders think drove him bonkers — has now concluded that if he’s in for a penny, he’s in for a pound. If the rest of the world hates him for invading Ukraine, nothing will change much when they hate him for using a nuclear weapon.
International condemnation, by itself, is not a deterrent. It is a consequence of the failure of deterrence:
Western officials have repeatedly said that Russia has become isolated since invading Ukraine in February. Until recently, though, that was largely wishful thinking. But on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, much of the international community spoke out against the conflict in a rare display of unity at the often fractured United Nations.
The tide had already appeared to be turning against Putin even before Thursday’s U.N. speeches. Chinese and Indian leaders had been critical of the war at a high-level summit last week in Uzbekistan. And then the U.N. General Assembly disregarded Russia’s objections and voted overwhelmingly to allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be the only leader to address the body remotely, instead of requiring him to appear in person. . . .
Numerous world leaders used their speeches on Tuesday and Wednesday to denounce Russia’s war. That trend continued Thursday both in the assembly hall and at the usually deeply divided U.N. Security Council, where, one-by-one, virtually all of the 15 council members served up harsh criticism of Russia — a council member — for aggravating several already severe global crises and imperiling the foundations of the world body.
If Vladimir Putin feared being a pariah or inviting international condemnation, he wouldn’t have launched the invasion.
Writing in National Review, Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute, argues that real deterrence requires the threat of the use of force:
The West should respond together in a clear NATO declaration: Any introduction of nuclear weapons, or for that matter any weapons of mass destruction, on the European plain will result in a full response from the alliance. NATO aircraft will not just establish a no-fly zone, but rather instantly come to the aid of Ukrainian forces and go on the offensive against Russia. NATO ships will quickly move to sink any Russian ships in Ukrainian ports or operating in the Black or Baltic Seas. Likewise, it will blockade any ships in Russian ports. Meanwhile, NATO troops, who have been quietly pre-positioned in the east over the past seven months, will enter Ukraine. Lastly, key Russian military positions — including command-and-control nodes, fuel dumps, and ammunition depots that sit on the Russian side of the Ukrainian border — will be eliminated.
Only by being this stark can we hope to deter a panicked man at the end of his rope. It must be made “clearer than truth” — as the great Democrat secretary of state Dean Acheson said at the beginning of the Cold War — to those near and around Putin, that should they choose wholesale war, what follows automatically will be upon their heads.
This is more or less treating Ukraine as though it is a NATO member, which it is not. Then again, once Moscow gets comfortable setting off mushroom clouds, everybody’s tolerance for risk shrinks dramatically.
A statement such as the one Hendrix suggests would no doubt get Putin and the Russians to sit up and take notice. But Mark Wright doubts it will ever happen: “Such a policy would, of course, have the benefit of putting forward the strongest possible deterrent wrench into Putin’s calculations — a redux of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine of the Cold War — but such a grave decision should not be undertaken without the consent of Congress. Unfortunately for us all, I’m doubtful that congressional leaders will move on this or any such proposal.”
The Hendrix proposal would also require that every government in NATO feel comfortable getting into a shooting war with Russian forces.
There is a fair but disquieting critique that a lot of U.S. foreign policy — or at least its rhetoric — is built on a naïve belief that policy-makers can avoid hard choices, and that for every problem around the globe there is some sort of happy win-win scenario. We can stand up for our values and maintain our alliances. We can engage with our adversaries, diplomatically and economically, and they’ll change their ways. We can have stable, productive relationships with the world’s most unsavory and ruthless regimes. Back in 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that the term “rogue states” was outdated, and that “we are now calling these states ‘states of concern’” — as if the U.S. label had any impact on the character or nature of those regimes.
Sometimes, the world is bedeviled by some powerful, ruthless, cold-blooded, and/or potentially delusional dictator, hell-bent on conquest in the most brutal and bloodthirsty manner — and no amount of vague warnings is going to make him think twice.
And we’re left with the same hard question we faced all the way back during the Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border: What are we, as Americans, and the world as a whole, willing to do to stop him?
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