Did the Biden Administration Fall for Russia’s Nuclear Propaganda?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 04, 2024

 

The Insider’s Colby Badhwar picked up on a newsy excerpt from Puck Washington correspondent Julia Ioffe’s recent interview with House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul. During it, the congressman identified the source of the Biden administration’s timidity when it comes to provisioning Ukraine with the weapons platforms it has sought from the United States: Russian propaganda.

 

The Biden administration would certainly prefer it if voters forgot about the first two years of Ukraine’s defensive conflict, blaming Kyiv’s recent battlefield setbacks on a rump caucus of House Republicans for whom blocking aid to Ukraine has become their raison d’être. But it was the Biden administration that hemmed and hawed before ultimately caving to Ukraine’s requests for long-range artillery and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), tanks, cluster munitions, Patriot missile-defense systems, F-16 fighter aircraft, Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), and so on.

 

What explains what McCaul deemed the Biden administration’s “timid response” to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? In his estimation, the problem is national-security adviser Jake Sullivan and his uncritical belief in the credibility of Russian nuclear threats:

 

“Jake is — he’s overly cautious. He’s very timid. And he’s bought into this notion that, well, if we give them too much, then Russia’s going to use a tactical nuke on us. Well, most intelligence I’ve seen is they’re not going to do that. Because that would be a game-changer for everybody.”

 

If McCaul’s assessment is accurate, it would be a serious indictment of the Biden administration’s handling not just of the war in Ukraine but of the threat Russia represents to U.S. interests all over the globe. McCaul has charged the administration with failing to comprehend the logic of nuclear deterrence, which is a two-way street.

 

Moscow routinely threatens the West with nuclear blackmail as a means of compensating for the inferiority of its conventional forces relative to those of NATO. But deterrence has kept those weapons safely interred in their silos for decades because of the absolute certainty that their first use would beget a nuclear retaliatory response. Was Sullivan, the president, or both operating on the assumption that first use by the Russians would not beget a nuclear response?

 

Communicating to the Kremlin anything less than absolute resolve to restore nuclear deterrence through the overwhelming application of force, both conventional and unconventional, begets aggression and risk-taking. Conveying something short of that resolve is reckless.

 

It would be tempting to chalk up Sullivan’s alleged diffidence to self-deterrence, but even that misses the mark. Self-deterrence describes the process by which the target of a first nuclear strike (against its offensive forces) declines to retaliate for fear that a second offensive volley would take out its “value” targets (population centers and the like). What McCaul alleges is worse — the Russians managed to intimidate the administration into backing down without even firing a shot at NATO allies.

 

But as McCaul confessed in his interview with Ioffe, Sullivan may be only part of the problem. “I think it’s both of them,” he said when asked if Sullivan was “more cautious” than Biden. “I think they are kind of like-minded.” Indeed, it was Biden who, in the autumn of 2022, mused before a group of donors that Putin “is not joking when he talks about [the] potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.” Indeed, “the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” the president ill-advisedly continued, “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 Biden White House has spent the duration of Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine behaving in ways that confirm McCaul’s diagnosis. Today, the administration eagerly insists that the primary obstacle to the provision of lethal arms to Ukraine is the House GOP conference, and that’s not inaccurate. But posterity will take the full measure of this war in due time. In the final analysis, if Ukraine is ultimately defeated following its unlikely successes in its first year, the history books won’t be pointing any fingers at Marjorie Taylor Greene.