Putin’s Nuclear Gambit

It’s being repeatedly said that Russia’s war on Ukraine marks the first major conflict in Europe since the end of WWII.

This description must come as a surprise to the people who lived through the siege of Sarajevo or the Russian attack on Georgia.

It is, however, the first recent war in Europe which the West has decided truly matters, and there is no doubt that the physical scale and geopolitical ambition of this war is different, more akin to the world before WWII than since.

What is even more of a break from the post war order — yes, even more so than seeking to erase an independent nation by conquest — is what Putin is now doing to the policy paradigm of deterrence based on nuclear weapons.

Since both the United States and Russia have had nuclear weapons, there has been a sort of  invisible hand helping prevent war between the nuclear powers.

It was never a guarantee, for sure, but fear of nuclear war was a force of  gravity that pulled nuclear weapons states in the direction of less reliance on force than was historically normal. It prevented all out war and even capped the intensity at which the wars which still happened  were fought, arguably even including causing America to accept defeat in Vietnam.

States with nuclear weapons, or nuclear guarantees, have fought one another, including the US and China in Korea (while the Chinese were considered covered by the nuclear umbrella of the Soviet Union), clashes between the Chinese against the Soviets in the late ‘60’s, clashes between India and Pakistan and between India and China, but a structure and mindset of deterrence has held against the use of nuclear weapons and, mostly, (with the Middle East being the main exception) against World War II style and scope of conventional warfare.

Deterrence became a voice of conscience in the minds of leaders, whispering not only that a nuclear war itself was unwinnable and must not be fought but also that the possible escalation from conventional to nuclear war, especially the possibility of the first use of tactical nuclear weapons by the losing side of a conventional battlefield, was a prospect which could not be risked.

The “unthinkable” possibility of nuclear war not only prevented nuclear war itself but also very likely prevented major conventional war among the great powers. Would not the Soviets have taken West Berlin, and perhaps more of the West, but for the self-restraint imbued by nuclear deterrence? Would not the US have come to the aid of the Hungarians in ‘56 or the Czechs in ‘68? Would Castro have ruled Cuba for more than a New York minute?

Mr. Putin has now said to hell with all of this. Instead of nuclear arms, his and those of the US and NATO, being a restraint on his use of conventional firepower, he is boldly proclaiming threats to use nukes as an impenetrable shield behind which he has complete free range in the use of conventional firepower — even otherwise banned weapons and regardless of the loss of civilian lives they cause.

So what are we to do, when only we, only the side seeking to defend peace and freedom, are being restrained by the “logic” of nuclear deterrence?

The Ukraine war may well be remembered for causing many fundamental changes in world affairs but how could it not be top of the list among those for any state which wishes not to be pummeled by a bigger neighbor to conclude that it needs its own nuclear weapons and for the whole world to conclude that any state which has nuclear weapons can attack its neighbors and face nothing stronger than stern words and economic sanctions in rebuke?

Even in the theater, the power of the United States Air Force, complimented as we have been during similar missions in the Balkans, Iraq, and Libya, by NATO and other partner air forces, is vastly superior to that of the Russians. As President Zelensky has been imploring, we could save Ukraine and the entire global security system the United States has led for over 70 years by declaring and enforcing a no fly zone over Ukraine.

Without doubt, this would be nothing less than an enormous risk, on the order of the risk JFK took in blockading Cuba while demanding the withdrawal from the island of the Soviet nuclear missile program

But failing to take that risk allows Putin’s nuclear gambit to win, not only in Ukraine, but as a new principle of statecraft. A country with the bomb, and perceived as perhaps crazy enough to use it, can do whatever its aspiring emperor wants to do with its conventional forces.

President Biden has said that any direct contact between US and Russian forces would be World War III. We should all appreciate that that assessment might prove true. But it is not necessarily true, and that risk must be weighed not only against the immediate moral urgency of this war of aggression against a freedom seeking people but perhaps even more so against the ugly jungle of a world we are allowing to be created by letting threats to use nuclear weapons become a magic cloak of protection for any nation which would do evil.

Craig Snyder is a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute National Security Program and editor of “The Strategic Defense Debate” (University of Pennsylvania Press). Snyder was previously Chief of Staff to US Senator Arlen Specter and President of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.