NUCLEAR DOCTRINE NO CASUAL TOPIC
WASHINGTON — It’s cleanup on Aisle 6 at the Biden White House again. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, President Biden backtracked on his warning a few days earlier that the world faced the “prospect of Armageddon” for the first time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — declaring, “I don’t think [Vladimir Putin] will” use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Biden said something very different at a Democratic Party fundraiser last week. “We’ve got a guy I know fairly well; his name is Vladimir Putin,” Biden declared. “He is not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical and nuclear weapons, or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming. It’s part of Russian doctrine that they will not — they will not — if the motherland is threatened, they’ll use whatever force they need, including nuclear weapons.
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden continued.
That’s not all. Earlier in his address, Biden said: “First time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they’ve been going. That’s — that’s a different deal. That’s a different deal. And, you know, we’re trying to figure out: What — what is Putin’s off-ramp? Where — where does he get off? Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself in a position that he does not only lose face, but lose significant power within Russia? So I guess what I’m saying is that we have to keep the Senate.”
You did not misread that last sentence. Biden seamlessly transitioned from discussing the threat of nuclear war into a pitch for Democratic control of the Senate.
The president of the United States should never just blurt out random thoughts about nuclear war — especially not at a partisan fundraiser. Biden surprised even his own senior officials by delivering an unplanned stream of consciousness about nuclear war in front of a bunch of campaign donors. It is one of the most irresponsible things he has done as president.
To make matters worse, his hand-wringing about Armageddon projected weakness. Putin knows American weaponry has turned the tide of the war against him, making his complete defeat in Ukraine a real possibility. He also knows Biden and his team have been slow-rolling the delivery of those weapons, hesitating at every step of the way while publicly musing about their pathological fear of inadvertently starting World War III. He is trying to scare the White House into withholding even more advanced weaponry and pressuring Ukraine to sue for a negotiated peace — ending the war before Kyiv can retake all the territory he has unlawfully seized.
Putin is doing this out of weakness, not strength. The success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive has shown the Russian leader that, as long as the West continues backing Ukraine, he has no way to win. So he is threatening nuclear escalation to frighten Biden. And by comparing Ukraine to the Cuban missile crisis, Biden reveals that Putin’s strategy is working.
Would Putin ever pull the nuclear trigger? While he could certainly miscalculate, a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine makes no strategic sense for Putin. The nuclear fallout could, quite literally, blow back into Russia. And to stop the counteroffensive in eastern Ukraine, Putin would need to use a nuclear weapon on territory that he has unlawfully annexed for Russia. From the Kremlin’s perspective, he would be nuking his own country. This would be an information operations disaster at home. It would also backfire militarily on the ground. As Fred Kagan, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, tells me, the fallout would “preclude any future Russian advances into irradiated areas.” The Russian military is already having difficulty operating on a conventional battlefield; it would not be able to function on a nuclear battlefield in Ukraine.
The only way Putin might be tempted to use a nuclear weapon is if he were certain the West would not undertake military reprisals. Which is why Biden needs to make clear that any use of tactical nuclear weapons would result in a conventional response from the United States and NATO that would destroy the Russian military. Biden must also show Putin his nuclear threats will not intimidate us into withholding support for Ukraine or coercing Kyiv into accepting a frozen conflict whereby Russia keeps some of the territory it has seized. Rather, Kagan says, the United States must develop a strategy to “get Putin to accept a defeat” by presenting him “with a situation in which he cannot stop the conventional defeat, in which we credibly deter him from using nuclear weapons, and in which we persuade him that continuing to try to fight will put his own rule at risk.”
That requires something a whole lot more serious than riffing about Armageddon at a Democratic Party fundraiser.