A delicate calibration with Putin

A momentous milestone will soon be reached. Probably. The second use of atomic weapons occurred Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the first. On April 7, 28,000 days will have passed without a third. Maybe.

This enormous achievement of postwar statecraft is difficult to celebrate because it is an absence of something. Besides, suddenly the most sophisticated of weapons might be used by a moral primitive because of Russia’s 10-thumbed mishandling of its conventional forces in Ukraine. The calamity of crossing the nuclear threshold might occur because, for example, a Russian convoy ran out of gas. Because of the Russian military’s incompetence regarding logistics and other military fundamentals.

Writing for the Atlantic, Eliot Cohen, former State Department counselor, says the “abundant” evidence that “Ukraine is winning” includes: “Most modern militaries rely on a strong cadre of noncommissioned officers. Sergeants make sure that vehicles are maintained and exercise leadership in squad tactics. The Russian NCO corps is today, as it has always been, both weak and corrupt.”

And: “Vehicles bunched up on roads, no infantry covering the flanks, no closely coordinated artillery fire, no overhead support from helicopters, and panicky reactions to ambushes. The 1-to-1 ratio of vehicles destroyed to those captured or abandoned bespeaks an army that is unwilling to fight . ... If the Russians level a town and slaughter its civilians, they are unlikely to have killed off its defenders, who will do extraordinary and effective things from the rubble to avenge themselves on the invaders.”

Putin has thrown 75% of Russia’s combatready ground forces onto Ukraine in an attempt to reestablish Russia’s great power status. He did not reckon on (notes former deputy undersecretary of the Navy Seth Cropsey) Ukraine’s “900,000-man pool of veterans from eight years of war” fighting Russian-backed insurgents in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The Ukrainians’ effective resistance is forcing President Joe Biden to make a delicate calibration that he is fortunate to be in a position to make: How much embarrassment can Putin suffer without taking a catastrophic step — use of a tactical nuclear weapon? Biden’s calculation occurs in this context of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s saying U.S. objectives are the restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. This might maximally imply the reversal of Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

The rhetoric of imagined but rarely attained precision is common in modern governance. Policymakers speak of “fine tuning” an economy that is powered by hundreds of millions of people making hundreds of billions of daily decisions and subject to “exogenous” events unanticipated by policymakers.

After 1945, it was understood that nuclear weapons might, by deterring military interventions to counter aggressions, enable wars of considerable conventional violence. Biden, however, has orchestrated a symphony of sanctions and weapons deliveries that has — so far — nullified Putin’s attempt to use nuclear threats to deter effective conventional responses to his aggression.

Presidents are pressured by friends as well as foes. In 1976, as Republicans convened in Kansas City, Ronald Reagan was almost tied in the delegate count, having potently attacked President Gerald Ford’s policy of U.S.-Soviet detente, including Ford’s refusal to meet with Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In Kansas City, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, detente’s architect, asked Tom Korologos, a Ford aide who enjoyed tormenting Kissinger, who would be Ford’s running mate. Korologos answered: “Solzhenitsyn.” Volodymyr Zelensky is to Biden what Solzhenitsyn was to Ford, someone whose prestige encourages firmness.

Ukraine’s president illustrates Churchill’s axiom that courage is the most important virtue because it enables the others. Zelensky has stiffened the West’s spine, made something like victory seem possible, and made it impossible to blur the conflict’s moral clarity.

So, a collateral casualty of the conflict is a 19th century German philosopher.

Before sinking into insanity, Friedrich Nietzsche propounded a theory that still reverberates in the intelligentsia: There are no “facts,” “only interpretations.” That today’s war has been caused by one man’s wickedness is a fact. War is a harrowing means of embarrassing the faux sophisticates’ moral relativism, but by doing so this ill wind has blown some good.