We Must Deter Russian Nuclear Blackmail

John Wolfstahl agrees with Secretary of Defense Austin that defending Ukraine against Russian Nuclear Intimidation is not only a local strategic goal, but desirable in deterring in advance nuclear blackmail world-wide.

]t was with some interest that I heard Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speculate i]this weekend that a Russian victory over Ukraine could lead to greater proliferation of nuclear weapons.

I have heard defense officials, including prior Secretaries of Defense, make such assertions in the past so I tend to view them with skepticism. In this case, however, Secretary Austin is on to something. …

Russia has not just invaded a sovereign country. It did not just annex territory of a state whose borders it had pledged to respect. And it did not just annex land from a state that agreed to free itself of legacy Soviet nuclear weapons left on its territory in 1991 and return them to Russia as the USSR’s designated successor state.

No, Russia has done all of this while threatening to use its nuclear weapons against states who might come to Ukraine defense and to insulate itself against counter-attacks. Moscow under Putin has done more than weaponize risk. Russia in this campaign has undermined the hard-earned norm against threatening to use nuclear weapons for territorial aggression and sought to use its nuclear arsenal as a shield behind which it could pursue an invasion, commit war crimes, and destabilize a continent for its own benefit. Protestations that any reference to nuclear weapons have been misunderstood aside, Russia under Putin has become the kind of state we have worried might develop in North Korea or Iran. Many analysts have expressed concern for years that North Korea in particular was a threat because it was an anti-status quo state that might try to use its nuclear weapons to carry out sub-strategic attacks against South Korea, and that it might miscalculate that their nuclear deterrent might protect them in the event it attacked the South from an American response.

Instead, Russia is the one who underestimated its own capabilities and now is dragging the world closer to the nuclear brink. And thus Austin was right to note one of the very tangible reasons why the United States should remain so committed to both deterring Russia nuclear use and ensuring Ukraine prevails. If Russia can hide behind its nuclear shield and prevent America and NATO from bringing many of their conventional advantages into the conflict, than others may see a similar path to victory against a stronger, more capable military adversary. If Russia – the second-best army in Ukraine[1] – can hold America and NATO at arm’s length while gobbling up a neighbor, then maybe other states will follow suit. It is likely this would influence nuclear decision making among US friends and allies. I think this is a lesser danger for US allies and treaty partners, however, since Putin has attacked many states but none of them US allies proper because he knows the risk. And there is a good argument that the depth and strength of NATO’s response to the invasion of Ukraine has likely done wonders for the credibility of the alliance, as evidenced by Finland and Sweden’s desire to join NATO as rapidly as possible.

But for the potential aggressors out there, states whose leaders are unaccountable and who may have territorial or strategic ambitions, the lure of nuclear weapons has always been balanced by the costs of going nuclear, both economically and politically. But if Russia can invade a state in the face of a much stronger set of conventional adversaries and get away with it because it has nuclear weapons, then the prospects that other states might up their interest in nuclear weapons should be a concern. And Secretary Austin put this in a way that was not overstated and did not suggest this was an on-off switch kind of decision.

This gets to the follow-on point that Austin did not make but that he might have/should have. If Ukraine can defeat Putin (defined as expelling him from all Ukrainian territory taken, at least since February) and avoid Putin escalating with nuclear weapons, then the United States will have done something both unlikely and important – demonstrate that nuclear weapons are much less useful as a tool for conventional military conquest than some might have believed, perhaps even unusable. Avoiding nuclear escalation by Russia is a key U.S. objective not only because of the horrors a nuclear strike would cause, or because it would likely draw the U.S. and NATO in the conflict with uncertain consequences. It matters because perhaps the only way Putin can avoid defeat is through nuclear escalation – nuclear use by Moscow is perhaps the easiest way for him to end a losing campaign and force a stalemate by going over the heads of the Ukrainians and raising the stakes for the west as high as he has raised them for himself. Put another way . . . keeping the Ukraine war conventional is the best way to beat Putin.

RTWT

I agree, and I think he is correct in noting that Russia’s attack on Ukraine must be opposed for being an absolutely outrageous violation of the post-WWII understanding that there should be no alteration of European borders by force.

On top of which, Russia’s perfidy in breaking its 1994 pledge to not only respect, but to defend, Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and its flagrant resort to shameless lying represents exactly the same kind of gangsterish behavior characteristic of Nazi Germany, and both offenses against decency and the international Order absolutely require opposition.