The president’s rhetoric will encourage Putin to test American resolve.
President Joe Biden is right to be concerned about Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats. As Russia’s military flounders in Ukraine, it is replacing military commanders with the architects of Russia’s campaigns in Syria, dropping even the pretense of targeting militarily significant objectives, expanding its war aims, and hinting darkly about using nuclear weapons against both Ukraine and its Western supporters.
But by loudly agonizing over the issue in public settings, Biden isn’t helping. The president has previously expressed fears of becoming enmeshed in World War III. Last week at a private gathering of Democratic donors, he likened the current risk to the Cuban missile crisis and fretted that the world faces Armageddon. The worst way to have a discussion with the American people and the world about the risks that Russia poses is to fret about them—at an elite partisan fundraiser, no less—in ways that are bound to leak out. Instead, Biden should give a national address explaining American interests in preserving an international order where states come to the aid of countries attacked by predators (as President George H. W. Bush did in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait), valorizing the Ukrainians’ courage, laying out why they deserve our help, articulating but not melodramatizing the danger, and preparing the American public for what will be needed if Russia does use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, our European allies, or even the U.S.
States are likely to use nuclear weapons when they believe their conventional military forces cannot achieve their war aims. Russia’s recent defeats in Ukraine may be raising such doubts. At the end of the Cold War, NATO reduced its holdings of tactical nuclear weapons—that is, lower-yield bombs without intercontinental delivery systems—by 90 percent, hoping to set a virtuous example for Russia. Russia has retained a tactical nuclear stockpile 10 times the size of America’s, by one estimate, and in theory could employ it against Ukraine.
To be sure, current conditions offer Russia few military targets against which nuclear weapons would confer any battlefield advantage.
