The transition period between the Biden and Trump administrations will be a dangerous time for Europe. Both Russia and Ukraine understand that the incoming Trump White House will take a different approach to the conflict, but there is profound uncertainty about the form that difference will take. As a result, both parties to Russia’s war of territorial expansion know they have a short window to shape the conditions on the ground in advantageous ways in advance of January 20.
The Biden administration, which is as in the dark about the incoming administration’s outlook toward the war in Europe as anyone else, has reluctantly consented to loosening the reins on its Ukrainian partners. This weekend, the Biden White House finally consented (after months of dithering) to allow Ukrainian forces to use U.S.-provided ordnance to strike targets inside Russia where the invasion of its territory is being staged and weapons used to target Ukrainian population centers are stocked.
Kyiv didn’t waste any time. Overnight, Ukrainian forces targeted Russian weapons arsenals with six ballistic missiles while Moscow rained rockets and drones down on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. At least ten Ukrainian civilians died in what has become a routine exhibition of Russia’s indiscriminate effort to pummel Ukraine’s population into submission.
Moscow understands that its objectives in this war will not be secured so long as the West maintains its support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, so it has appealed to an approach that so frequently spooked Joe Biden into meekness: nuclear blackmail. Russian president Vladimir Putin formally revised his country’s nuclear doctrine today. Those weapons may now be used in response to an attack by nonnuclear states if that attack is supported by members of the nuclear club — “a clear reference to U.S. support for Ukraine,” our own James Lynch observed.
The Kremlin has every reason to suspect that its nuclear saber-rattling will have its intended effect. After all, it worked on Joe Biden. “Jake is — he’s overly cautious,” House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul said of national security adviser Jake Sullivan this spring. “And he’s bought into this notion that, well, if we give them too much, then Russia’s going to use a tactical nuke on us. Well, most intelligence I’ve seen is they’re not going to do that. Because that would be a game-changer for everybody.” The timidity McCaul identified also explains why the Biden administration passed on the opportunity to share with Ukraine a series of weapons platforms, stealing from them the chance to achieve maximum battlefield efficacy at times and places of Kyiv’s choosing.
And why wouldn’t this approach prove similarly motivating to Donald Trump? Putin’s regime has heard the former president say time and time again that Biden’s support for Ukraine risks triggering “World War III.” Trump’s pick to lead the office of the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, seems to see any expression of Western opposition to Russia’s expansionist objectives — from Ukraine to Syria — as an invitation for Moscow to inaugurate nuclear war. The president-elect’s coterie of flatterers are fit to be tied over Biden’s decision to belatedly expand the terms of engagement on Europe’s battlefields. They maintain that Trump has a mandate to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia’s invaders, and any continued support for Kyiv’s plight jams a thumb in the eyes of 76 million American voters.
These conversations rarely seem to take into any account the Russian state as it exists today and its record over the course of its expansionist war. It is a partisan discourse designed for internal consumption that treats Russia as a theoretical abstraction. Indeed, observing Russian behavior over the course of this war should provide some solace to those who are not addicted to garment-rending apocalypticism.
How many of Putin’s self-set red lines have come and gone despite the outcry of Western quislings who foolishly take the autocrat at his word? We were credulously informed by Putin’s boosters at home that the provision of long-range rockets, cluster munitions, M1 Abrams battle tanks, and fixed-wing aircraft amounted to “crossing a red line.” And yet, we’re all still here. We were told that incursions into sovereign Russian territory crossed an inviolable threshold. But when Kyiv did just that, Putin’s regime downplayed the event lest he risk acknowledging the scale of the catastrophe he invited with his war of choice and foment a backlash against the war among the Russian public. Putin even violated his own red line with the introduction of North Korean combat troops to the conflict — an intervention of a noncombatant power into the conflict that Putin apparently can abide only when it is intervention on Russia’s side.
Those who are not spending the afternoon digging a bunker into their backyard today are predicating their nonchalance on an elementary understanding of nuclear deterrence, which is a two-way street. Decades of scholarship have been devoted to apprehending every scenario, every escalatory posture (horizontally and vertically), and every less-than-nuclear threshold event that could escalate into a limited or even strategic exchange of weapons. The goal of that process of inquiry into how to “win” a nuclear conflict was only ever to prevent it from occurring.
The preservation of a stable deterrent dynamic doesn’t just benefit the West. Putin, too, would like to avoid a step up the escalatory ladder that opens his forces to both nuclear and (even likelier and, thus, more importantly) nonnuclear retaliatory responses from the civilized world for violating the post-1945 prohibition on the use of those weapons. The diplomatic and commercial consequences alone would likely outweigh the benefits associated with temporarily putting the fear of God into his Western opponents. A step as rash as engineering a nuclear event would imperil Russia’s strategic objectives well beyond Ukraine’s borders and imperil his longevity in his role, even assuming such an epochal incident does not beget a reciprocal response from NATO’s nuclear states.
Nuclear weapons are useful for one thing: preventing the use of nuclear weapons. Westerners who jump every time Putin taps on one of his warheads either do not understand deterrence themselves or hope you don’t.
As has become his habit, Biden has finally shown some spine, albeit too late to meaningfully contribute to the U.S. interests in Europe that Russia presently threatens. The Trump administration should not take office operating under the delusion that Biden was somehow too reckless in his management of this conflict. If Trump has a mandate to fix this administration’s errors, he won’t achieve that by succumbing himself to Biden’s fear of the shadows that dance across the wall.
