Astonishing remarks by President Biden at a fundraiser in New York.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since [President John] Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” Biden said, adding that “we have a direct threat of the use of nuclear weapons if in fact things continue down the path they are going”.
President Biden’s remarks on Thursday, October 6, 2022.
It is unlikely that the Policy Tensor’s intervention had anything to do with the US declaration — seems considerably more likely that the US military came to same conclusions on their own. What is clear is that Biden has recognized that Putin is not bluffing. If the Russian military position in Ukraine is at risk of collapse, Putin may well resort to the use of nuclear weapons. This is the correct reading of “things going down the path they are going.”
This is not diagnostic evidence of a pivot on US Russia policy. That came a day earlier. The White House decided to make public the assessment of US intelligence that Ukrainian intelligence had carried out the attack that killed Dugina. This was different from the hypothesis suggested earlier, by myself and elements in the intelligence community, that the attack was ordered by the Kremlin as a warning to the right-wing crazies. The new hypothesis is tighter. In any case, the administration could hardly be expected to release such an explosive assessment unless it was “high confidence.”
How should we interpret the astonishing US decision to release the intel? Together with Biden’s remarks in New York, the most sensible interpretation is that this is an extremely costly signal from Washington to Moscow. It suggests that we’re in the midst of a nuclear crisis that Biden is trying to defuse by offering credible evidence that his offer of a US pivot on Russia policy is real.
The United States has decided, correctly, that the attendant escalation risk is not worth bearing to secure a Russian strategic defeat in Ukraine. Biden’s musings about looking for an “off-ramp” for Putin are welcome. It seems clear that the war winners have lost the argument at the National Security Council. The way is now open for a clear pivot to a more appropriate Russia policy.
The United States may be prepared at this time to accept a partition of Ukraine along anthropological lines. Indeed, Biden’s solution to the catastrophe of the Iraqi civil war of the mid-2000s was to propose breaking up the Iraqi state into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish statelets. The US decided at the time to preserve the Iraqi state (with Kurdish autonomy) because the Shia and Sunni statelets would’ve immediately become satellites of Iran and the Arab powers respectively, with the US left with a landlocked Kurdish statelet under constant pressure from Turkey.
This problem of creating ‘an arc weakness’ turned out to be decisive on the question raised by then Senator Biden. A similar but distinct problem attends allowing a ceasefire to evolve into a de facto line of control in Ukraine. The United States can achieve much more for US interests and for the Ukrainians, even in a nuclear crisis. But that requires thinking carefully about the trigger for the Russian deterrent.
What makes Putin’s nuclear threat credible? Annexations, military occupation, and anthropological terrain do not solve Russia’s extended deterrence problem — the problem of establishing the credibility of deterrent threats beyond the homeland. What has solved Russia’s extended deterrence problem is the extended Russian position in Ukraine. Putin’s army is now committed. He cannot order it back without suffering an irrevocable loss of military prestige. Nor can he allow his army to be destroyed in the field. And, as has been understood for a long time, the nuclear umbrella is always on one’s military instrument. Indeed, US forces, as a rule, do not go into combat without air defense cover and “strategic backup” (the nuclear queen behind the conventional pawn). The same is true of the Russians. So, these routines and rigidities explain how Putin has been able to solve his extended deterrence problem.
What is clear is that, with the present nuclear crisis, the time for a ceasefire and diplomatic negotiations has arrived. It’s too risky to let the Ukrainians mount an offensive against the prepared Russian defensive position in the south. The alternative to direct negotiations is not a Russian defeat but a protracted war of attrition that is nevertheless incapable, at the pain of nuclear escalation, of achieving strategic outcomes. Much better to seek a negotiated settlement that both sides can live with.
If I am right about this assessment, then the United States need not accept ‘a ceasefire evolving into a de facto line of control in Ukraine’ as the least bad outcome. The main problem with this outcome for the United States is that it will be stuck with a practically land-locked satellite with likely permanently hostile relations with Moscow. At the minimum, the United States should seek unmolested access to the world ocean for Ukraine. And much more can be achieved on the bargaining table.
Indeed, the United States should refrain from prejudging the outcome of negotiations too early. It is Ukraine and the West that will have the upper hand at the bargaining table. It is important to realize, too, that rumors of the death of the neutrality option have been greatly exaggerated. The status of Ukraine, the Nomos of Ukraine, is, in the final analysis, an open question for diplomacy.
Once the contours of a settlement are clear, the United States should also invite China, India and Germany to underwrite the Ukraine settlement. The point of such an initiative would be to get India and China to commit to isolating Russia if Russia were to violate the settlement. A great power settlement along these lines would establish a useful template for US leadership in a multipolar world. It would help mend relations with India and reassure China that it has a place at the table even in an era of great power competition.
Contra, note also the MSM articles in recent days practically drooling at the prospect of a nuclear war.
Not the first time Biden has been over his head in foreign policy; the loss of Sunni-dominated Iraq as a buffer against Iran being a key example (a Sunni general opposite to Saddam Hussein would have done).
But "to get India and China to commit to isolating Russia if Russia were to violate the settlement"
It's hard to see what China can possibly gain from a weakened or isolated Russia, especially with their competition against the US, thus their interest in restraining Russia in Ukraine is nil.