It should be no surprise that it has come to this. For weeks now, Western security elites have been discussing whether they should give Ukraine permission to use Western cruise and ballistic missiles in order to strike targets deep within the internationally recognised borders of the Russian Federation. We have definitely come a long way since the early days of the Russian-Ukrainian war, when Germany’s hapless chancellor, Olaf Scholz, wondered if the supply of Bundeswehr helmets to the Ukrainians might be escalatory, and Joe Biden openly stated that U.S. tanks and jets in Ukraine would be opening the door to World War Three. In the meantime, many hundreds of Western tanks were deployed in the Ukrainian theater. Dozens of U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets have been promised to Kyiv, with the first ones already delivered, used in combat, and shot down. Now, as the West discusses raining U.S. missiles on Russian cities, Joe Biden tells us there’s nothing to be worried about at all: “I don’t think much about Vladimir Putin,” replied the President, his face awkwardly attempting a faux cowboy grin.
Well, perhaps he should. While Russian President Vladimir Putin has seldom shied away from mentioning the nuclear card, the fact remains that he has it up his sleeve. At a grand total of almost six thousand warheads, Moscow commands the world’s largest atomic arsenal. Whatever the difficulties faced by the Kremlin’s ground forces in Ukraine, the country’s nuclear triad remains fully intact and second to none among the globe’s great powers. When Putin warns, as he recently did from the old imperial capital of Saint Petersburg, that a NATO decision to allow its missiles to be used against the Russian heartland would constitute “the direct participation of NATO countries, [namely] the United States and the European countries, in the war in Ukraine” and that this would “change the very nature of the conflict,” ignoring him out of hand would be the height of folly.
Indeed, why should Putin’s bellicose remarks be dismissed as bluster? The White House’s persistent line throughout the conflict is that Russia is solely to blame for any and all escalation, given that it was Putin who made the decision to illegally invade in the first place. It’s a tricky point to make. The West, after all, is hardly new to the game of illegitimate, unsanctioned wars. Members of what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has called the West’s “pro-war consensus” would be well advised to wonder how we ourselves would have reacted if, having invaded Iraq in direct contravention of international law, Russia had supplied the Iraqis with every category of war matériel. If Putin had systematically escalated his support for Saddam while our troops fought in the streets of Basra, first with tanks and fighter aircraft and, finally, with missiles capable of hitting Paris, London, and Washington, would we have reacted with mere diplomatic protests? Or would our leaders have seen such actions as crossing an unacceptable boundary and as direct acts of war by the Russian state, regardless of the perils of striking back? As weak and gutless a leader as Blair may have been, one would hope that, indeed, Western governments would then have found the spine to strike back against such wanton aggression. Why do we expect the Russians to do otherwise?
It has been often repeated that President Putin only really fears his people—they alone, after all, could bring about the veteran strongman’s downfall. President Zelensky of Ukraine recently made this very point in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. Zelensky’s assessment is sound. What is harder to understand is how the Ukrainian leader can reconcile that view with the ludicrous claim that bombing Russian cities with Western missiles will lead to no significant consequences. If Putin is indeed mindful of public opinion, it is surely absurd to presume that he would not answer in kind to such a grave turn of events. Instead, an infuriated, vengeful, and nationalist-minded Russian public would force the hand of even the most dovish resident of the Kremlin. To pretend otherwise is not only supremely irresponsible; it is also extraordinarily unwise.
Indeed, the feel-good tale about Russia’s ‘red lines’ meaning nothing might be an effective propaganda line, but it has very little to do with reality. Instead, Putin famously promised a new era of Russian assertiveness and bellicosity in reaction to NATO’s steady march towards the East during his 2007 Munich speech—and self-evidently kept his word. Putin made clear that Ukraine’s entry into NATO would precipitate a radical Russian response. William J. Burns—then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and now the director of the CIA—wrote, in a remarkable diplomatic cable from 2008:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests … Today’s Russia will respond.
Putin’s Russia did respond, as Ukrainians know better than most. Similarly, the Russian president threatened to supply military aid to Western adversaries in response to the West’s own generous aid to Kyiv. Once again, the Kremlin kept its promise. Should reports that Moscow is considering to supply advanced anti-ship missiles to Yemen’s Houthis prove truthful, that would make the lives of NATO navies operating in the Red Sea far more perilous. And there are multiple signs of growing Russian technology and material transfers to China, even as the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, reportedly prepares to invade Taiwan. Of particular concern for Western policy makers is information that Moscow is now supplying China with advanced submarine technologies, a development that enables Beijing to grow immeasurably stronger in the seas. This Sino-Russian collaboration will transform the balance of power in the Pacific in ways that are gravely harmful to Western interests.
Moscow’s tradition of acting on its threats should inspire caution in Western capitals, a lesson recently relayed by America’s intelligence community to the White House. Even if firing Storm Shadow missiles at factories in Moscow doesn’t lead to nuclear Armageddon, most reasonable people would surely agree that nothing that has happened in the world would justify risking such a scenario. That a policy might not, with luck, lead to the atomic devastation of the European continent is scant justification for enacting it, particularly if that worst case scenario is merely one possibility in a list of terrible potential outcomes. In fact, Russia has numerous tools to enact a heavy price on the West if it so desires, from supplying missile and submarine technologies to North Korea to sharing nuclear secrets with Iran’s Ayatollahs. Other imaginable steps could be even more perilous and include Moscow’s own retaliatory missile strikes against non-U.S. NATO targets, be it ships, bases, or, more benignly, offshore oil and gas rigs. This would test the Alliance’s Article V and force Washington and its European allies to decide between humiliation and a global catastrophe. It isn’t a situation where we should want to be.
Yet, it is now where we seem to be headed. With Biden physically and politically out of the equation and his vacuous vice president, Kamala Harris, focused on her election bid, what might prove one of the most consequential decisions in decades—if not, God forbid, in human history—is being made with minimal public discussion and awareness. The chaos that has taken hold of the American administration can no longer be disguised: the bitter, ongoing rift between a faction of prudence, apparently led by U.S. National Security Director Jake Sullivan and Defence Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, and the hyper-bellicose group led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, presents the world with the sorry sight of a superpower captured by a stunningly inept and undeserving elite. That this Democratic administration was once sold to the American people as a return of maturity to the White House now seems too fantastic to be believed.
Even as the U.S.—and, thus, the West—is bereft of leadership, with a faceless bureaucracy acting as regent for an evidently incapacitated President Biden, it continues to sleepwalk towards tragedy in Ukraine. No one seems to know what this exceptionally dangerous policy is supposed to effect, or what objectives it pursues; the majority of Western leaders, and indeed of observers, appear now to understand that the Ukrainian war will not end with victory over Russia, but in some form of negotiated compromise. Why, then, should a peace process that everyone understands to be inevitable be further postponed, with the stakes raised even higher and the probability of catastrophic consequences—for the West and the world—so greatly increased? On both sides of the Atlantic, be it Trump or Orbán, only realist conservatives stand ready to stop humanity’s descent to increasingly certain disaster. May they not be delayed in their task.
