The Russian president has a strategy to
resuscitate his country's great power status. It involves nuclear weapons.
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts prides
itself on paying keen attention to warnings about the apocalypse (and usually pooh-poohing them). So when Vox’s
Max Fisher writes a 10,000 word essay on “How World War III became Possible,” we here at Spoiler Alerts sit up and take notice.
There is a growing chorus of political analysts, arms
control experts, and government officials who are sounding the alarm, trying to
call the world’s attention to its drift toward disaster. The prospect of a
major war, even a nuclear war, in Europe has become thinkable, they warn, even
plausible.
What they describe is a threat that combines many of
the hair-trigger dangers and world-ending stakes of the Cold War with the
volatility and false calm that preceded World War I — a comparison I heard with
disturbing frequency.
They described a number of ways that an unwanted but
nonetheless major war, like that of 1914, could break out in the Eastern
European borderlands. The stakes, they say, could not be higher: the post–World
War II peace in Europe, the lives of thousands or millions of Eastern
Europeans, or even, in a worst-case scenario that is remote but real, the
nuclear devastation of the planet.
You really have to read the whole thing because I’m not sure any summary will do it justice.
Fisher does an excellent job of explaining why more nuclear tensions warrant
more worry than, say, asteroid defense.
In essence, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
strategic conundrum is that he wants to restore Russia’s great power status
back to the good old days of the Cold War, but his Russia is much, much weaker than the old Soviet
Union. This is true whether you look at economic capabilities, conventional
military forces, or nuclear forces. Putin, however, thinks that he’s Keyser
Sozed a way around that problem:
In essence, Putin thinks that his comparative
advantage is his willingness to go to the brink and stare down the West in any
confrontation. This is why he’s lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear
weapons — the dimension where Russia is closest to parity to NATO — and why
he’s embracing hybrid warfarein dealing with Ukraine and the Baltics. Putin wants
to create the image of a “grim trigger” strategy when dealing with allies or adversaries, in the hope
that this deters other actors from any noncooperative actions.
There are ways in which this strategy is a
doppelganger of NATO’s Cold War strategy. It’s worth remembering that during
that era, NATO viewed its conventional forces as weaker than the Warsaw Pact’s.
That was why NATO rejected a “no first use” doctrine during the Cold War; it needed the nuclear deterrent
to compensate for the Soviets’ conventional military advantage. It’s also worth
remembering that the outlier in Russia’s nuclear doctrine isn’t its current
posture, but the 2010 strategic doctrine that was
more benign than
its other post-Cold War doctrines.
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