Putin Should Be More Afraid of Us Than We Are of Him

Plus: America's sporting zeitgeist.

JVL is off today and tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve got a potpourri for you.

But first, it was great to see everyone at the Philly event last week. There’s still time to sign up for the event in D.C. on May 15, and our friends in the Centennial State should save the date for our event on June 21.

And for anyone who hasn’t yet caught up, we posted the two parts of the Philly show for everyone on the Bulwark Podcast and Next Level feeds but for Bulwark+ members, here’s the complete show (ad-free) Swing State Swing—An Evening with The Bulwark in Philly.

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Trees burn next to a Ukrainian military vehicle, after white phosphorus munitions exploded in the air, at the village of Chasiv Yar near Bakhmut, on March 14, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by Aris Messinis / AFP) (Photo by ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images)

1. Escalation and deterrence

In case you missed it, Russia is using weapons of mass destruction—specifically chemical weapons—in Ukraine. Here’s Reuters:

The United States on Wednesday accused Russia of violating the international chemical weapons ban by deploying the choking agent chloropicrin against Ukrainian troops and using riot control agents “as a method of warfare” in Ukraine.

“The use of such chemicals is not an isolated incident and is probably driven by Russian forces’ desire to dislodge Ukrainian forces from fortified positions and achieve tactical gains on the battlefield,” the State Department said in a statement.

The Russian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chloropicrin is listed as a banned choking agent by the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which was created to implement and monitor compliance with the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

German forces fired the gas against Allied troops during World War I in one of the first uses of a chemical weapon.

Chloropicrin is not as dangerous as some of the other infamous WWI-era poison gases, like mustard but it’s one of those chemical weapons that, like chlorine and phosgene, can act as a potent irritant. But here’s why it’s still important: Russia signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, meaning it promised not to use chemical weapons.

How much hesitation do you think the Russian chain of command had about using banned WMDs in Ukraine? Whatever the answer, it clearly wasn’t enough. They apparently figured the marginal benefit of moving some Ukrainian troops from one treeline to another was worth the risk.

That says bad things about what they think the risks are. As Bill pointed out this morning, Putin has announced exercises with theater nuclear weapons. This is how he uses nuclear weapons—not to kill people, but to scare us.

By comparison, how is the United States thinking about risk? Well, here’s how Susan Glasser described it in October:

In some sense, the President’s instructions have been clear from the beginning: No U.S. boots on the ground; no supplying weapons for the purpose of attacking Russian territory; and avoid giving Putin grounds for nuclear escalation. . . . “I don’t necessarily think that they went in thinking, Oh, we’re going to boil this frog slowly, because that’s the best way to avoid escalation,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former national-intelligence officer who worked on the Biden transition team for the N.S.C., said. “They stumbled into it.”

Escalation management is a real thing—a lot of ink was spilled in the Cold War thinking about how to manage the game of chicken between the United States and the Soviet Union. Since then, we’ve gotten out of the habit. No one worried about al Qaeda or the Taliban or Saddam “escalating” anything.

But note that it’s called “escalation management”—not “escalation avoidance.” There are two reasons for this.

1. If you really want to avoid escalation, the only surefire way to do so is to surrender. Even then, all it guarantees is that you won’t contribute to the threat of violence. It does nothing to prevent whomever you’ve surrendered to from intensifying their own violence (vertical escalation) or directing their violence at someone new (horizontal escalation).

2. If you do surrender, you just reward the other side’s escalation. You encourage them to make threats to get you to back down without extracting a price from them. So counterintuitively, de-escalating can be, well, escalatory.

The trick is to escalate in such a way that you don’t get to an unacceptable outcome—say, global nuclear holocaust—but also that you don’t give evil people like Putin a free win. There are tons of historical examples of how this can be done, but generally it involves a combination of rhetoric, military signals (which may or may not match the rhetoric, like calling for negotiations while moving some bombers around), or breaking the “escalation ladder” with something out of left field.

Using nonlethal chemical weapons in Ukraine is, in a disgusting kind of way, kind of a clever move by the Russians because it’s not clear what the proper response to a banned nonlethal weapon is.

This is all a long way of saying that managing a quasi-proxy war with the world’s largest nuclear power isn’t just about worrying what they might do. It’s also about making them worry about what we might do.

The more time Putin spends worrying that, at the slightest “provocation,” we might make his life a lot worse, the better for everyone.

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ICYMI: George and Sarah taped their show on Saturday after Hope Hicks’ testimony. Tune in for George’s optimistic analysis of all the testimony from week three of Trump's New York criminal trial. Click to watch.

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2. America’s Game

There’s no questioning baseball’s special place in American culture. It holds a place alongside “mom” and “apple pie” as the quintessential American things, and among the three, it’s the only one that’s really quintessentially American.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but supposedly one way American soldiers ferreted out spies and imposters during World War II was by asking suspects who won this-or-that World Series. Even if that’s apocryphal, the idea that the World Series test could be dispositive says a lot: The underlying logic is that every American would know who won every World Series in the previous twenty years, and that no foreigners would.

Not being much of a baseball fan myself, I’ll let George F. Will help me out here:

A few years ago, in the Speaker’s Dining Room in the U.S. Capitol, a balding, hawk-nosed Oklahoma cattleman rose from the luncheon table and addressed his host, Tip O’Neill. The man who rose was Warren Spahn, the winningest left-hander in the history of baseball. . . . Spahn said: “Mr. Speaker, baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time. The two Hall of Fame pitchers here today . . . lost more games than a team plays in a full season. I just hope you fellows in Congress have more success than baseball players have.”

The fellows in Congress don’t, and they know it. There are no .400 hitters in Washington.

. . .

Because baseball is a game of failure, and hence a constantly humbling experience, it is good that the national government is well stocked with students of the national pastime. There also is a civic interest served by having the population at large leavened by millions of fans.

He goes on to describe how the rhythms of baseball mimic the rhythms of farm life.¹ And many have observed that a game with a theoretically unlimited field fits a country with an almost unlimited frontier. Will again: “Baseball, with the largest field of play of any sport other than polo, is the most observable of team games.”

But does anyone really think baseball is America’s favorite sport anymore? Yes, but it’s only 27 percent of Americans, compared with 53 percent for football. Here’s football historian Richard C. Crepeau:

The history of the National Football League unfolds across time, in many dimensions, carried along by those forces that have shaped modern American history. It was the product of forces transforming twentieth-century America into a consumer society pursuing leisure. It was a product of changing technologies: the automobile, radio, television, and the Internet. It was the product of the willingness of government at all levels to subsidize sport. It benefited from an increasing concern over issues of masculinity in a sedentary world, and from expressions of masculinity through vicarious violence. Above all it was the product of any number of individuals who understood how to manipulate and exploit these forces.

I would only add that, as the closest analogy of the major American sports to actual warfare, football made sense for a postwar, hegemonic, Cold War America.

So what’s America’s sport of the future? You got a hint in last Thursday’s Press Pass. Formula 1 is America’s new sport for a new era. It’s highly technological, of course. It also combines globalization—with races on five continents—with some tinges of nationalism. It’s celebrity-obsessed and the main “characters” are mostly people of extreme wealth who can afford to, you know, own a racing team. It also generates a large number of secret conspiracies and an even larger number of conspiracy theories.

No wonder it’s booming in the United States. In 2018, about 554,000 Americans watched each grand prix. By 2022, it was more than 1.2 million.

Abner Doubleday. Vince Lombardi. Mario Andretti?

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3. Paul Bunyan

If you’re not familiar with Operation Paul Bunyan from 1976, it’s a weird little object lesson in escalation and deterrence. From the Clements Center at UT:

According to a memo for a Washington Special Action Group Meeting (WSAG) on August 18, 1976, two U.S. Army officers serving in the United Nations Command (UNC) at a joint security zone between North and South Korea were murdered in an unprovoked attack by the North Koreans while they were attempting to prune a tree.

. . .

During this tense situation, a small group of U.S. and South Korean troops set out on a simple mission to cut back a tree in the jointly controlled zone. The tree obstructed the view from nearby observation towers. About 15 North Korean soldiers approached and demanded the group stop trimming the tree. When they refused, the North Koreans attacked with crowbars, clubs, and axes. Two U.S. Army officers were killed, and four other U.S. soldiers and four South Korean soldiers were wounded. . . .

The WSAG members judged the North Koreans authorized an attack on any group of Americans or South Koreans who were vulnerable, and the North Korean soldiers likely saw the tree-trimming group as a target of opportunity. President Gerald Ford tasked the WSAG to think about what would be the best response.

When the WSAG met the next day, they had already decided that U.S. and South Korean forces should cut down the tree entirely. The question was whether they follow a diplomatic route, informing the North Koreans of their plans and potentially inviting international observers, or would they cut the tree without warning, using the maximum number of men to do so and therefore maximize their show of force. The WSAG recommended the latter option. They also sought approval from Ford to conduct a B-52 flyover at the same time the tree was cut down to further demonstrate U.S. military might. Finally, they developed initial plans to move a Naval Task Force in from the Sea of Japan, fly in F-111s from Idaho, and even developed [plans to] bomb North Korean barracks. . . .

The Americans and the South Koreans swiftly cut down the tree. The North Koreans were scared, and agreed to dismantle two North Korean guard-posts. The plan to bomb the barracks was eventually scuttled, despite having the support of William Clements and Henry Kissinger. Kissinger blamed the decision to forgo the barracks strike on Ford’s presidential election speech that Americans would not be in combat anywhere in the world. However, during the August 25, 1976 WSAG meeting, the policymakers continued planning for a response in case further incidents occurred.

Get it? Paul Bunyan? Because of the tree?

1. Of course, he was writing before the pitch clock.