Trump Is Spooked by Putin’s Nuke Threats
The president takes the Kremlin’s bluster at face value.
PRESIDENT TRUMP, WHO PROFESSES TO DISDAIN the policies of his predecessor, appears to be falling into one of the same policy traps that hobbled the Biden administration’s approach to European security—the fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin might resort to using nuclear weapons to fight the war in Ukraine.
In the Oval Office meltdown with President Zelensky in late February, Trump said, “You’re gambling with World War III.” That, however, was not the only time that the president or his supporters like Donald Trump Jr. or Tucker Carlson have invoked the threat of a potential nuclear Armageddon as an excuse for pressuring Ukraine into making a deal—any deal to end the war. It is also a partial (but obviously not complete) explanation for the administration’s asymmetric application of pressure on the two sides to reach a ceasefire agreement. The invocation of World War III as a major factor shaping policy towards Ukraine is as much a trope for this administration as it was for the last.
Last week, Ralph Goff—who served six times as a station chief in the CIA and was, until the Trump administration nixed his candidacy, in line to be the next CIA director of operations—told the Times of London that the Biden administration had, in the Times’s words, “a deliberate strategy to give Ukraine the arms it needed to fight—but not enough to defeat Putin’s army, because of fears the Russian leader would use nuclear weapons if he got close to losing.” Goff, who retired from the CIA in 2023, explained that the Biden administration never gave the Ukrainians “enough to win. They only gave them enough to bleed.” And the reason for the Biden team’s über-cautious approach was fear of World War III. “They allowed themselves to be bamboozled by Vladimir Putin and his nuclear-sabre rattling.”
Putin repeated the saber-rattling Goff described just days later in a documentary about his 25 years in power aired on Russian state television. Queried about Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory and the threat of nuclear war, Putin replied, “There has been no need to use those [nuclear] weapons . . . and I hope they will not be required.” Putin’s answer encapsulates his skillful manipulation of the nuclear threat. He often denies the intention of using nuclear weapons in a specific case but leaves the potential for future use hanging in the air. It is an exemplar of the classic Russian (and Soviet) use of nuclear threats for political purposes.
At the dawn of the missile age, Henry Kissinger made a trenchant observation about nuclear deterrence in his 1961 book, The Necessity for Choice: “Deterrence,” he wrote, “seeks to prevent a given course by making it seem less attractive than all possible alternatives. It therefore ultimately depends on an intangible quality: the state of mind of the potential aggressor. From the point of view of deterrence a seeming weakness will have the same consequences as an actual one. A gesture intended as a bluff but taken seriously is more useful as a deterrent than a bona fide threat interpreted as a bluff.”
Putin, who almost certainly has not read Kissinger on the subject, seems to have grasped this insight intuitively. His nuclear threats have been consistent and carefully calibrated. When asked specifically if he intends to use nuclear weapons, he has denied their utility in the Ukraine war, but he has accompanied that with numerous vague threats. At the outset of the full-scale invasion, for instance, he cautioned the West against interfering lest they see consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history.” Later in the fall, he warned, “We will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.” Putin’s nuclear posturing was also on display in an interview with journalist Dmitry Kiselev in which he suggested that Russia’s nuclear arsenal outmatched America’s and implied that the United States should therefore avoid any risk of miscalculation that could lead to nuclear war. Putin has also, on multiple occasions, referred to U.S. use of nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II suggesting that the U.S had created a “precedent” for nuclear use.
Whereas Western thinking about deterrence often stovepipes nuclear and non-nuclear domains, Russian thinking is much more integrated and flexible. Russian experts Russians have been especially attuned to how information warfare can play a role in deterrence and can influence American decision-making.
Even the words Russians use to characterize deterrence reflect very different notions of how deterrence works than those familiar to Americans. The Russian word for deterrence, “sderzhivanie,” suggests “restraint.” But whereas American thinking has come to focus on restraint by one side leading to restraint on the other, in Russian thinking “restraint” is something that one enforces on the adversary through “ustrashenie” or threat. “Sderzhivanie” comes from the root for “to hold,” and is the same word the Russians use to translate “containment.” The result in Russian doctrine has been an emphasis on the potential use of theater nuclear weapons in order, as some Russia watchers have out it, to “escalate to de-escalate,” or more properly to escalate to end a conventional conflict on terms favorable to Russia. The emphasis is less on resolving a crisis and more on scaring the adversary into inaction.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the war in Ukraine has been replete with frequent, if vague, Russian threats to use nuclear weapons. Putin is merely playing on oft-expressed American fears of potential nuclear escalation. U.S. support for Ukraine in the Biden administration was clearly bounded by fears of nuclear escalation and the U.S. president’s determination to aid Ukraine without provoking “World War III.”
The Trump administration would do well to familiarize itself with the actual history of Putin’s many vanishing red lines and nuclear threats before it invokes the danger of nuclear war or world war, lest they too find themselves “bamboozled” by a series of nuclear bluffs.
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