Most members of the U.S. political and foreign policy establishment still consider Washington’s proxy war in Afghanistan to have been a smashing success, since it caused significant damage and frustration to America’s superpower rival without direct U.S. involvement in the fighting. The disruptions that the war caused even appeared to have played a role in the subsequent political implosion of the Soviet Union itself. True, assisting the mujahidin empowered Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world, but that danger was not easily discernible at the time. In the short term, Washington’s strategy achieved its objective without leading to a direct military clash between the United States and the Soviet Union.
What U.S. officials and members of the foreign policy blob do not seem to grasp is that Ukraine is far more important to Moscow than Afghanistan ever was. That difference explains why there are more and more dark hints emanating from the Kremlin about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons if Russia faces an overall military defeat in Ukraine. As I’ve written elsewhere, Ukraine is a vital security interest to Russia, and the Putin government will do whatever is necessary militarily, including using tactical nukes in Ukraine, to prevent such a humiliation.
Nevertheless, hawkish and even some centrist foreign policy pundits have proposed a variety of reckless U.S. responses if Russia crosses the nuclear threshold in Ukraine. Most of those proposals obliterate the distinction between a proxy war and a direct war between the United States and Russia. Joe Cirincione, a longtime expert on nuclear warfare and supposed moderate, mused that the United States “could destroy the Russian forces in Ukraine in a matter of days” with purely conventional weapons.
Destroying Russia’s Black Sea fleet using conventional air and missile strikes if Putin violates the nuclear taboo, has long been a favorite “solution” of Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In early May, he stated confidently that “even without resorting to nuclear weapons of their own, NATO could launch airstrikes that would rapidly sink the entire Russian Black Sea fleet and destroy much of the Russian army in and around Ukraine. That would shake Putin’s criminal regime to its foundations.” Boot remained equally confident in late September. “President Biden needs to deter Putin by signaling that the response to any nuclear attack would be devastating. It would not even require a nuclear response; NATO air forces could probably destroy the Russian army in Ukraine with conventional munitions.”
Both Cirincione and Boot implicitly assume that Moscow would view a direct U.S. attack on the Russian military as no more provocative than providing weapons and training to Ukrainian forces who are fighting Russians. It is an illogical and extremely dangerous assumption. The former carries excessive risks to defend a country that is not even remotely a vital U.S. interest, but the latter would be a blatant act of war against the Russian Federation. Russia is not likely to cower and slink away from such an existential threat.
Even if Moscow uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the ongoing war—awful as it is—would remain a bilateral Russia-Ukraine conflict. A U.S. attack on Russian targets changes that equation totally. Such a dramatic escalation means war between two major powers armed to the teeth with both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. What starts out as even a limited war between 2 nuclear powers entails an awful risk of escalation to the thermonuclear level, bringing Armageddon into play. It is shocking that supposedly knowledgeable foreign policy experts can’t grasp such a crucial distinction.
