Nuclear moment of truth for Biden and the West

It is “red line time” for the United States and the West. Mounting Russian, Chinese and North Korean threats, and their open coordination in undermining the international order, have produced a dramatic and dangerous situation requiring an equally dramatic response.

The United States, as leader of the Western world, needs to stop walking on eggshells in the face of reckless intimidation from adversaries and start imposing some “red lines not to cross” of its own. And they should be more serious and enforceable than the one the Obama-Biden administration set regarding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

The first and most existential area for immediate attention is the three regimes’ threatened use of nuclear weapons. Initial use by any of those proclaimed Western enemies would rekindle the specter of nuclear annihilation that prevailed throughout the Cold War and has returned with the reconstitution of the Soviet threat in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Multiplying the danger is China’s expanded and intensified menacing of Taiwan, Japan and the United States with an arsenal of nuclear weapons exponentially larger than what it possessed in the earlier period. China’s fraternal collusion with Pyongyang has added to the toxic mix a malevolent, nuclear-armed enemy in North Korea even more reckless in its threats than the other two supposedly more mature powers.

Putin has led the charge with a shocking return to Nazi-era barbarism in his wanton aggression against Ukraine. After a devastating seven months of intensive ground warfare, Ukrainian valor, bolstered by U.S. and Western arms, has turned the tide of battle and regained large parts of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

Putin apparently has decided he can complete the destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure without destroying what is left of his own army by sustaining the attack at a safe distance through the use of long-range missiles.

If that last-ditch brutality fails to break Ukraine’s spirit of resistance and Western will to support it, the desperate and morally-defeated Putin has strongly suggested he will resort to the final means at his disposal: the use of a nuclear weapon. The United States and the Western world are being hurled back to the ultimate peril faced in October 1962 — the possibility of a major war between two nuclear superpowers.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was precipitated by the Soviet desire to achieve superiority over the West in all military domains, conventional and nuclear. It already had conventional dominance in Europe with its massive ground armies and vast arsenal of traditional arms and military equipment. Those advantages were offset by the proximity of NATO’s nuclear weapons, especially the intermediate-range ballistic missiles based in Turkey and Italy.

Moscow long had resented their presence in Western Europe and consistently badgered the West to remove them, to no avail. Washington and its allies were not about to surrender the clear military advantage those nuclear-armed missiles provided to counter the Soviets’ edge in conventional ground forces.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had met with President John Kennedy in Vienna and came away with the conclusion that America’s young president was too weak and inexperienced to stand up to Russian might and Khrushchev’s personal strength and bluster.

He approved a plan to neutralize the West’s nuclear advantage by surreptitiously placing Russian medium-range missiles in Communist Cuba, where they could threaten Washington and New York. But, before they were fully deployed, and despite Kennedy’s initial denials, U.S. intelligence discovered them. The moment of truth had arrived: how to respond to this new nuclear existential threat.

Kennedy went on national television to explain the situation to the American people and the world, saying Washington would consider any attack on the U.S. coming from Cuba to be an attack from the Soviet Union and would respond in kind. He imposed a naval “quarantine” around Cuba to prevent any further influx of Soviet weapons.

The world held its breath as tense negotiations to resolve the nuclear standoff continued for 13 days. Then, according to Kennedy mythology, Secretary of State Dean Rusk reported to the president, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and the other guy just blinked.” The Soviet missiles would be removed, and the world exhaled.

It turned out, however, that both sides had blinked. In exchange for Soviet withdrawal of its missiles, the U.S. agreed to Moscow’s years-long demand and removed NATO’s own missiles from Italy and Turkey. Washington also committed to provide an unprecedented security guarantee to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and refrain from any further attempts to overthrow his regime, as it had tried in the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs operation.

Today, unlike the mutual de-escalation that peacefully resolved the 1962 nuclear confrontation, there is no readily available exchange of concessions. Washington this time has no rewards to bestow on Moscow to prevent its resort to nuclear weapons, even at the tactical level — only severe punishment after the fact of the outrage.

What might that punishment be? Detonation of a nuclear weapon in or near Ukraine would end three-quarters of a century of prudent restraint by nuclear powers and establish the tragic historical precedent of outright nuclear war. Responding in kind with a nuclear weapon on Russian forces in or near Ukraine would cement the “new abnormal” and is almost certainly not what national security adviser Jake Sullivan meant when he reported warning his Russian counterparts of “catastrophic” consequences.

But breaking the historic post-World War II norm of non-nuclear war certainly merits a historic response. It should start with an all-out Western commitment to provide Kyiv with every weapons system needed expeditiously to drive Russian forces completely out of Ukraine’s territory and restore Ukraine to its pre-2014 borders.

On the economic front, the U.S. should pull out all the stops on sanctions, leaving none in reserve for measured escalation, as has been the practice since Russia’s invasion began in February. That should include hitting the reachable assets of every Russian oligarch and Putin ally, many of whom have figured out how to avoid the sanctions list and to minimize the impact of any sanctions imposed.

Washington should do all it can to invigorate the international war crimes investigations and to hold to account all those responsible, especially Putin. Whatever the technical obstacles and legal complexities inherent in those processes, the U.S. should render all overt and covert support to individuals and groups in Russia already committed to fulfilling the moral claim Biden announced in March: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Hopefully, that vow will be sustained to realization, unlike President Obama’s empty pronouncement against the longevity of Syria’s Assad.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.