Michael McFaul sees all and knows what’s best for us:
This threat of escalation, however, is cheap talk. Putin is bluffing.
The CIA Director, Bill Burns, is not so confident that talk of using nuclear weapons is just “cheap talk”:
Burns spoke at Georgia Tech of the "potential desperation" and setbacks dealt Putin, whose forces have suffered heavy losses and have been forced to retreat from some parts of northern Ukraine after failing to capture Kyiv.
For those reasons, "none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons," Burns said.
One of the main flaws in McFaul’s analysis is that he assumes that the Russian leadership believes that any use of nuclear weapons would result in their destruction and therefore they wouldn’t risk their own demise by using them. McFaul dismisses threats to use nuclear weapons because Putin is not “suicidal.” I agree that he isn’t suicidal, but that doesn’t tell us that he wouldn’t authorize the use of one or more tactical nuclear weapons in the field if he concluded that his conventional forces faced defeat.
Because the Russian military’s conventional forces have proved to be much weaker than anyone expected, that is all the more reason to take the threat from their nuclear weapons very seriously. McFaul says that Putin is “bluffing,” and that could be right, but lots of people assumed that Putin was bluffing about invading Ukraine because the costs of doing so seemed too high. It is certainly not a risk that can be blown off in the way that McFaul does.
If military defeat threatens Putin’s hold on power, or if he thinks that it threatens his hold on power, he might take even more extreme risks to stave off that outcome. Putin is concerned with self-preservation and regime preservation, and he presumably understands that losing a war that he started threatens his survival. McFaul assures us, “No country is threatening to attack, let alone eliminate, Russia.” That may be, but there are many prominent people in the West talking about regime change and removing Putin from power. If he believes that this is the goal of the U.S. and its allies, he may lash out. There may not be an existential threat to Russia itself, but if Putin thinks there is a real threat to his survival he may act as if his survival and Russia’s were one and the same.
It is true that the use of even one tactical nuclear weapon would backfire politically on Russia in a big way. Fence-sitting governments that have so far refrained from condemning Russia might feel compelled to denounce it, and previously sympathetic governments might start putting distance between themselves and Moscow. More companies would pull out of the Russian market, and Western governments’ positions would harden further. The potential for further escalation and direct war with NATO would be considerable, and that could become a nuclear war. Using a nuclear weapon would be a short-sighted and outrageous thing to do, but that describes the entire Russian war so far. If we should have learned anything from Putin’s decision to launch the war, it is that he has not been taking the potential costs of using force seriously enough. It would be inexcusable folly for our political leaders and policymakers to make the same mistake by discounting the threat to use of nuclear weapons as nothing more than a “bluff.”
Advocates of increasing military support to Ukraine need to minimize the risks of what they propose, and that is why McFaul insists that Russian nuclear threats are empty. If they aren’t empty, following his recommendations would make the use of nuclear weapons more likely, and that would be a catastrophe for all concerned. The use of nuclear weapons in this war is still unlikely, but it is not impossible. That is why the U.S. and its allies must make sure that they don’t take any additional actions that make that use more likely, because the consequences of getting this wrong are terrible to contemplate.