Kęstutis Girnius. Red lines in nuclear age - empty scares?

 

"Zelensky is more and more persistently asking Western allies to supply more weapons and not limit their use. According to Zelensky, Putin's threats and hints about red lines are a bluff.

 

Some two weeks ago, he claimed that "the whole naive, illusory concept of the so-called red lines vis-a-vis Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has collapsed these days."

 

There is an increasing reliance on the rhetoric of red lines. US President Obama has threatened to retaliate if Syria ever uses chemical weapons against rebels in its civil war. Earlier, during his speech at the United Nations, Israel's Netanyahu literally drew a red line on a diagram, indicating that Iran would not be allowed to exceed a certain stage of uranium enrichment, and implicitly threatened military action if that line was crossed.

 

Obama has been and continues to be criticized for his perceived indecisiveness when, despite his own line, he decided not to launch airstrikes against Syrian armed forces after they used chemical weapons. This criticism is redundant. Under pressure from Obama and Russia, Syria agreed to destroy all of its weapons of mass destruction, and while Damascus isn't fully committed to this agreement, their destruction has done far more good than would have been achieved if US aircraft had spent days or even weeks destroying targets in Syria. Trump bombed Syria in 2018, but it didn't change the course of the war.

 

As the British military historian Lawrence Freedman points out, the red line means a commitment to a certain course of action, no matter what the risks, no matter what the difficulties. A red line is successful when it is linked to vital interests, it is clearly drawn, the consequences of disregarding it are unambiguously stated or implied, and both sides know where the line is and what crossing it would mean. But theory is one thing, reality is another.

 

If an enemy unit crosses a strictly defined line, say a state border, but quickly retreats, then you will not declare war, and most likely, you will not shell its territory with artillery. The Kremlin would probably have felt pressure to take more radical measures if both the Leopard and the F-16 had been handed over to Ukraine in the early days of the war. In small steps and over a longer period of time, the West gave Kiev more and more powerful weapons - the Stinger anti-aircraft weapon, the HIMARS artillery system, Leopard tanks, and finally F-16 fighter jets. I don't know if the USA deliberately implemented this "salami" tactic, but Russia did not react strongly to the loss of each slice, so in the long run they lost the whole salami.

 

This is not enough for Zelensky, he is seeking permission to use Western weaponry to attack targets deep in Russia. The aspirations of the US and Ukraine are not the same. Washington prefers to avoid a war with Russia, for Zelensky, that war would not be the greatest evil if it would enable the recovery of a significant part of the lost territory.

 

The President of Ukraine is convinced that Russia will not use a nuclear weapon, the United States has doubts about this and bears greater responsibility for the fate of the world.

 

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, former US President John F. Kennedy described the lesson learned this way: “The nuclear powers, in defense of their vital interests, must first avoid confrontations that would force the adversary to choose either a humiliating withdrawal or nuclear war. To choose such behavior in the nuclear age would be nothing more than proof of our political bankruptcy or the collective death wish of the world."

 

In his book Thinking about Nuclear Weapons, Michael Quinlan, the British government's leading civilian thinker on defense policy, particularly on nuclear weapons, wrote that a nuclear state is a state that no one can afford to make desperate, and that we can never be sure that it will come to terms with a non-nuclear defeat, even though it may be required by treaties, obligations or international law. And it is not clear how to understand the opponent's actions, how to react to them.

 

I used to think that if Russia decided to use a tactical nuclear weapon, maybe they would detonate it over the Black Sea to avoid mass casualties. But in his book, published nearly two decades ago, Quinlan writes that during the Cold War, NATO's nuclear planning group considered detonating a bomb, say over the Baltic Sea, to deter the Soviets from possible action, even though the Soviets themselves had not yet used a nuclear weapon. Although the author does not go into details, such a step might be taken if the Warsaw Pact parties mobilize and concentrate their forces on the borders of NATO countries.

 

The proposal was rejected out of concern that such a move might give the impression of lacking the firm resolve the move was intended to demonstrate. So it would not strengthen, but weaken the deterrent effect. It is assumed that all decision-makers think alike and have a similar psychological approach to risk-taking and the loss of honor to force in case of landing. Disagreements among NATO countries over targets deep in Russia show that the assumption is questionable.

 

The current director of the CIA and a great Russia expert, William Burns, follows the middle ground. Given Russia's potential military failures, no one can lightly underestimate the threat posed by the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons, so "it would be foolish to completely dismiss the risk of escalation...but it would be equally foolish to be unnecessarily alarmed."

 

Red lines work only under very specific conditions, and if they are published without moderation, they lose credibility (who takes Medvedev's threats seriously?) and reduce the effectiveness of those that might be credible. Attempts to establish clear boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable, such as the aforementioned hypothetical border breach, often fail because of the chaos and uncertainty inherent in war, and because, as in the case of Obama's Syria, enforcing them does not guarantee an improvement.

 

Russia's threats are not aimed at Ukraine, but at the United States and its allies, telling them not to get directly involved in the conflict on the side of Ukraine. Washington has made it clear to Russia that it can hardly imagine any circumstances in which the use of Russian nuclear weapons would trigger a nuclear response, but stresses that the cost to Moscow would be very high. Freedman believes that the assumption that Putin is unpredictable and erratic, and fears of a possible escalation in the use of weapons, have misled key US decision-makers.

 

US leaders began their deliberations with the worst-case scenario - the use of a nuclear weapon - and tried to imagine the course of events that would lead to that. It would have been better to start with the situation that V. Putin faced and his possible reactions, of which the use of nuclear weapons was only one and perhaps the least convincing. It is said that the West is acting too timidly.

 

For now, Putin is acting, in Mao Zedong's words, like a "paper tiger." But we should not forget Burns' careful assessment of the situation, nor Kennedy's remarks about the lessons of the Cuban crisis, nor the warning against creating conditions in which a nuclear power would consider its position desperate."