The story goes that President Nixon, brainstorming with Henry Kissinger on how America could prevail in Vietnam, suggested to the would-be American Metternich that he could tell North Vietnamese negotiators that the president was quite insane and willing to use nuclear weapons against the Communist state if he didn’t get his way. This “madman theory” did not, needless to say, get Nixon or America anywhere, although it would make a boffo plot for a present-day Shakespearean drama about the madness of power. But its equivalent today poses an impossible dilemma for NATO as it confronts Putin’s invasion of democratic but non-member state Ukraine. To wit: How much help can the U.S. and Europe give Ukraine without seriously risking Putin escalating all the way to nuclear attacks on Warsaw, London and New York?
Like the North Vietnamese regime in Nixon’s scenario, we just don’t know whether our opponent is “mad” enough to launch thermonuclear weapons, or merely bluffing. And even in the latter case, we still face extreme dangers. Read One Minute To Midnight, Michael Dobbs’s 2008 history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to understand why. In brief, neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev had any intention of starting World War III in October 1962 over the issue of Russian nuclear weapons in Cuba, but both leaders were willing to push matters very far indeed, and tensions got so high that numerous small incidents almost set off Armageddon anyway. For example, an American bomber loaded with nuclear bombs crashed on takeoff in Indiana. Spoiler alert, the bombs didn’t go off, but if they had, none of us might be here today. Another American bomber based in Alaska was running a drill that nobody thought to call off when it strayed into Russian airspace and was confronted by Soviet fighter jets. Whoopsie! We lucked out then, too, and the pilot made it home safely. Or take JFK’s genius move of declaring a naval “quarantine” around Cuba, because a blockade is legally an act of war. So very smaht, as he might have said in his Boston accent, at least until a bunch of American destroyers surrounded a Soviet diesel submarine in the Sargasso Sea and started dropping depth charges to make it surface. Temperatures on board climbed to something like 40 degrees Celsius (over 100 Fahrenheit), and as the hull shook and it got hard to breathe, the captain and the first mate lost their shit and wanted to fire off everything they had. We are all alive today because the onboard Soviet Communist Commissar overruled them.
I trust the point is made. But at the same time, we dare not let Russia have a free hand to smash Ukraine and commit genocide, because in that case Putin will attack NATO next and democracy will imperiled around the world, with pro-Putin Western politicians like Trump and Marine Le Pen feeling the fascist East Wind at their backs and becoming still further emboldened. (If you haven’t been paying attention, the slick French neo-fascist leader is now within heiling distance of the French presidency.)
I don’t mean to let the last twenty years of feckless Western leadership off the hook here, with everyone from Shrub Bush to Obama to Angela Merkel happy to keep “doing business” with an increasingly aggressive and reckless Putin. Just maybe, the Russian invasion could have been stopped in its tracks had NATO simply made Ukraine a member back in early February and let Putin shriek and rant like Hitler. But that historical moment is gone.
So what is the right balance to strike now between surrender to twenty-first century fascism and the long-delayed “wargasm” of thermonuclear warfare? I’m damned if I know, and neither, dear reader, do you.
Emanuel Goldstein 