In remarks at a private fundraiser on Thursday night, Joe Biden claimed the world was facing the prospect of “Armageddon’ if Russian President Vladimir Putin used a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
Biden got a scolding from French President Emanuel Macron for even discussing the use of nuclear weapons. “We must speak with prudence when commenting on such matters,” Macron said at the European Union summit in Prague on Friday. He’s right, of course. Nuclear diplomacy is best conducted in the shadows, given the stakes involved. In 1962, John Kennedy and Nikita Kruschev established a “backchannel” — a trusted go-between who delivered private messages to the two leaders. As the two sides “negotiated” in public and at the UN, a deal was sealed behind the scenes.
But just because Putin is running off at the mouth about using nuclear weapons doesn’t mean Biden has to play that game. Nor does Biden have to let the world know about how the U.S. intends to get Putin off the perilous ledge he’s on.
Related: Russia at a Tipping Point as Ukrainian Forces Advance
“We’re trying to figure out: What is Putin’s off-ramp?” Mr. Biden said in a speech at the home of James Murdoch, the son of Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp.
“Where, where does he get off? Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself in a position that he does not — not only lose face, but lose significant power within Russia?”
In 1962, Kennedy was confronted with the same problem: how to keep Kruschev in power without emasculating him while preventing World War III. Kennedy chose to give the Russian premiere a bone: removing U.S. missiles stationed in Turkey. (The White House spin at the time was that the Jupiter missiles were “obsolete,” which was ludicrous. They were perfectly good nuclear weapons that would detonate no matter how old they were.)
But it was something for Kruschev, and he and the Russian Politburo accepted it.
Kennedy wasn’t dumb enough to muse out loud about the potential weaknesses of Kruschev — a sure-fire way to undercut him in the eyes of the Soviet elites. Suggesting that Putin needed to “save face” to stay in power no doubt worried Putin as well as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It is hard to translate Mr. Biden’s description of the risks into a strategy that fits the moment. No one in the administration wants to suggest, in public or private, that the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky should avoid chasing Russian troops out of every corner of Ukraine, back to the borders that existed on Feb. 23, the day before the invasion began.
But behind closed doors, some Western diplomats and military officials say, that is exactly the conversation that may have to happen if the goal is to balance winning back territory against preventing Mr. Putin from lashing out. William Burns, the C.I.A. director and the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow during Mr. Putin’s rise, said on CBS this week that the Russian leader can be “quite dangerous and reckless” when he feels cornered or “feels his back against the wall.”
Indeed, how much should the United States give Putin to satisfy his appetite for territory while keeping the nuclear genie in the bottle? Do we recognize Putin’s illegitimate claims to Crimea? What about Russian minorities in Donetsk? Putin made things extraordinarily complicated with his fraudulent vote to annex four Ukraine provinces. He’s already made a big deal about them being part of “Mother Russia.”
Mr. Zelensky is not going to like any solution that doesn’t include returning every inch of Ukraine’s territory seized by Russia over the last decade. But if nuclear war is to be averted, that’s a probable outcome. Biden will not be able to satisfy both Putin and Zelensky, which means Putin’s “off-ramp” may end up being a slippery slope to nuclear war after all.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member