With the outgoing US president seemingly eager to throw a final tantrum before his time is up, it’s up to Moscow to be the adult in the room.
Never a dull day: America’s political culture is constantly evolving. Currently, we are witnessing a beautifully “bipartisan” competition over who can leave the president’s office as the sorest loser. After the 2020 election, when Donald Trump was defeated and had to vacate the White House to make room for Joe Biden, Trump and his followers would not stop whining about having been cheated (no, they were not). In the end, whatever you think about its political meaning – vulgar riot or full-blown coup attempt – their January 2021 storming of the Capitol in Washington certainly qualified as a tantrum of historic proportions. Think Boston Tea Party, but with very, very tired toddlers.
And now, with Trump riding back into town – and even the New York Times forced to acknowledge that he is not an aberration but a “transformational force” – the outgoing Biden team has found an even more tempestuous way of throwing its toys out of the pram: Whereas the unimaginatively homebound Trumpsters of 2021 could not think of anything better than making a very embarrassing scene at home, the Bidenistas of 2024 – good liberal internationalists that they are – have found a way of going global with their anger management issue. What’s a storming of a national parliament if you can risk triggering World War III?
Because that is what the Biden administration is doing by – after long and well-founded hesitation – allowing the regime of Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to use American ATACMS missiles for strikes into Russia. The attitude of the EU-NATO Europeans has been muddled. Usually they, of course, fall in line with the US, but there are some signs that this time they might find it too risky or split over the issue. Germany will not – for once (and for now!) – follow the US slavishly: Barely-still-chancellor Olaf Scholz is clinging to his “no” to delivering Taurus cruise missiles to Kiev. France and Britain, too, are reported to be “circumspect,” whatever that may mean in the end.
To be precise, three caveats are in order: The initial news of this shift were, US-style, not fully official but wrapped in a leak released through the as-always-obliging New York Times on November 18. Then, one day later, the White House followed up with neither confirming nor denying the story. The ATACMS attack on the Bryansk region shows that the news was real enough. Second, the Russia being targeted does not “merely” consist of territories that used to be Ukrainian in 1991 but are now claimed by Moscow: The new decision is so explosive because it means firing into territories everyone acknowledges as belonging to Russia. Finally – and crucially – things are made worse by the fact that this is not even really about “allowing” Ukraine to use the ATACMS missiles in this manner. Rather, these weapons do not only come from the US, they also can only be operated with substantial Western assistance. What we are talking about are, in other words, not simply Ukrainian but joined NATO-Ukrainian attacks on Russia with American weapons fired from Ukrainian territory.
Russia has just officially changed and, to an extent, loosened its nuclear arms doctrine. The Russian president Vladimir Putin has long warned the West that Moscow will not tolerate the absurd fiction that these missiles will come only from Ukraine. Instead, such use of the ATACMS, he has been clear, will bring about a (direct and open) state of war between Russia and NATO. In response to the Biden administration’s fresh escalation, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has confirmed that this position has not changed: Washington is “pouring oil into the flames,” Peskov has commented, risking escalating “tensions to a qualitatively new level.” In particular, he pointed out that such a US policy also implies “a whole new situation with regard to US involvement in this conflict.”
So, there is no doubt that this Democratic administration, already on its way out after a thorough electoral thrashing by the Trumpist Republicans, is, literally and deliberately, dialing up the tension in a manner that risks World War III – a direct clash between NATO and Russia (and, in that case, most likely, not only Russia).
In effect firing (with and for a friend, so to speak) your missiles at a great-power state with a large nuclear arsenal is always a really, really dicey move. Getting ready to do so just after elections have made clear that you definitely do not represent your nation, especially on that issue, adds a nice touch of contempt for the American people. Say what you will about MAGA-fury and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, she is right about this one.
Why is this happening? We do not know. There are published rumors that even Biden advisers are split on the issue. Is this, then, a last desperate throw of the dice by the most bellicist White House and State Department faction, trying to escalate to full-scale war before Trump will get his chance to shut the whole thing down? Or is it “merely” an especially cynical maneuver meant to poison the US-Russian relationship even further so that Trump will have as hard a time as possible when trying to fix it? Is it part of an information war strategy aimed most of all at the American public, preparing the ground for the post-proxy war blame game? “We Democrats did everything we could to the last minute, but then they, the Republicans, came in and lost Ukraine!” – That kind of thing.
Or has the whole operation been coordinated with the incoming Trump team to increase the pressure on Russia, a sort of primitive bad-cop-good-cop con, as some speculate? Unlikely, it seems. For that explanation to be plausible, the protests from the Trump side are a little too loud. That Greene has come out guns blazing may not be strong evidence. She is well known for being – cough, cough – extremely outspoken and a bit of a loose cannon, too. But Donald Trump Jr. – currently much in favor with his dad – and Trump senior’s designated national security adviser Mike Waltz have also weighed in: For Trump junior, the Biden move is about the “military industrial complex” trying to “get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives.” Waltz, meanwhile, has, in effect, publicly agreed with the Russian position by calling the ATACMS move another “step up the escalation ladder” leading into the unknown. He has also stressed that the Biden administration did not inform him in advance – so much for talk about a smooth transition, then.
Whatever the reasons for Biden’s last hooray, no one in Washington even claims that adding these ATACMS strikes will actually make a genuine military difference (that is, in Kiev’s favor). The times when one miracle weapon after the other was sold to Western publics as a “game changer” are over. Now we hear much more modest assertions, such as that, somehow, such ATACMS attacks are the right response to the alleged appearance of North Korean allies on Russia’s side. How? No one really knows or seems to feel they’d need to know. Instead, we hear vague mumbling that the ATACMS will, in essence, teach North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un a lesson. Good luck with that… I bet the man who built himself a nuclear deterrent in defiance of the US and its allies will be immensely impressed.
But let’s not try too hard to understand Washington. To paraphrase a famous line from the nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev, late-imperial Washington cannot really be grasped by reason. It’s just too irrational for that. What is more important is to ask what consequences these US antics will have. Here the key fact to keep in mind is that risking World War III is certainly very bad, especially in the context of a dastardly proxy war that should never have happened in the first place. But it’s still not the same as actually starting World War III, fortunately. Washington could, of course, do that as well. Yet as things are, its disruptive activities are limited to making it more likely.
In the end, therefore, the key factor remains Russia. Or to be more precise, how Moscow will choose to respond to a type of attack – once it happens – that it has warned the West about in very clear terms. One option we can rule out is that Russia will simply do nothing. That is impossible because that is not its style nowadays (it’s not the 1990s anymore, as hard as many in the West still find it to process that fact), and, also, it would embolden an out-of-control and lawless West further and allow it to undermine Moscow’s credibility.
Russia will exact a price. The question is how exactly. Even while Putin has warned that a direct state of war between Russia and NATO will follow from joined NATO-Ukrainian ATACMS attacks in Russia, Moscow has, of course, not tied its own hands: Even if it considers itself at war, it will still be Russia’s decision what to do about that. Here the fact remains that the Russian leadership has no interest in a type of retaliation – for instance, a direct attack on NATO bases in Poland, Romania, or Germany – that would play into the hands of Western bellicists, especially while Russia is winning the war on the ground in Ukraine and on the eve of Trump’s return to Washington.
What seems more likely are responses elsewhere in a world that features between 700 and 800 US bases, often in places where no one wants them. It would, for instance, be easy for Russia to dish out painful payback through regional adversaries of the US and their allies, for instance in the Middle East. Moreover, Moscow can, obviously, also retaliate within Ukraine, including against Western black-ops troops and mercenaries, as it has done before.
The bottom line remains that Biden’s last gamble is a double sore-loser move: By a president and a party that cannot accept that Trump – with his at least declared vision of making peace with Russia – has beaten them at the American polls. And by a US foreign policy establishment that won’t admit that its whole hubristic proxy war project of demoting Russia has not only failed but backfired: Moscow has grown stronger and the West weaker. And once again, the world will have to rely on the Russian leadership to be the adult in the room and find a way to respond and, if necessary, retaliate in a smart manner that will avoid global escalation. That, in turn, will only increase Russia’s standing even further. Bidenistas: Slow claps for you, again.