I have written in earlier posts about the dangers of the US allowing Ukraine to use advanced US ATACMS missiles to attack in Russian territory. Well that has now occurred and Russia has formally and very publicly changed its nuclear doctrine to include such a use as a legitimate reason to use its nuclear arsenal and argued that this involves direct US involvement in the war, that it crosses a key red line in the proxy war that has been raging.
All I will say here is that Russia’s use of North Korean soldiers to press its war effort is also escalatory and these new US weapons are being used against Russian targets that are directly involved in the war effort against Ukraine not just any targets in Russia or deep into the country. Still this is extremely troubling and this policy decision is not taking seriously enough that Russia is a nuclear power and that Ukraine is right next door to its own territory.
Now there are several ways one can look at all this: First, to some extent this is jockeying for power in the war before Trump takes office and a peace agreement of some sort is reached with each side trying to position itself best for the resulting negotiations. It’s interesting to speculate whether Trump himself would even have approved such an escalation prior to these negotiations. In some ways Trump has always taken an even harder line against Russia than has the current administration. What exactly did Biden and Trump discuss in their White House conversation last week?
Second, one can see this as another example of the international organization approach that is largely running our foreign policy and has as a new generation in many cases no reality principle about the cold war realities of an earlier era making very bad and dangerous judgements regarding actions towards nuclear power countries. The headlines for this event were in many cases “World War 3 watch”. From a real-politique approach which should be ascendent on this matter this was a very bad decision.
Third, an influential political philosopher in Russia who has Putin’s ear, Alexander Dugin, has come out and said that the West does not understand how important Russia views control of Ukraine for its own national security is, that the West is risking nuclear war with a nuclear superpower, and that with Ukraine it will be much more difficult to reach a peace proposal than the West realizes. In other words the Korean DMZ proposal which has been the fallback position for the West and was discussed extensively early on even by that bastion of the power elite the Foreign Affairs journal is a nonstarter. Putin may be much more of a pragmatist than that, but Duggan has a point that Russia may indeed be unwilling to tolerate a Western peacekeeping force in Ukraine or simply a 20 year hold on NATO inclusion. I m not sure if we were in a proxy war with Mexico the US would go for such a resolution either.
All of which is to suggest that whatever Trump’s skill set is in terms of negotiating a deal on the Ukraine war, and past history suggests he is quite talented in this area and already has Zelensky and the European allies including Germany’s Sholz thinking in terms of a peace deal, campaign rhetoric aside it may be actually quite difficult to end this conflict and the risks of escalation are extreme and very dangerous indeed. Was the cutting of a Finnish-German undersea cable already a retaliation as some have suggested to this change in policy or from some other cause? How will Russia respond to this change in doctrine on the actual battlefield? What this means for markets is that the black swan of macro-political risk is still very present but not priced fully in to stock valuations.
On a more positive note I do believe that Trump takes much more seriously, hopefully, the threat of nuclear war and that his approach will be that of a real-politique perspective.