This article was originally published by Connor O’Keeffe at The Mises Institute.
On Sunday, news broke that President Joe Biden has authorized Ukraine to use long-range American missiles to strike deeper into Russian territory. After the US gave Ukraine the greenlight to strike targets on the Russian side of the border earlier this year, the Ukrainian government and its biggest cheerleaders in Washington have been pressuring the president to support longer-range strikes—especially after Ukraine launched its invasion of Russia’s Kursk region. Sunday, they got their wish. On Tuesday, the first missile was launched at a target in Russia’s Bryansk region.
This move has many in the West concerned. Back in September, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a change to Russia’s nuclear doctrine. According to the changes, the Kremlin now considers an attack on Russia carried out by a non-nuclear state with the support of a nuclear-armed power to be a joint attack. Also, under the new doctrine, a conventional attack that poses a “critical threat to Russian sovereignty” now meets the official threshold to trigger a Russian nuclear response. Yesterday, those changes were made official.
The American weapon system the Ukrainians are now using is the Army Tactical Missile System or ATACMS. They have a range of 190 miles and, importantly, require the US or its allies to provide the targeting coordinates every time it’s shot. So, the US is not merely allowing the Ukrainians to fire missiles deeper into Russia, it’s actively helping them do so.
Six days ago, China opened a deep-water port in Chancay, Peru—3,472 miles away from Washington DC. US officials and hawkish commentators condemned the move, calling it “a security threat” to the US because they consider this to be in “America’s backyard.” Yet this same group is now cheering on as the Biden administration orders the US military to help Ukraine launch missiles at targets in Russia, a little over 100 miles away from Moscow, with no apparent concern about the Russian reaction.
The official position of the US government appears to be that Putin is a psychotic maniac who views himself as a quasi-religious figure in conflict with the West and that he is expected to keep a totally cool head as he watches the US violate the line laid out in Russia’s nuclear doctrine by helping to launch missiles deeper and deeper into Russian territory.
The other factor that makes this escalation frustrating is that Biden’s political heir, Kamala Harris, just lost the election and popular vote to Donald Trump—who ran, to a significant degree, on transitioning the ongoing conflict with Russia from the battlefield back to the negotiation table. Biden appointees and other top-level foreign policy officials have been very explicit that they want to “Trump-proof” their Ukraine policy. This policy change may be an attempt to do that.
In other words, Biden officials and unelected bureaucrats are working to undermine the next administration’s ability to carry out what voters want—all in the name of “protecting democracy.”
Thankfully, the imminent transfer of power in Washington does give the Russians less of a reason to escalate in response to these strikes. Especially considering that the months of consideration Biden gave to this move reportedly provided the Russians time to move critical military assets out of the range of Ukrainian ATACMS. As provocative as this move is, the likelihood it alone will trigger World War III remains very low.
That said, a world war between two governments, armed with thousands of city-killing thermonuclear weapons, is so unfathomably dangerous that any increase in the risk of one breaking out—no matter how small—must be deemed unacceptable.
The best, most up-to-date account of how nuclear war can break out and would play out comes from Annie Jacobsen’s haunting book from earlier this year: Nuclear War: A Scenario. Even just reading the prologue (which is available for free in the Amazon preview), where Jacobsen explains what would happen in the minutes after a single thermonuclear bomb is detonated above an American city, makes it clear that such an event would be a catastrophe so far beyond any of the various “threats” the establishment is trying to scare us about it’s almost comical that we spend any time worrying about anything else.
Most experts who study nuclear deterrence agree that a “limited” use of nuclear weapons is likely to quickly accelerate to a full-on nuclear exchange. And, in a full-on nuclear exchange, American cities are not expected to be struck by a single bomb, but by dozens of them—with hundreds of smaller towns targeted as well and radioactive winds set to bring painful deaths to those who were initially spared.
So it is absolutely crazy that Joe Biden is kicking off his lame-duck period by explicitly crossing a red line the Russians said would justify a nuclear response. US officials spent decades scoffing at Putin’s red lines about Ukraine—berating him for being all talk and no action until suddenly, in February of 2022, he invaded. Now they’re again playing that same game, with much higher stakes.
If the government’s primary job were, as we’re taught, to protect the lives and property of the American people, then avoiding a nuclear exchange would be its single greatest priority. The Biden administration’s decision on Sunday reiterates that our so-called leaders have other priorities.
