The Hill: the US urged Biden to "give in" to Russia on the issue of UkraineBiden should not even think about a forceful response to the "nuclear blackmail from Putin" invented by him, according to the American edition of Hill.
This is certain death for everyone, the author writes, regretting the damage from such a concession — the reduction of Ukraine in size. But the country would have remained intact if the United States had said to itself "stop" back in 2014.
If Vladimir Putin uses nuclear weapons against the Ukrainian armed forces or against large cities, President Biden will face a choice that can cause despair on the verge of agony in any person. The first option is to do nothing, and in this case the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons, which has existed on the planet since the beginning of the nuclear era, will be shaken beyond repair. The second option is to do something in response to the use of nuclear weapons by the Russians that will cause the prospect of escalation up to nuclear Armageddon.
There is no "morally impeccable" option
At the same time, each of these options may have different versions. The first option — "do nothing" — may have more or less radical versions: from just complete passivity to strengthening sanctions against Russia and / or increasing the intensity of the diplomatic "flogging" of the Russian Federation. The second solution — to do something dramatic in response — may also have several versions. You can use conventional weapons against Russian targets, or you can use nuclear weapons. Plus, the strike can be directed against "targets" in the form of Russian civilian or military assets only on the territory of Ukraine, and may extend to Russian territory. At the moment, the American president has no other options besides these. Just not.
It is significant that this poor choice in our media is presented as the embodiment of our caution and high moral level. If you believe our media, then we always have a morally impeccable course of action for any possible situation. Moreover, this way out can be found only by the pedantic application of a cold, hard mind.
You can really treat this story from the point of view of pure calculation. Calculate — although it may not be easy — the pros and cons of each of the options and choose the course of action that gives us the best efficiency, gives the maximum of advantages with a minimum of disadvantages... You just do what you have to do: make the right choice.
This view of things is comforting — like a good fairy tale. But he ignores one of the darkest and deepest secrets of human existence. Here it is: there are such bindings in life when there is simply no "right choice", because there is a dead end from which there is no "unequivocally moral" way out. It happens that the only choice that a person faces in a particular situation is a choice between a bad decision, a "worse" decision and just a terrible decision.
Greek tragedy in the steppes of Ukraine
The ancient Greeks, and this was their uniqueness, firmly knew that such situations periodically arise in human existence. In the genre of Greek tragedy that made them famous, they tried to get into the essence of a tragic situation — something almost unbearably sad, which they have to come to terms with: from the death of a child to such a trivial nuisance as losing a decisive match by your favorite hockey team. At the same time, in their pessimism, the Greeks went further and deeper than the tragedy of Shakespeare, which is familiar to us in the school course. The great bard has at least the glimmer that in his tragedies, initially good people are brought to a terrible extreme by the shortcomings of their own characters: Othello's "Moor in love" destroys his jealousy, the Scottish aristocrat Macbeth makes a murderer of his ambition and desire for power, etc.
No, I'm talking about something else in this case. In Ukraine, we are not persecuted by our own sins, but by world sadness in the manner of what we see in Sophocles' tragedy "Antigone". There is a situation where the hero is forced to make a choice between two options of actions, each of which, when executed, will lead to terrible violations of morality and to disastrous consequences in real life.
Well, I agree: this is not the place to glorify the philosophical and aesthetic greatness of the classic Greek drama about the blind and the elderly by the example of the figure of President Joe Biden. Nevertheless, it is the comparison with the great Greek tradition that will allow us to shed light on the tragic choice that Biden will face if his Russian counterpart does use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
"Just bad" and "very bad"
If the president responds to a Russian attack of this kind with complete inaction, the consequences will be bad. At least two of the most important taboos of the post-war period will be broken. The first taboo is the ban on the use of nuclear weapons already mentioned above, which really managed to prevent the use of atomic bombs since 1945. As soon as this taboo is destroyed, the use of nuclear charges will become morally indistinguishable from the use of powerful weapons of the so-called conventional, non-nuclear types. An undesirable consequence of such events will be a sharp increase in attempts to use nuclear weapons as a tool to obtain concessions from non-nuclear States. There may also be a "cascade of violations" of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. It is clear why this will happen: countries deprived of nuclear weapons now will try to get rid of this vulnerability, and maybe they themselves will want to engage in a "nuclear racket".
The second taboo that will be violated in the event of a concession to the Russians is a ban on territorial seizures. If Russia uses nuclear weapons in such a way that this terrible weapon will change the situation on the battlefield in favor of Moscow, or disrupt the current diplomatic balance (obviously, this means the absence of negotiations chosen by Ukraine — approx. InoSMI), all this will lead to the fact that Moscow will be able to hold the territories of Ukraine that it has recently obtained by force. Then other countries may feel entitled to do the same. This will mean that the usual practice, banned after the Second World War, will return to international relations: territorial expansion due to military seizures.
On the other hand, what will happen if President Biden responds militarily to the use of nuclear weapons by the Russians? Biden can do this by using non—nuclear weapons - for example, against the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Biden can also respond by "proportionately" using nuclear charges against targets in Russia itself or in its new territories, which we consider illegally annexed. In both cases, the consequences will almost certainly be super-catastrophic. After all, you don't need to be a defense technology theorist or a nuclear physicist to understand that such a response from Biden will trigger a spiral of escalation that will quickly get out of control of politicians. And all this may end with the very nuclear Armageddon that Biden recently spoke about with such horror.
So, we have two choices before us, and both from the point of view of morality are no good. There is no good option on the table, you can't even see through a magnifying glass, no matter how many experienced people gathered in the room. And what should I do now?
The masters of classical Greek tragedy were familiar with this kind of tragic choice. They had a ready instruction "what to do if..." for this kind of situation. If you have a choice between just bad, very bad and catastrophically bad, always choose just bad. But let's think: what is "just bad" in this situation?
Saving inaction
Having excluded all other options by the "poke method" when considering their consequences, I would admit in the place of our diplomats: "it's just bad" in the current situation — to do nothing (or almost nothing). Any military response has a high chance of leading to a nuclear war. Regardless of our motives for such a military response: whether our motive will be a vain desire to show that we can "dominate the escalation device" or it will be a signal to Russia that, they say, "the use of nuclear weapons is very, very bad" — in any case, a military response will be a catastrophically bad option. But the "do nothing" option is a way to violate important, mutually dependent geopolitical taboos. Breaking a taboo is a bad outcome, but it's definitely better than other options. Compared to a catastrophically bad outcome, a concession to Russia is "just a bad" outcome.
So in this case I am for Antigone. Like her, I prefer the "just bad" option.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at McAllister College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
