Andy Schmookler: The Cold War taught that ‘probably a bluff’ isn’t good enough | Nvdaily

Listening recently to Timothy Snyder and Phillips O’Brien — two analysts I greatly respect — discuss the war in Ukraine, I was surprised to find myself thinking: These guys don’t seem to understand something that strategic thinkers of my generation understood better.

They were talking about what they regarded as Biden’s excessive caution — which they saw as a typical kind of liberal weakness — in the way he supported Ukraine in the early phases of battling against the Russian invasion. I agree that a good case can be made that Biden should have provided them more support, more quickly. But as they discussed what they termed Biden’s insufficient determination to “win,” their case appeared to me to rest on a serious case of historical amnesia.

Snyder and O’Brien seemed content to ASSUME that all of Putin’s rattling of his nuclear saber was merely a bluff that should not have inhibited a wise American decision-maker.

I wondered if that apparently glib dismissal of the concerns that inhibited Biden reflected a generational issue — and one that needs to be noted, because it is important that the coming generations absorb fully into their consciousness what the Cold War taught people of the generation of Biden and me — people whose thinking was shaped not only by those Cold War times, but who also were involved in the effort to avoid nuclear catastrophe.

(Biden, as Senator, had a special interest in foreign affairs, and I worked professionally during the Cold War on the question of how the United States could best achieve security in an age of competition between nuclear superpowers.) The Cold War taught that generation: WHEN WE’RE DEALING WITH THE POSSIBILITY OF WAR BETWEEN NUCLEAR SUPERPOWERS, “PROBABLY A BLUFF” IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

During those long, dangerous years of the Cold War, the wise strategic thinkers of the generations who confronted the realities of the nuclear threat absorbed the understanding that direct conflict between the two nuclear superpowers MUST be avoided, because nothing less than the survival of humankind MIGHT be at stake.

When the stakes are practically infinite, even small probabilities carry great weight. So while Putin was probably bluffing, I respected Biden’s insistence that the effort to defeat Putin’s invasion would not precipitate direct military conflict between the United States and Russia.

Was his caution excessive? Maybe. But I felt pretty sure that Snyder and O’Brien under-estimated the degree of caution required — i.e. that they didn’t give enough weight to the dangers understood by those of us shaped by the years when the nuclear Sword of Damocles hung over all of human civilization.

There’s nothing like EXPERIENCE to teach us the big realities. And the world has not experienced that continuous danger since the 1980s, when the Berlin Wall came down and, soon, the Soviet Union collapsed. Generations die out, and with them can also die hard-won understandings borne of profound historical experience — like what civilization confronted with the dawn of the nuclear age and the development of weapons so powerful that they could end human civilization and, conceivably, much of life on Earth.

That threat receded, but it has not disappeared. But what is disappearing is the generation of those — like Biden — who lived through the years when those dangers were vividly visible.

I don’t know for sure that their younger years account for this difference in judgment. But I suspect their age is relevant. And if people as brilliant and historically informed as Snyder and O’Brien haven’t absorbed deep in their being the necessity of avoiding war between nuclear superpowers, I find that worrisome. Because it is clear that such dangers still threaten.

China is now a nuclear superpower, too, and the danger is very real that China and the United States could get into a shooting war over Taiwan. Even after the age of Trumpian incompetence has passed, what kind of understanding will inform the way American decision-makers will navigate through that fraught issue? Will the decision-makers in that crisis understand the stakes well enough to avoid descending into the nightmare scenario that taught the early generations of the nuclear age absolute necessity of stopping short of Mutual Assured Destruction?