Russia Needs to Learn to Lose Like America

Former Russian president and current deputy chairman of the Kremlin’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, told the world that Russia losing its war in Ukraine might lead to a nuclear war in a Telegram post on Thursday. This is what nuclear experts call nuclear blackmail. America has tried it several times in the past and it never quite works out the way the politicians making the threat think it will.

"The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger a nuclear war," Medvedev said in his post, according to a translation from Reuters. "Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends."

When Russia first escalated its war in Ukraine almost a year ago, the Kremlin thought it would be marching through the streets of Kyiv in a few days. That didn’t happen. Instead, casualties are mounting, the Kremlin can’t seem to equip or train many of its troops, it's using ancient ammunition, and Russian military bloggers who once fawned over Putin have started to criticize him. Russia is being humiliated on the world stage, doubling down on the occupation of east Ukraine and a war in Ukraine that may take years and tens of thousands of lives.

The United States is no stranger to this humiliation, and is a fine example for how an arrogant nuclear power can lose a war without using its nuclear weapons. It has fought long, pointless, devastating conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq that the world now widely agrees were foolhardy and disastrous. It spent 20 years in Afghanistan and lost the war. During the entire time it was there, only President Trump made even vague allusions to using nuclear weapons to win. In the end, the U.S. didn’t use its most powerful weapon and instead ate the loss at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives, and many more civilian casualties in the countries it occupied. It took the loss because the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is so strong that even the most powerful country in the world would rather be humiliated on the world stage than drop a few bombs capable of causing world ending devastation.

Moscow has repeatedly rattled the nuclear saber during its war with Ukraine. In February of 2022, Putin announced he was putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. In a September speech following the official and illegal annexation of east Ukraine, Putin accused the West of Satanism and promised to use nukes if NATO threatened Russia’s territorial integrity.

The U.S. also threatened to use its nukes to settle disputes that had no business going nuclear. It’s a feature of nuclear powered countries. In 1950, President Harry Truman said the use of atomic weapons was on the table for the Korean War. He later said he was being rhetorical, but the use of the bomb in the conflict was a hot topic. Truman’s talk wasn’t empty either. The weapons were moved close enough that the military could, if authorized, use them.

After Truman left office, former general Dwight D. Eisenhower took over the presidency. He, too, threatened to use nuclear weapons on China. First, in 1953 as a means of bringing the country to the negotiating table over Korea. Then again in 1955 when China seized a group of islands in the Taiwan Strait.

Some members of America’s military leadership wanted to use nukes to turn the tide in Vietnam during the 1960s and ‘70s. Plans were drawn up and generals pushed the president to issue public threats, but both Kennedy and Johnson demurred. Nixon did want Hanoi and Moscow to think he would drop a nuke, but all three presidents avoided using nuclear weapons to get out of a humiliating defeat in southeast Asia. Any one of these presidents could have dropped a bomb to win some kind of victory. None did. 

Russia needs to learn from America and know how to lose without using nuclear weapons. Better yet, it can learn that invasion and occupation should be avoided in the first place.