Public pronouncements aren’t commensurate with the gravity of the Ukraine situation. They’ve gotten too informal, off-the-cuff and shallow.
Russia continues its missile barrage against Ukrainian cities. The Crimean bridge was daringly taken out, delivering Vladimir Putin a real blow, and within hours Ukraine was tauntingly unveiling a postage stamp depicting the ruined span. The Nord Stream pipeline has been sabotaged. Each side blames the other, but either way Europe is braced for a long dark winter. And both sides are either threatening or speculating aloud about the use of nuclear weapons.
President Biden has taken to publicly comparing the current moment to the Cuban Missile Crisis. From reported remarks at a New York City Democratic fundraiser: “We have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going. . . . We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy.” Vladimir Putin is “not joking.”
If we’re facing Armageddon, that should be taking up all the president’s time. JFK wasn’t at fundraisers in October 1962, and when he spoke it was in a studied, careful way, and to the entire nation.
Since the tanks first moved in February, one of this column’s preoccupations has been the tone, volume and swiftness of the declarations, tweets, one-liners and ad libs that followed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the beginning, had to establish that he and his country would fight: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” The West in turn had to make clear it would resist this brute violation of international law, the violent invasion of a sovereign nation. If it didn’t, it would be accepting the idea that the law counts for nothing; the world is a jungle where the feral have the upper hand.
Since then, and as the stakes got higher, leaders have become all too casual—unserious and sloppy. Part of it is social media, on which the whole world is hooked. Ambassadors launch taunting tweets like rockets and get high-fives instead of irradiated craters. I can’t get the phrases “possible nuclear war” and “let’s do snark” to go together in my head. Many others can.
What’s needed is a serious, weighty, textured document that reflects the gravity of the moment we’re in, a full Oval Office address that doesn’t emote but speaks rationally to a nation of thoughtful people. A big definitional statement. Where are we? Are we communicating with the Kremlin? How should the American people be thinking about all this?
There are times in life and diplomacy when silence must be maintained as circumstances evolve and new options emerge. But we’re not maintaining silence. As for the efficacy of thoughtfulness, sometimes it can cool things down or slow them down. If we’re traveling toward Armageddon the slow route is best.
Here I jump to Mr. Putin himself. It’s hard to imagine a peaceful resolution while he retains power. It is possible conversations have begun among members of the institutions that might most effectively move against him—the state intelligence apparatus, the military, even the cabinet. If they are talking, it would be going like this: Mr. Putin himself drove the war, which was a bad idea badly executed; it likely can’t be won by conventional means; the use of nuclear or chemical weapons would create a physical danger to, and reputational disaster for, Russia; the Ukraine adventure has stressed the Russian economy and strained its political stability; the people don’t want it—not the elites seeing their worlds constrict, the middle seeing their aspirations disrupted, the hinterland folks whose sons are being sacrificed.
A veteran observer this week said Mr. Putin is a strongman who is now a weak man. That sort, he implied, can’t continue.
When Nikita Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964, his adult son, Sergei, was keeping a diary. Twenty-four years later, when the diaries were published, Sergei spoke to Felicity Barringer of the New York Times.
Khrushchev, who was 70 in 1964, had embarrassed the Kremlin in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when his aggression and bluster were followed by retreat. He first caught wind of a plot when a bodyguard for a former Politburo member phoned and warned Sergei that the bodyguard’s boss, the head of the KGB, the communist party secretary and two current Politburo members were planning a coup. Nikita Khrushchev didn’t believe it but asked that his friend President Anastas Mikoyan be told. Later, at his dacha on the Black Sea, he received a call: There would be an emergency meeting in Moscow, his presence was necessary. Khrushchev suddenly realized he’d been seeing odd things—a ship hovering near his beach, bodyguards outside his usual detail.
At the Politburo meeting the coup leaders accused him of mismanagement, nepotism and tactlessness. He admitted he was rude but disputed the other points. At a second meeting he accepted his fate. The official news agency Tass reported he was retiring due to poor health and advanced age. He lived out his life gardening, airbrushed from historical photos, and died in 1971. In time, almost perversely, he told Mikoyan what happened was proof of the progress he’d instituted. Would anyone have dared tell Stalin to resign? “There wouldn’t be anything left of us.”
More recently, in August 1991, was the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. He was at his Black Sea house when his communications were cut off and he was placed under arrest. The Warsaw Pact countries were starting to break free. The KGB and the military didn’t like Gorbachev’s approach and said they feared the Soviet Union was next. They rolled tanks into Moscow, seized state television and announced Gorbachev was leaving for health reasons. Massive crowds gathered in the streets opposing the coup, and the pro-democracy figure Boris Yeltsin took to the top of a tank to urge resistance. The army broke, the KGB backed down, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. But Moscow was Yeltsin’s now. A few months later, on Christmas Day, Gorbachev stepped down. Yeltsin declared the Soviet Union over. It would be Russia now, Russia again.
In his farewell speech Gorbachev said he opposed the “dismembering” of what had been the previous Soviet state, and warned of danger ahead for the countries carved away. Six years later Yeltsin appointed a new head of the domestic arm of the intelligence service, a young man named Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Putin has dismantled or defanged some of the institutions that might go up against him. He likely has things pretty tightly wired. Unlike the KGB when it faced the protests of the Gorbachev coup, he wouldn’t likely shrink from bloodshed. Khrushchev was a fully rational actor, as was Gorbachev, as apparently were those who opposed them. We cannot be certain Mr. Putin is.
And Mr. Putin has the benefit of knowing how the two previous coup attempts ended. He’s probably made a deep study of both. And of course he lived through Gorbachev in 1991, as a KGB officer, though later he insisted he resigned when it began.
We’ll be helping dissidents only if we show now seriousness and sobriety and gravity, and repeat again the old Cold War distinction: We are against the Russian government’s actions but feel only respect and regard for the people of Russia, with whom we only want peace.