The combination of pressure and diplomacy offers the best way to counter Putin, liberate Ukraine, and avoid nuclear war.
The combination of pressure and diplomacy offers the best way to counter Putin, liberate Ukraine, and avoid nuclear war.
T he American president worries that the Kremlin’s nuclear threats could lead to “Armageddon.” He presses NATO allies to curtail their dependence on Russian oil and gas, while imploring Saudi Arabia to increase oil production. The United States provides advanced weapons such as Stinger missiles to forces fighting to eject Russian invaders from their country. Tension between Moscow and Washington has hit the most perilous apex since the Cuban missile crisis. Some Americans worry that their president, who as the oldest in history is prone to erratic ruminations, may lack the mental acuity to steer the world from the brink of nuclear war.
Such was the situation for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s as he confronted the Soviet Union. It also, of course, describes President Biden today as he faces Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The comparison is not exact. Reagan was much more of a commanding and visionary strategist than his carping critics knew, or would admit. And, to adapt Lloyd Bentsen’s famous riposte to Dan Quayle, Joe Biden as a young senator knew Ronald Reagan, but as a president he is no Ronald Reagan.
Still, appeals to history are inescapable in our present moment. Recently Biden indicated that he and his staff are looking at the Cuban missile crisis for lessons in dealing with Putin and Ukraine. The White House believes that America now faces the most fraught nuclear standoff since coming to the brink of war over Soviet missiles in Cuba 60 years ago this week. Others, such as Senate Armed Services chairman Jack Reed (D., R.I.), echo the comparison.
It is not a bad idea to draw insights from President John F. Kennedy’s leadership in defusing the Soviet nuclear threat 90 miles from American shores. Kennedy deftly managed a terrifying standoff and secured Moscow’s withdrawal of the missiles while avoiding nuclear war. But the Cuban crisis in 1962 should not be the only historical template to inform U.S. policy today. After all, the Kremlin regarded the outcome as a success. The Soviets achieved their main goals: a security guarantee for their communist partner regime in Cuba, and the withdrawal of American nuclear missiles from Turkey. It also bears remembering that Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev first felt emboldened to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba (and to build the Berlin Wall) after witnessing Kennedy’s feckless performance at their Vienna summit in 1961. One hears such echoes in Biden’s calamitous Afghanistan withdrawal last year and the signals it sent to Putin as he considered invading Ukraine.
Rather, in consulting history’s muse, the Biden White House would do well to learn also from Ronald Reagan. During Reagan’s presidency he navigated his own series of nuclear standoffs and scares with Moscow, particularly in the perilous autumn of 1983. In the end Reagan brought the Kremlin to heel, won a peaceful victory in the Cold War, and prevented nuclear war.
The 1980s and 2020s are of course not identical; perfect analogies do not exist in history. The Red Army was a much more formidable force than the contemporary Russian military, and likewise the Soviet nuclear arsenal then was over ten times the size of Russia’s now. Conversely, Moscow’s battlefield deaths in just eight months in Ukraine already exceed those in eight years of combat in Afghanistan. The coalitions in the conflict also differ. The USSR had its Warsaw Pact satellites in Eastern Europe, while China and Saudi Arabia partnered with the United States. Now those alignments are flipped, with Eastern European nations working closely with the U.S. to support Ukraine, while China and Saudi Arabia serve as economic buffers for Moscow. Then there is the figure of Vladimir Putin, who, while self-consciously imitating past Kremlin strongmen such as the czars, Stalin, and Brezhnev, is otherwise sui generis.
Nonetheless, there are enough parallels between Reagan’s day and our own that his posture and policies towards the Soviet Union remain the best historical antecedents for navigating the present Russian challenge. When he took office Reagan perceived that the USSR, like Russia today, was at once strong and weak — an aggressive and formidable nuclear menace but also a decrepit economy and political system built on an edifice of lies. Then as now, it was a uniquely dangerous combination.
Reagan’s Cold War strategy integrated force and diplomacy. He blended persistent outreach to Moscow with the aggressive deployment of nuclear and conventional weapons, support for anti-communist forces worldwide, an ideological offensive, and partnership with Soviet dissidents. This combination kept the Kremlin off balance. It deterred the Soviets from employing nuclear blackmail (or worse), undermined the Soviet system from within, and provided the safety valve of negotiations.
The Soviet Union’s deployment of SS-20 nuclear missiles on both its western and eastern edges posed the most acute nuclear threat at the time. These devilish mobile weapons carried three warheads each, were hard to detect and impossible to stop, and could incinerate London, Bonn, Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, Seoul, and other allied capitals within ten minutes of launch. Reagan feared both that the Kremlin might order a first strike or that, just by threatening as much, Moscow could coerce America’s European and Asian allies into capitulation.
Soviet paranoia further destabilized the precarious balance. The Kremlin, presuming that Reagan would likely attack first, launched Operation RYAN and directed the KGB to look for any signs in Western countries of ostensible preparations for nuclear war — even mundane “indicators” such as more lights on in government buildings, more cars in parking lots, or increased supplies at blood banks.
Reagan wanted the Soviets to fear America’s might yet trust its morality. To deter the SS-20s, he deployed American nuclear missiles in Europe — both ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) and Pershing II ballistic missiles — that were equally mobile and equally capable of hitting the Kremlin. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev bemoaned that they were “like a pistol held to our head.” Reagan’s military modernization developed weapons with new technologies — such as stealth, semiconductors, and precision guidance — that could outsmart and overwhelm Soviet defenses. His Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and vision of a multilayered missile shield terrified the Kremlin that its own nuclear arsenal could be rendered impotent.
Reagan partnered with French intelligence on a covert sabotage campaign that stymied the KGB’s theft of Western technology and starved the Soviet military and economy of vital advanced equipment that Moscow could not produce itself. He advocated for thousands of imprisoned Soviet dissidents such as Jewish leader Natan Sharansky and Christian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, while flooding the Soviet Union with contraband literature and radio broadcasts designed to undermine Kremlin propaganda and crack its information monopoly. He waged an unrelenting rhetorical campaign to expose the illegitimacy of Soviet communism, such as when he pointed out in his 1982 Westminster address that, “of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the communist world.” He elaborated: “Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.”
In Afghanistan, which the Soviets had invaded in 1979, Reagan shifted the American goal from merely weakening the Soviet occupiers to forcing their withdrawal. He provided billions of dollars in advanced weapons that enabled the Afghans to send thousands of Russian soldiers home in body bags. It was not always an easy partnership. The Reagan team occasionally had to curtail mujahideen overreach that threatened escalation, such as when the holy warriors crossed the border in a nighttime raid inside the Soviet Union.
From the start Reagan paired these coercive measures with diplomacy. He put pressure on the Soviet system to produce a reformist leader. He handwrote letters to each successive Soviet premier, expressing his hope for negotiations and reaffirming his desire to avoid nuclear war. In a 1981 epistle to Premier Leonid Brezhnev, Reagan recalled that “we alone had the ultimate weapon, the nuclear weapon” at World War II’s end. “If we had sought world domination then, who could have opposed us? But the United States followed a different course” — of rebuilding Europe and Japan. Reagan paired these private assurances with the public proclamation that “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.” Even when the first three Soviet dictators of his presidency (Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko) did not requite his outreach, Reagan’s missives persuaded them that the United States would not launch a preemptive nuclear war — and that neither should they.
PHOTOS: Reagan and Gorbachev
Then came Mikhail Gorbachev. Once the new Soviet leader took power in 1985, Reagan recognized him as the reformer he had been waiting for — and had been pressing the Soviet system to produce. Yet even as the two leaders built a diplomatic partnership that culminated in the 1987 treaty eliminating all intermediate-range nuclear weapons, Reagan did not relent in his military, economic, and ideological campaign against the Soviet system. This included increased support to the Afghan rebels (leading Gorbachev to lament Afghanistan as “our bleeding wound”), the development of advanced weapons systems such as the stealth fighter and bomber that could penetrate any Soviet air defenses, continued advocacy for human rights and religious freedom, and an unrelenting rhetorical assault on the communist system, exemplified by his demand to “tear down this wall!” This strategy led, famously, to the Soviet Union’s negotiated surrender and the Cold War’s peaceful end.
Employing a similar playbook in the Ukraine war today would entail a combination of vertical and horizontal escalation with quiet (and perhaps public) outreach to Putin and his generals making clear that the U.S. does not seek a nuclear conflict — but will severely punish any nuclear use. I do not here attempt to lay out a detailed operational plan; what matters most is first adopting the right strategic framework. But just to offer a few examples of specific steps that could be taken: The United States and our NATO allies should immediately increase missile-defense support to Ukraine, including Patriot batteries and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System units (both of which derive from technologies first developed in Reagan’s SDI program). These should be combined with increased counterbattery fires to enable Ukraine to destroy Russian missile launchers targeting Ukrainian civilians, and with other offensive weapons such as the game-changing HIMARS. The White House should also lead NATO in deploying naval assets in the Black Sea, as a visible display to Putin of our capabilities and as further deterrent to any nuclear detonations.
To increase domestic pressure on Putin, the U.S. should launch a massive covert information campaign — targeting the Russian public via computer screens, television, radio, and print — that makes the name of Alexei Navalny and other Russian dissidents known in every Russian home. It should also make every Russian aware of Putin’s hundreds of billions of dollars in pilfered wealth, and broadcast images of the tens of thousands of Russian men fleeing their country to evade the draft.
Such an approach bears risk, to be sure, especially that an even more isolated and besieged Putin might lash out. But at this juncture in the war, and in Putin’s arsonist campaign against the West and against his own country, every possible path — whether escalatory, de-escalatory, or staying the present course — carries additional risk. The Reagan framework of pressure and diplomacy offers the best way to counter Putin, liberate Ukraine, and avoid nuclear war.