Why is Russia somehow capable of making a credible threat of a nuclear attack and the United States is not?
If the OP was about the US invading Crimea and threatening nuclear war if Russia responded, I’d suggest the same simplification.
Generally though, I’d be more likely to believe a Russian threat, seems they have less to lose.
Not necessarily Russia, but allowing Russia to get away with nuclear brinksmanship would send a horrible signal to every other country with nukes - that nuclear brinksmanship works. And it would send a message to every bad actor that nuclear weapons are the game changer that would allow them to achieve their own ambitions. Failure to respond dramatically to a Baltic invasion would make the world a much more dangerous place.
Even in Shakespeare’s time, we knew that if you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. The only proper response to any kind of blackmail threat involving nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons is an immediate denunciation followed by measures that ensure whoever tries it suffers more negative consequences than they gained. Whether that means military blockades, war, selective strikes against the regime itself or hard sanctions would need to be determined by conditions at the time, but the net result MUST be negative for the aggressor.
As an aside, this is why it’s dangerous to let your defenses get weak. You invite this sort of risky calculation by your enemies, which can result in much more eventual cost than the maintenance of a proper deterrent in the first place.
In any event, we should be more worried about Germany, which is about to put its energy needs in Putin’s lap due to Merkel’s godawful decision to shut down Germany’s nuclear plants. You want to talk blackmail? Wait until Putin does something against the Baltics and then warns Germany to stay out of it or face being starved of energy. Germany’s military is already hollowed out, and Merkel probably wouldn’t need much convincing.
As for NATO breaking up, that’s looking more and more likely by the day, but not because of the Baltics. I would say a bigger threat is Turkey. Turkey is becoming autocratic, and is enraging a lot of NATO members by buying Russian missile systems along with advanced allied aircraft, which will give Russia a huge amount of data they can use to improve their weapons against NATO. The U.S. needs to halt sale of the F-35 to Turkey for this reason. How do you maintain a member in NATO which is in close military cooperation with the country NATO was set up to defend against? And with Turkey and Russia both operating in Syria, there are decent odds that the U.S. could find itself in a shooting battle with a NATO country on the other side.
You are making a mistake in thinking that you can just mobilize a large response rapidly. That was never true - it took the allies years to build up their forces to the level where they could seriously challenge the Axis, and that was in an era when you could design, test, fly, and mass produce a new aircraft or tank in a matter of a year or two, and sometimes even shorter.
Today’s military conflicts aren’t about massed troops meeting in battle. Conscript armies are a thing of the past, because modern soldiers have to be technical specialists with extensive training, and wars are fought by highly advanced machinery which take a very long time to build.
We live in an era where military hardware is so advanced that going from functional requirements to a production line can take decades. Production can no longer be done by women with a few week’s training and a rivet gun, but requires advanced engineering and specialized manufacturing training that takes years. Ramping up production of existing weaponry would take a very long time.
Take the F-35 - its development was started in 1992. The first prototype didn’t fly until 8 years later, and it took 15 more years of testing and refinement before its first combat ready deployment. They are manufactured by higly trained specialists, not big assembly lines. Ramping up production would take years. Training new pilots to fly something as sophisticated as an F-35 isn’t done in weeks or months, but years.
This is why it is so hard to plan military spending - the new weapons you are funding today won’t be ready for combat for years or decades, so you can’t base your spending on current threats, but on an evaluation of what the threats might be years or decades from now - an impossible task. This will probably be a growing source of geopolitical instability of the coming decades - the increasing difficulty of managing a military that is the right size and effective when it is needed.
cough Kipling ** cough**
C’mon. When cute kitty pix are going around the world in 20 seconds or less, you don’t think that the world won’t hear about a Russian invasion of the Baltics pretty much instantaneously?
It may be in different time zone from the various nations that have troops there, but the populations of those nations will learn in real time if it happens.
Oops! Of course. I had Hamlet on the brain, but yeah, Kipling. It’s even the name of the damned poem. My bad. And I love Kipling.
And it’s very relevant to this discussion:
Kipling was misreading his history. The English didn’t pay Dane-geld because they were too lazy to fight the Danes; they paid it because they were too weak to fight the Danes (or at least too weak to feel confident in winning).
You don’t demand tribute from a truly rich and powerful country. If you do, the best outcome you can hope for is that your demand will be ignored. Another likely possibility is that the rich and powerful country will see your demand as a reason to attack you.
Dane-geld is what you demand from countries that you know are vulnerable. Either because they’re weak or because they have to many other enemies to be able to focus on you.
Countries pay Dane-geld not because they’re too lazy to fight but rather because they recognize their vulnerability. They decide that the cost of paying off a threatening country is less than the cost of losing a war with that country.
The problem is a lot of people forget to take one very important factor into account when they do their planning; how other countries will react to your military spending.
No country exists in isolation; if they did, they wouldn’t need a military. And there’s a natural tendency to think about military superiority and how the more of it you have, the better you are. But that can be a trap.
Because other countries are also thinking about their strategic situation. And they see your military as part of the threat they must deal with. So when you decide that you need a bigger military to feel safe, they see the bigger size of your military as an increased threat and they respond by increasing their military. And now you see that you’ve lost the military superiority you had so you feel the need to increase your military to a new bigger level - which prompts the other country to respond again by increasing their military. And so on.
This isn’t just theory either. There are plenty of historical examples of this happening, some of which involved the United States as a participant. And often the participants in the arms race realized the disadvantages of being in it while being unable to figure out how to get out of it.
Smart countries need to take this into account when their making their plans for the future. They need to not only think about where they will go but also where other countries will go as a response.
Nuclear weapons changes that calculation. Ask the North Koreans - they’ve been collecting Kim-geld for decades.
And that’s the problem. If you are a weak nation that can never match the great powers on a battlefield, your only chance to deter them is to threaten them with nukes.
The name of the game in the 21st Century is asymmetrical warfare. Countries like Russia and China see nuclear weapons, internet hacking, propaganda subverting social media and other tools as a way to level the playing field.
North Korea didn’t collect money by having nuclear weapons. They collected money by not having nuclear weapons and threatening to develop them. And obviously that game has been played out.
North Korea now has nuclear weapons for the usual reason small countries have them; not to threaten powerful countries but to defend themselves against threats from powerful countries. Nuclear weapons have become a de facto defensive weapon; their only planned use is as a response to an attack. No country has ever threatened to use nuclear weapons offensively since 1945.
I could be way wrong, but in the near term, I tend to think that Russia is not interested in invading Europe and creating a new Soviet empire. It takes time and attention away from his problems at home.
In the longer term, however, the threat that Russia poses is acting as a global disruptor and anti-democratic force. And if it inspires a global wave of nationalism then that’s a game changer, because nation-states will be acting out of their own self-interest with fewer restraints and fewer frameworks to resolve disputes between individual countries.
No, they aren’t going to invade Europe. Russia doesn’t have that capability, nor do they have the financial or logistical resoures.
Rather, I think Putin is playing a long game, trying to undermine the European democracies, manoever to make them energy dependent on Russian natural gas, etc.
But there are also short-term needs, such as Putin deflecting blame for Russia’s stumbling economy, stoking Russian nationalism, keeping the oligarchs onboard, etc. Expansion through conquest has been a time-honored way to keep the people quiet while you destroy the economy or siphon off the state’s resources to the bank accounts of your friends and supporters to keep internal threats at bay. Putin is walking a high wire, and the danger is that he might do something rash if it’s the only way to keep his internal and external enemies at bay.