Trump to Putin: You Know We Have Nukes on Subs, Right?

Soooo … it looks like Donald Trump knows how to play “escalate to de-escalate” too. 

For the first eight months of Trump’s second term, he tried to sweet-talk Vladimir Putin into ending the war in Ukraine. At times, he even all but offered to throw Volodymyr Zelensky under the bus to end the four-year stalemate. In recent weeks, though, Trump made it clear that he had lost patience with Russia and would rapidly increase economic pressure on Putin to start negotiating in good faith. 

Putin responded by testing a long-range missile for Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons, a not-at-all-veiled threat to the US and NATO over the sanctions. Rather than back down, however, Trump publicly rebuked Putin by reminding him of the obvious:

President Donald Trump on Monday took aim at Russia’s announcement that it has tested a nuclear-powered missile that can go more than 8,000 miles, telling President Vladimir Putin that he “ought to get the war ended” instead.

When asked on Air Force One whether he saw the missile test as “saber-rattling,” Trump—who is currently visiting Japan—told reporters that the U.S. is in possession of the “greatest” nuclear submarine in the world, before going on to rebuke Putin.

“They know we have a nuclear submarine, the greatest in the world, right off their shore. So it doesn’t have to go 8,000 miles. They’re not playing games with us, we’re not playing games with them either,” Trump said. “We test missiles all the time… we don’t need to go 8,000 miles. And I don’t think it’s an appropriate thing for Putin to be saying, by the way.”

“You ought to get the war ended,” Trump said, seemingly addressing the Russian President directly. “The war that should have taken one week is now in its soon fourth year. That’s what you ought to do, instead of testing missiles.”

Hey kids, what time is it? Time to check out the ol’ Doomsday Clock. 

Right now, we have both Russia and the US attempting to employ the Madman Theory in foreign relations. Even if it sounds like a Cold War relic, we still have the doctrine of mutually assured destruction governing conflicts between the two countries. Putin has used that for leverage with his saber-rattling, and it worked — for a while — with the West. NATO supported Ukraine in Russia’s invasion, but it has balked at times from more substantial support over the fear of whether Putin would go the Full Madman in response. No one expected Joe Biden to challenge Putin at that kind of chess match, especially Putin.

Trump, however, has made it very clear that he will use American military power to address threats to American security, and that we have the technology to achieve those objectives. Both Russia and the US have functional nuclear strategic platforms, but only the US has demonstrated battle effectiveness in the past, oh, forty years. The Russians/Soviets haven’t succeeded in a strategic military operation since they took over Afghanistan. They couldn’t beat a third-rank military like Ukraine and ended up in a four-year quagmire, and they just got kicked out of Syria by a rag-tag rebel army. And it turned out both Bashar al-Assad and Russia were largely propped up by Hezbollah anyway. 

Neverthless, we are entering very dangerous territory. Zelensky wants Tomahawks, if not directly from the US, then through NATO. Putin’s missile launch was an escalate-to-deescalate demonstration hoping to head off that possible upgrade by Ukraine, which would make Moscow an easy target. Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons if Moscow came under serious attack as a regime-saving strategy, but the costs would be so enormous and the gains from it so miniscule that it’s absurdly irrational in comparison to the cost-benefit analysis of negotiating an end to the war.

Hopefullly, Trump’s riposte today will make those calculations clear to Putin. Or if not, perhaps more rational minds in Moscow will step away from windows and take direct action to bring all of this to a safer conclusion. 

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.

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