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Odds of NATO-Russia war rising
Russia's war in Ukraine has dramatically raised the odds of a direct confrontation with NATO due to Western sanctions against Moscow. Russia now considers NATO to be its enemy, and vice versa, former US Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. In fact, Daalder explains, Russian military aggression is a very real and present danger.
That makes the current situation in some ways even worse than during the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union tried to find ways to coexist and set up arms control agreements.
But now all of that is gone. Russia has even walked away from New Start, the last nuclear weapons treaty between Washington and Moscow.For Daalder, who is also the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the possibility of all-out war between the world's two nuclear superpowers is the highest it's been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Watch the full interview on an upcoming episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, airing on US public television nationwide. Check local listings.
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Ian Bremmer: Risk of nuclear crisis in 2022 is too high
The White House believes that there is a 20% chance of another Cuban Missile Crisis "in the next eight weeks" with Russia, Ian Bremmer said at an event at the Asia Society in New York on Monday. While Bremmer doesn't see as high a chance that Putin would risk using nuclear weapons, he added, "Either way, those numbers are way too freaking high." The even bigger risk, he points out, is that not enough is being done to manage the unprecedented danger from Russia in the medium term.
The Russian economy is being cut off from the West the same way as Iran has been, with a 40% or 50% contraction expected over the next five years. A G20 economy has never been decoupled from the West before. If Russia becomes a rogue state like Iran with ballistic missile attacks, drone strikes, espionage, proxy wars, radicalism, and terrorist violence - but with 6,000 nuclear warheads in their arsenal - "that really does not bode well for the next five, 10 years or for our kids. It really doesn't," Bremmer told former Australian PM and Asia Society President and CEO Kevin Rudd at the Asia Society's headquarters in New York.
Cuban Missile Crisis turns 60
Sixty years ago, the world got as close it's ever been to nuclear war.
For 13 days, the US and the USSR played a dangerous cat-and-mouse game over Soviet nuclear missiles parked in Cuba. The Cold War nearly got hot.
In the end, a shared sense of humanity allowed a diplomatic solution. The world breathed a sigh of relief.
Would Moscow and Washington do the same if Vladimir Putin uses nukes in Ukraine?
Watch the GZERO World episode: Chinese Power
- Will Putin drop a nuke on Ukraine? - GZERO Media ›
- Nuclear weapons: more dangerous than ever? - GZERO Media ›
- Nuclear weapons could be used; Russia's war gets more dangerous ... ›
- Another nuclear showdown? - GZERO Media ›
- How close are we to a second Cuban Missile Crisis? - GZERO Media ›
- Odds of US-NATO war rising - GZERO Media ›
Another nuclear showdown?
Sixty years ago on Friday, Maj. Richard Heyser took hundreds of photos of suspicious installations in the Cuban countryside from a US spy plane. Close inspection of the photos back in Washington revealed that the Soviet government, then led by Nikita Khrushchev, had secretly installed missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads over 90 miles of ocean to hit targets across much of the United States. You can hear audio recordings of the initial White House discussion of this threat here.
Over the following days, the White House and Kremlin found themselves looking for ways to avoid nuclear war. The crisis was resolved when a deal was reached that pulled the Soviet missiles from Cuba and later withdrew US missiles from Turkey.
Today, a Kremlin leader has created a new crisis. A Russian invasion has produced a military stalemate in the south and east of Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has warned that nuclear weapons remain an option for Russia if he believes his country’s national security is threatened. Other Russian officials and allies have issued more explicit threats. President Joe Biden has invoked “the prospect of Armageddon” and spoken about lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis that might help avert catastrophe today.
In some ways, the 1962 nuclear face-off was more dangerous than the current standoff. Sixty years ago, the threat of nuclear attack was made against the territory of the United States, a nuclear-armed superpower that would have retaliated instantly against attack. Millions of Americans and Soviets would have been killed within minutes. Today, most of the specific Russian threats center on so-called tactical nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield in Ukraine. Their effect would be horrific, but the scale of destruction would be much smaller than an attack on the US in 1962 – unless retaliation against a Russian strike provoked escalation.
In addition, communication between Washington and Moscow, crucial in any potential military confrontation, was more complex in 1962. Then, it took hours for secure communications to reach the other side, increasing the risk of miscalculation and deadly accidents while leaders waited for responses. And President John Kennedy faced an especially dangerous problem 60 years ago: It was not clear who was in charge in the Kremlin. Contradictory messages from Moscow led some in Washington to fear that Khrushchev had been removed from power and that the US faced an unknown adversary in a potentially unstable situation.
But in other ways, it’s the current standoff that’s more dangerous. The Cuban missile crisis took place just 17 years after the end of World War II. The devastating consequences of war were lived experience for leaders on both sides. Today, 77 years after the end of the last global war, the destructive potential is more abstract. It’s possible to be complacent about a threat no one has faced in decades.
Second, the crisis over Cuba occurred in peacetime, while today’s Russia finds itself in a shooting war in which the United States is very much involved. As a result, there are other players in today’s drama. The risk that an action taken inside Ukraine could send nuclear forces onto high alert adds a layer of complexity that didn’t exist in 1962.
Finally, we now know that Kennedy and Khrushchev were able to communicate through a back channel that even senior US and Soviet officials didn’t know about. Secret negotiations between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin were crucial for averting catastrophe and building a deal. Today’s White House and Kremlin may have their own backchannel to avoid nuclear war, but it may be years before details emerge on the quality of that communication.
US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But for now, Russian leaders are determined to project strength and confidence at the expense of any hope of reconciliation. Ukraine’s government refuses to compromise on control of its territory, and Ukraine’s backers in Europe and the United States know that surrender to nuclear blackmail sets a dangerous precedent that makes the world less, not more, secure.
US and Soviet leaders resolved the Cuban missile crisis through flexibility and creativity on both sides. Today, there’s no sign of any such solution.
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How close are we to a second Cuban Missile Crisis?
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In 60 Seconds.
Will China's Communist Party Congress be a game changer?
I wouldn't call it a game changer, but I think there are a lot of people out there that are hoping that there's going to be loosening of the zero-COVID policy. They're hoping that there's going to be more of an opening in terms of state control of financial institutions and technology, sort of state-owned enterprises after Xi Jinping gets his third term. I see no reason to believe that. If anything, there's more consolidation of power. There are more loyalists around him and top party positions, and as a consequence, he can do more of what he wants, which is what we've been seeing over the last few years. So I think it's actually going to be a lot more consistency as opposed to a game changer, but that's my view.
As the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis approaches, how should the world react to this new nuclear threat from Putin?
Yeah. Well, I wasn't around, of course, for the first Cuban Missile Crisis, and I kind of hope that I won't be around for the second. I'd like to avoid it. I recognize this is dangerous. I don't like all the talk about nuclear weapons potentially being used. We should take it seriously, but we should not in any way overestimate the likelihood. We need to recognize that Putin using a nuke would be existentially a risk for him, both in terms of ordering it to get done internally, whether that line of command would actually work, and also, of course, what the external reaction would be. I think we're still very far from that, but I recognize it's a possibility, a plausibility in a way that it wasn't even a few months ago. And of course, that's very deeply disturbing.
With oil workers striking, is Iran on the cusp of another revolution?
Well, of course we saw some of that during the last Iranian revolution. It's dangerous. It would affect their economy. The Iranian government is going to need to go in and crack a lot of heads, but then they're also going to need to provide some support for the Iranian people that creates more sustainability, more willingness to actually accept a conservative theocratic rule. It's becoming harder, but let's not undermine the fact that surveillance mechanisms, big data technology, also makes it easier for authoritarians to stay in power. I'm still skeptical that what we're seeing here is a revolution and the end of the Iranian government as it is presently, but there's no question this is a big threat to them. We're going to watch it very carefully.