If Putin goes nuclear, Biden should choose the ‘merely bad’ option

Should Russian President Vladimir Putin use nuclear weapons against Ukrainian military forces or populations centers, President Biden will face an agonizing choice: either do nothing in response, in which case the nuclear taboo in place since the dawn of the nuclear era will be irreparably shattered, or doing something, which raises the prospect of escalation and nuclear Armageddon.

There are variations on each possible response, of course. The decision to do nothing would really fall somewhere along a continuum between ratcheting up the sanctions against Russia, intensifying the already intense level of diplomatic scolding and literally doing nothing. And the decision to do something – anything – would take the form of employing either conventional or nuclear forces against Russian civilian or military assets in either Ukraine or Russia itself. Ultimately, however, these are the options available to president. There are no others.

Tellingly, this choice is invariably represented as being prudential and moral. On this view, there is always a morally correct or right course of action available in every situation, one that can always be grasped through the application of cold, hard reason.

According to this view, one simply – or perhaps not so simply – adds up the costs and benefits of each option and selects the course of action that yields the greatest marginal utility. There can be dilemmas, of course, as in the case of two patients who need a particular medicine to live but have available to them only one life-saving dose. In such cases, decisionmaking can be morally fraught and prudentially complicated. But ultimately, there is a right thing to do, and a good person chooses to do that right thing.

While comforting, however, this fairy-tale ignores one of the deepest and darkest truths about the human condition: Sometimes there simply is no right thing to do, no single morally correct course of action that can be known to any reasoning person if they are just moral and rational enough to think things through. Sometimes the only choice available to human beings facing concrete human dilemmas is between options that are bad, worse and truly horrific.

The ancient Greeks, perhaps uniquely, understood this full well. In the genre of drama for which they are arguably best known, they sought to grasp this hard truth by probing and parsing the concept of tragedy. Not tragedy in the colloquial sense of the word, of course, tragedy as something almost unbearably sad, like the death of a child or, more trivially, the loss of an important game by one’s beloved hockey team. Nor even tragedy in the sense many of us were taught in high school Shakespeare classes: tragedy as the proposition that potentially good people are brought low by character faults – Othello by jealousy, Macbeth by ambition and so forth.

No, here I’m referring to tragedy in the sense found, for example, in Sophocles’s play “Antigone.” That is, tragedy in the sense that human action sometimes involves a choice between two radically incompatible but equally undesirable outcomes and that whatever a moral and rational actor does in a given situation will be morally wrong and practically catastrophic.

This is not the place to extol all the philosophical and aesthetic glories of classical Greek drama. But this single insight from that rich tradition sheds important light on the tragic choice that I would argue faces President Biden should his Russian counterpart use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.

If the president responds to Russian nuclear attack by doing nothing, the outcome will be bad. At least two post-World War II taboos will be broken. The most obvious is the aforementioned nuclear taboo which, in conjunction with the practice of deterrence, has prevented such weapons from being used in earnest since 1945. With this taboo shattered, the bright line between conventional and nuclear weapons will be effaced and the use of nukes will become morally indistinguishable from the use of massive conventional weapons. A related consequence might be an upsurge in attempts to use nuclear weapons to extort concessions from non-nuclear states, perhaps triggering a “proliferation cascade” as those nuclear-bereft states seek either to avoid being left exposed to such extortion or to get into the racket themselves.

The second taboo will be that of proscribing territorial conquest. Should Russia use nuclear weapons in a way that shifts the battlefield and/or diplomatic balance in its favor and results in Moscow holding on to its recently “annexed” territories in Ukraine, that would likely empower other states to do the same. This would reintroduce into international relations a practice once unexceptional but legally and normatively proscribed since the Second World War: territorial expansion through military conquest.

On the other hand, should President Biden respond to a Russian use of nuclear weapons by retaliating militarily – either with the use of non-nuclear weapons against, say the Russian Black Sea fleet, or with the “proportional” use of nuclear weapons against targets in Russia proper or its illegally annexed territories – the results would almost certainly be catastrophic. One doesn’t need to be a master nuclear theorist to see how this type of response could unleash an escalatory spiral that would quickly exceed the ability of policymakers to control it — one that might well culminate in the nuclear Armageddon Biden recently mentioned.

So, two options, both morally bad. No good option on the table, not even one that might be difficult to discern, but that is ultimately knowable if we just think about it hard enough or listen to the smartest people in the room. What then to is to be done?

The classical Greek tragedians were familiar with this type of tragic choice and had a prescription for it. When faced with a choice between merely bad, really bad and catastrophically bad options, always choose the merely bad. And what would that be in this case?

All things being considered, and by process of elimination, I would suggest that the merely bad option here would be to do nothing (or almost nothing). Responding militarily in some vain attempt to assert escalation dominance or to signal that using nuclear weapons is a really, really bad thing has a very good chance of resulting in general nuclear war. This would be the catastrophically bad option. Doing nothing, in contrast, would result in the shattering of some highly consequential geopolitical taboos. This is a bad outcome to be sure, but in the grand scheme of tragic choices, it would be the merely bad option.

In this sense, and perhaps only in this sense, I’m with Antigone. Like her, I choose the merely bad option.

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter @aalatham.