The greatest poker player of our time never made it to Vegas. Russia’s graceless, grabbing czar never held a royal flush or even an inside straight, but he was the greatest master of the bluff since Adolf Hitler moved into the Rhineland. Again and again, Putin sat at the global big-spenders table and stared down presidents, prime ministers, and his early internal rivals, beating four aces with a pair of twos…until, inevitably, he became convinced he couldn’t lose and bet everything he had on raking in Ukraine.
To his shock and outrage, the players with the deeper pockets finally—even astonishingly—called his bluff. And he’s running out of chips.
His last bluff is the threat to use nuclear weapons. And he has a few. But were he to launch a single tactical/operational-level nuke, he would have played his last card and would find himself banned from the global casino for life. Still worse, the delivery of a nuclear weapon on any target in Ukraine would be an admission of defeat, a desperate attempt to freeze the conditions on the ground and prevent worse from becoming worst, to salvage something from this self-inflicted debacle that has exposed Russia’s pathetic weakness, its breathtaking spectrum of incompetence and incapability, and its genetically encoded savagery.
One year ago, Russia held the status of a great power with a near-superpower military. Today, Russia is a plague hospital out of medicine.
And what target might Putin choose (for he would make the ultimate choice)? Were he to nuke Kharkiv or Kyiv, he would add strategic leprosy to his country’s current plague sores. Yet were he to use a nuke solely against Ukrainian troops in the field, the impact would be less than the situation requires, but with the same status of lifelong outcast.
So, the likeliest target would be a small city or large town close to the front—wherever the front might be in Putin’s hour of ultimate desperation. He would need to choose a target that suggested the will and capability to kill in vastly greater numbers if not accommodated.
Yet, even then, he would be bluffing: While his generals and senior courtiers might acquiesce in the use of a nuclear weapon on or near the battlefield, we can be confident that they would not unleash an intercontinental nuclear war.
And Putin himself must wonder how many of his strategic weapons actually would work, given the Russian inability to field a tank that isn’t just a death trap for its crew.
Putin’s bluffing right now with his nuclear warnings, and he still would be bluffing even were he to employ a single nuke or even a pair of them.
President Biden, who has emerged as a surprisingly good card counter himself, and our European and democratic allies around the table, are also onto the game at last. Together, we hold all of the royal cards, four flushes, each in single suits.
Putin’s holding aces and eights, the “dead-man’s hand.”
Call his bluff.
