When Power Weakens

The war that began on February 24, 2022, ceased to be a territorial conflict long ago. What is at stake, and what this book aims to demonstrate, is that it has become a simultaneous test of three distinct things: the political survival of Vladimir Putin's regime, the credibility of nuclear deterrence as an international institution, and the West's ability to sustain a European security order under prolonged pressure. These three tests do not occur in parallel. They are coupled, and the mechanism that couples them is the central object of the book: as the material base of Russian power narrows, the relative cost of nuclear coercion instruments falls, and the probability of their signaling use rises. The Russian nuclear threat is a function of weakness, not strength. That is why it is dangerous, and that is why it will not disappear with a Ukrainian military victory or a Russian defeat.

It is important to define this thesis precisely because it is frequently confused with two related claims that I do not subscribe to. The first is that Russia will use a nuclear weapon. The book does not state this at any point, considers the issue unknowable, and explains in the methodological note why it considers it analytically sterile. The second is that Russian nuclear coercion is a bluff. It does not state this either, and for a symmetrical reason: to call a behavior a bluff is to assume knowledge about the intention of the person practicing it, and this knowledge does not exist. What the thesis states is a relationship between observable variables—as conventional capacity and the fiscal base deteriorate, the frequency, formality, and institutionalization of nuclear signaling increase because the relative cost of this instrument decreases. It is a statement about incentives, not about intentions.

Since this is a statement about incentives, it is falsifiable, and the reader has the right to know how. The thesis would be seriously weakened if, over a prolonged period, any of the following situations occurred: a sustained recovery of Russian material capacity accompanied by an increase—not a decrease—in nuclear signaling; a sharp degradation of this capacity accompanied by doctrinal retreat and the re-establishment of verification mechanisms; or a demonstration that the doctrinal revisions of 2020 and 2024 were decided for reasons entirely internal to the military apparatus, unrelated to the evolution of the Ukrainian theater. None of these three situations occurred between 2022 and the closing date of this book, which does not prove the thesis, but means that it survived the conditions under which it could have been refuted. I record this because an argument that nothing could contradict is not an argument: it is a conviction with footnotes.

Before outlining the book's structure, it is important to establish six operational concepts. I use them with a precise and consistent meaning throughout all chapters, and any reader who confuses two of them will miss the point.

Deterrence is the act of preventing an adversary from doing something they haven't done yet. It relies on credible communication that the cost of the action exceeds the expected benefit, and it works in two ways: through punishment, when what is promised is unbearable retaliation, and through denial, when what is demonstrated is that the action simply will not produce the intended effect. Nuclear weapons are extraordinarily effective in deterrence through punishment, for the elementary reason that it is enough to make the hypothesis of a catastrophic cost plausible—it is not necessary to make it certain.