A Russian Nuclear Attack on NATO?

According to news reports, a peace agreement may now be close at hand in the Iran War, a conflict that has heavily dominated most of the world’s attention during the last three months.

Such overwhelming focus has certainly been reasonable. Very soon after the American and Israeli attacks began, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz to cargo ships associated with unfriendly countries, causing a huge drop in the flow of oil and other vital resources from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world.

Conspiracy Theories: F... Unz, Ron Check Amazon for Pricing. President Donald Trump soon recognized that despite the overwhelming strength of his American navy, he was powerless to reopen that vital waterway and instead imposed a distant counter-blockade against Iranian oil shipments, further restricting supply. Meanwhile, the Iranians had responded to earlier attacks against their own infrastructure by using their huge arsenal of ballistic missiles and powerful drones to inflict similar destruction upon the civilian and energy infrastructure of the Gulf Arab allies who had facilitated those American and Israeli strikes.

Although a ceasefire began in early April, the combination of all these actions have reduced the global availability of oil by some 13% or more, with even larger reductions in the supply of LNG and other vital commodities. This has put the world at risk of a severe global recession if a peace agreement were not soon reached and the waterway fully reopened to traffic.

Throughout this period, Trump has regularly threatened to reignite the military conflict with a massive new bombing campaign, perhaps targeting much of Iran’s civilian and energy infrastructure and the Iranians have declared that they would retaliate in equally strong fashion. In conjunction with its Houthi allies, Iran has warned that it would shut down the alternate Red Sea transit route and also destroy much of the fragile Gulf Arab infrastructure, including energy facilities and even desalination plants. The result of such mutual destruction would be a far greater loss of oil and other natural resources and one that would probably continue for years, thereby possibly throwing the world into a global depression.

Given the enormous potential threat to the world economy, I have heavily focused on this Iran War, making it the subject of most my recent articles such as these:

• Will Donald Trump’s Iran War Crash the Global Economy?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 20, 2026 • 6,000 Words
• Will America Be Expelled from the Middle East?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 11, 2026 • 6,100 Words

During these months, this dire situation had naturally drawn attention away from other conflicts, notably including Russia’s continuing war with Ukraine. Furthermore, advances in drone technology have drastically reduced the pace of Russian progress on the battlefield, with signs of a deadlock developing. Prof. John Mearsheimer even recently suggested that contrary to his own expectations the ultimate result of the Ukraine War might be the sort of frozen conflict that some others had long predicted.

When that war originally began with a Russian invasion in February 2022 almost all observers had expected a very short military conflict, though one that might have long-lasting strategic consequences. But Ukraine’s very large armed forces fought with unexpected determination while dramatic changes in military technology, especially involving the use of drones, largely halted what had been expected to be a rapid Russian advance. As a result, the war has now easily passed its four year mark, already outlasting the Soviet war against Nazi Germany fought more than three generations ago.

During all of this period, pro-Russian analysts have insisted that Ukraine’s defeat was merely a matter of time, with Russia’s cautious, risk-averse military strategy gradually grinding down the Ukrainian armed forces and likely to soon cause a collapse of the front lines. The argument was always made that huge Russian advantages in manpower, weapons systems, and munitions production were inflicting disproportionate Ukrainian casualties, thereby ensuring an ultimate Russian victory. There were regular predictions regarding the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian front lines or the disintegration of the Ukrainian government, but none of these events ever transpired. End The Fed Ron Paul Best Price: $2.18 Buy New $5.68 (as of 09:55 UTC - Details)

Instead, more than four years later, Russia has still failed to capture much of the territory of the four eastern oblasts that it had officially annexed and declared part of Russia in September 2022, and over the last few months there have been signs of growing war-weariness on the part of the Russian population. Casualty figures are hotly disputed, but my own impression is that Russian forces have probably suffered many hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, including at least a couple of hundred thousand fatalities. Although Ukrainian losses have probably been far greater, such Russian casualties still loom very large in a population of about 143 million, especially one that has low fertility rates, rates that are far below replacement levels.

For the last couple of years, I’ve regularly watched Andrew Napolitano’s weekly interviews with Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, someone whose business activities had led him to spend many years living and working in Russia. Although he now lives in the West, he still regularly visits Russia and also seeks to monitor the Russian situation both through his contacts and by watching the leading political discussion shows. In recent months, he has reported a growing amount of elite and popular dissatisfaction with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conduct of the war, which many believe has now dragged on far too long without any decisive victory, while killing and maiming far too many Russians.

Doctorow has also claimed that Russians have been greatly disturbed by the increasing number 0f successful Ukrainian drone strikes and other attacks deep inside their enormous land, and the lack of effective responses by Putin to deter these. There have also been other escalating provocations by the NATO countries, including the seizure of Russian oil tankers on the high seas, and these actions have gone unanswered.

In some of his remarks, Doctorow has even suggested that if these incidents and the resulting sense of Russian weakness continued unabated, Putin might be removed from power in some sort of palace coup. Although I’m quite skeptical of this possibility and it has obviously not come to pass, merely broaching such an idea represents a huge shift in apparent sentiment. His blogposts have recently grown scathing in their criticism of Putin’s conduct of the war.

I think that a major factor behind some of the sharpest recent criticism of Putin by Russian elites was our own sudden, overwhelming attack against Iran at the end of February. As I wrote last month:

Just over five weeks ago, we launched our massive surprise attack against Iran, an operation that President Donald Trump later boasted had been inspired by the infamous December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Together with our Israeli allies, the initial missile strikes that constituted our official declaration of war successfully assassinated most of the top Iranian political and military leadership from its 86-year-old Supreme Leader and his family on down.

This sort of decapitating first strike had been the subject of countless strategic research studies during the the many decades of our long Cold War with the old USSR. But nothing like it had ever actually ever been carried out in modern history, so our willingness to conduct such a risky and ruthlessly bold operation against a large country of more than 90 million naturally inspired considerable concerns elsewhere around the world. Moreover, this sudden attack on Iran was fully aligned with Trump’s loud public declarations that he had absolutely no respect for any international law or norms, and that he would instead do whatever he wanted in military or political matters. This obviously forced everyone around the world to now take his audacious words much more seriously.

Over the last few years, Russia’s retaliatory nuclear deterrent forces have been subject to repeated attacks almost certainly greenlighted and assisted by American intelligence services, which have similarly assisted apparent attempts to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that a prominent Russian policy analyst declared that our unprecedented surprise attack and decapitation strike against Iran sent “shockwaves” around the world, with Russians becoming fearful that it might be the model for a similar future attack on their own country and its leadership. The Myth of American M... Unz, Ron Check Amazon for Pricing.

In that early March article, Prof. Ivan Timofeev emphasized what he considered the very dangerous implications for his own country:

The massive airstrikes by Israel and the United States on Iran were not entirely unexpected. Strike forces had been building up in the Persian Gulf for months. Iranian-American negotiations had stalled and offered little prospect of success. Yet the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, members of his family, and several senior Iranian officials have sent shockwaves far beyond the region…

For Russia, the crisis offers hard lessons…

…Iran is not defenseless. Its missile and drone strikes demonstrate capacity and resolve. Actions such as attempting to restrict navigation through the Strait of Hormuz show a willingness to raise costs. Yet the US and Israel appear to judge Iranian retaliation as painful but acceptable.

Deterrence depends not merely on capability but on the adversary’s sensitivity to damage. In prolonged confrontation, tolerance for loss can increase. The 20th century demonstrated how political escalation can erode restraint even in the nuclear sphere.

Russia possesses far greater retaliatory capacity than Iran. But that alone does not guarantee stability. An opponent who calculates that the damage is bearable may continue escalation. The Iranian crisis reveals a deeper mood emerging in global politics: fatalistic determination. Major powers appear increasingly willing to absorb risk and accept instability, which may be the most troubling lesson of all.

The Soviet Union collapsed thirty-five years ago, leading to the unipolar moment during which America reigned as the sole global superpower, almost unchallenged in the military, political, economic, and technological spheres.

As a result, those Russians who are in their sixties or younger have lived nearly their entire adult lives under this shadow of American supremacy, and as a result they have naturally absorbed an enormous, probably exaggerated sense of American might. These individuals today constitute the bulk of Russia’s political and policy elite, and this obviously colors the Russian view of the world. Timofeev himself was born in 1980, so he had not yet even entered his teens when the era of America’s global hegemony began.

For these reasons, I noticed that in the early days of the American-Israeli attack, most Russian experts seemed to regard Iran’s military position as absolutely hopeless and believed that the country was doomed to a rapid defeat. Like Timofeev, they even seemed fearful that a victorious and emboldened America might then make Russia its next target.

But contrary to all those expectations, Iran surmounted and absorbed that treacherous surprise attack and the massive blows that followed and within a few weeks had largely won the war, inflicting a stunning strategic defeat upon America and its enormous military forces.

Iran’s strategic victory has now become so apparent that it has even been recognized by Robert Kagan, who had spent decades as an arch-interventionist and one of our foremost foreign policy Neocons. In a couple of his May articles in the Atlantic, Kagan declared that we had suffered a “checkmate” at Iran’s hands and that the American “Endgame Is Surrender.”

Even excluding its huge nuclear arsenal, Russia’s conventional military power is certainly many times greater than that of Iran. AIDS and Public Health... Unz, Ron Check Amazon for Pricing.

However, Iranian boldness and courageous resistance have allowed it to triumph over America within weeks, doing so at the cost of just a few thousand deaths. Meanwhile, Russian political and military caution have meant that it has still failed to achieve any of its own wartime objectives and subdue Ukraine despite more than four years of combat and many hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Russians.

Russia is far stronger than Iran and Ukraine is vastly weaker than America. But the results of those two wars have been exactly contrary to what might have been expected based upon those objective considerations.

Many Russians, whether members of the top political elite or just ordinary citizens, have drawn the obvious conclusions from these very different military outcomes. So when President Putin personally greeted Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghi in Moscow last month, he praised the Iranians for their courage, and I think his sentiments were absolutely heartfelt.

Iran had certainly launched waves of effective missile and drone attacks against the American bases and the Israeli targets of the country’s direct military adversaries. But a much larger factor behind its victory came because it was also willing to strike back very hard with retaliatory blows against the Gulf Arab countries that had indirectly assisted the American war effort and also to bottle up hundreds of tankers and cargo vessels within the Persian Gulf, actions that had far greater strategic impact and deterrent value.

In sharp contrast, I had explained last year that Russia had been fighting its war against Ukraine in far more limited fashion:

One strange aspect of this current conflict is that Russia has essentially been fighting NATO with both hands tied behind its back. NATO missiles using NATO targeting intelligence and key NATO personnel—legally laundered through the fig-leaf of its Ukrainian proxy—have regularly struck deep inside Russia, inflicting many serious blows, including sinking the flagship and other vessels of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, but Russia has refused to respond in kind. So in effect, the NATO countries have constituted a safe haven for producing and assembling the military hardware and systems used to equip Ukraine’s forces without suffering any risk of Russian retaliation. Russian cities have been struck by NATO missiles but NATO cities and their populations have not faced any similar threat…

This has led to the growing criticism that Putin and his government have been far too cautious, risk-averse, and legalistic in their conduct of the war. This critics have emphasized that they have allowed their NATO adversaries to repeatedly cross Russia’s bright red lines, thereby suggesting Russian weakness and vulnerability and inviting further escalatory steps that might eventually lead the world to disaster.

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