Donald Trump, beset by a week of bad news, has decided to rattle the most dangerous saber of all. In a post today on his Truth Social site, the president claimed that in response to recent remarks by former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, he has “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.” (All American submarines are nuclear-powered; Trump may mean submarines armed with ballistic nuclear weapons.) “Words are very important,” Trump added, “and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”
And then, of course: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Trump’s words may mean nothing. The submarines that carry America’s sea-based nuclear deterrent routinely move around the world’s oceans. Each carries up to 20 nuclear warheads, on missiles with a range of more than 4,000 miles, and so almost anywhere can be an “appropriate region.” And Trump may not even have issued such orders; normally, the Pentagon and the White House do not discuss the movements of America’s ballistic-missile submarines.
Medvedev is a man with little actual power in Russia, but he has become Russia’s top internet troll, regularly threatening America and its allies. No one takes him seriously, even in his own country. He and Trump have been trading public insults on social media for months, with Trump telling Medvedev to “watch his words” and Medvedev—nicknamed “Little Dima” in Russia due to his diminutive stature—warning Trump to remember Russia’s “Dead Hand,” a supposed doomsday system that could launch all of Russia’s nuclear weapons even if Moscow were destroyed and the Kremlin leadership killed.
The problem is not that Trump is going to spark a nuclear crisis with a post about two submarines—at least not this time. The much more worrisome issue is that the president of the United States thinks it is acceptable to use ballistic-missile submarines like toys, objects to be waved around when he wants to distract the public or deflect from bad news, or merely because some Russian official has annoyed him.
Unfortunately, Trump has never understood “nuclear,” as he calls it. In a 2015 Republican primary debate, Trump said: “We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ball game.” When the moderator Hugh Hewitt pressed Trump and asked which part of the U.S. triad (land-based missiles, bombers, and submarines) would be his priority, Trump answered: “For me, nuclear, the power, the devastation, is very important to me.”
That power and devastation, however, is apparently not enough to stop the president from making irresponsible statements in response to a Kremlin troll. One would hope that after nearly five years in office—which must have included multiple briefings on nuclear weapons and how to order their use—Trump might be a bit more hesitant to throw such threats around. But he appears to have no sense of the past or the future; he lives in the now, and winning the moment is always the most important thing.
Trump’s nuclear threats are reckless. (I would call them “silly,” but that is too small a word when the commander in chief even alludes to nuclear arms.) But such threats serve two purposes.
First, they help Trump maintain the fiction that he wants to be tough on Russia, that he is willing to impose consequences on Moscow for its behavior, and that he’s not about to take any guff from anyone in the Kremlin. He takes plenty of guff, of course, from Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he seems to genuinely fear. Trump has never aimed such invective at Putin, and using Medvedev as a surrogate helps Trump thump his chest without any danger of getting into a real fight with someone who scares him.
More important, Trump knows that a foreign-policy crisis, and anything involving nuclear weapons, is an instant distraction from other news. The media will always zero in on such moments, because it is, in fact, news when the most powerful man on Earth starts talking about nuclear weapons. (And here I am, writing about it as well.) Trump has had a terrible week: He’s dug a deeper hole for himself on the Jeffrey Epstein issue, the economy is headed in the wrong direction, and his approval rating is cratering. Using the implied threat of nuclear war to pick a fight with one of Red Square’s most juvenile and odious figures is a convenient distraction.
Nuclear-missile submarines are not toys. No one understood this better than Trump’s predecessors, the 11 presidents who have been the only other people in American history with the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. They treated any declarations about nuclear weapons with utter gravity and sobriety. They avoided even mentioning such things unless they were articulating a carefully planned policy and communicating it to allies and enemies alike. They did not engage in petty spats with nuclear-armed foreign powers. And they considered using nuclear signals only when faced with crises that involved America’s vital interests.
Trump, however, has now discarded all of these red lines. He has initiated a new era in which the chief executive can use threats regarding the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes. Once upon a time, America was governed by serious people. No longer.
For now, America’s nuclear-armed opponents seem to have priced in a certain amount of drama and foolishness when it comes to Donald Trump, and his most recent social-media bloviation will likely amount to nothing. But if such outbursts are ever taken seriously by our adversaries, the president—and America—may one day regret it.
