As I wrote a while back, it is one thing for a political leader to loosely play with language that circles around making a nuclear threat, as Russian Security Council Deputy Head and former Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev has done again recently in a public social net spat with US President Donald Trump. But it is quite another to play global chess with the repositioning of nuclear forces to actually threaten another nuclear power of superior nuclear weapons strength (https://gordonhahn.com/2025/08/05/trumps-suicidal-nuclear-brinksmanship/). This is even more so when said nuclear power is technologically advanced and intent on defending ist homeland. Such a country is Russia – a major world power and the leading power in western and central Eurasia – the World Island, as Halford MacKinder wrote more than a century ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin, after proposing a nuclear compromise Trump in typical American fashion chose to ignore has rolled out a counterthreat. In sum, we are seeing the Bidenization of Trump’s Russia policy, oriented towards escalation in the mistaken belief that Moscow can be cowed into submission to US hopes of preserving its dissipating global hegemony. Let’s review the record.
Putin’s initial instinct to the new Trump administration was to signal Moscow‘s desire for nuclear arms talks, seeing the new administration as a small window of opportunity for achieving greater strategic stability for Russia through the conclusion of a new strategic nuclear arms control treaty (https://gordonhahn.com/2025/05/23/a-new-new-start-putin-sees-trump-administration-as-a-window-of-opportunity-for-strategic-arms-control/). The New START treaty, which entered into force in February 2011 and was extended for another five years in 2021, is set to expire without possibility of further extension in February 2026. Any new treaty would have contributed to the larger US-Russian rapprochement broached by the Trump administration in connection with its now collapsed efforts to broker an end to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy was welcomed by Putin, but the result is ‘no dice’ so far, and prospects look dim.
In contrast to the Biden administration, Trump has an opportunity to restart nuclear arms talks with Moscow as part of his self-declared hope of normalising relations between Washington and Moscow. ……
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NEW BOOK
EUROPE BOOKS, 2022
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RECENT BOOKS
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.