On Balance | Putin’s nuclear shift is shaking US Republicans from Russia’s thrall

Russian President Vladimir Putin might have finally dislodged the US Republican Party from the spell many of them were under for the past few years, or at least loosened the bonds. By linking arms with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un and then suggesting changes in his nuclear strike policy while in Vietnam, Putin’s two-country tour washed away another chunk of the ground that many in the party have stood on when they have dismissed calls from the centrists in their midst about the threat that Russia poses.

Speaking to reporters in Vietnam a day after visiting nuclear-armed North Korea for a summit with Kim, Putin gave us a split-screen moment that smacked of history as soon as it occurred. Around the same time Mike Turner, the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, was demanding the Biden administration provide more details about Russia’s nuclear capabilities, Putin said Russia was mulling changes to its doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons.

Turner, a congressman from Ohio representative, insisted that Americans needed more information about what he called “day zero”. This is when Russia might be able to use anti-satellite nuclear weapons to bring the West to its knees.

It is against this backdrop that some senior Republicans are leaping from one angle of attack against US President Joe Biden – that his administration’s fixation on Ukraine is wasteful and ineffective – to the opposite side of the foreign policy spectrum, one that is more reflective of Turner’s.

We are hearing positions more along the lines of this comment Turner made in his remarks about Putin’s trip to Pyongyang: “We’ve all sort of felt intuitively that China, Russia, North Korea, Iran are working together in both their development of capabilities and in their threats to the United States. These symbolic meetings, I think, should allow us to focus on this is a threat that has already been occurring.”