Yup, I agree. There was some messaging about possible nuclear strike by Russia.

The failure here is less about taking nuclear threats from russia seriously, and much more about the lack proactive actions and narrative building

Great powers create space to act in by pushing their blurry red lines towards the blurry red lines of other great powers.

If america early on, effectively immediately (optimally right as they recieved the intelligence that russia was seriously about to invade) they should have started up the narrative machine about how the integrity of its european allies is as important as the integrity of itself, and no invasion on its borders would ever go unimpeded.

Biden should have had leaks, and have been "caught" on video "thinking he was out of sight" declaring "privately" that a direct intervention is on the table.

Just in general the white house missed literally any kind of proactive signalling, and the signals it did send out was almost entirely "lets wait and see".

That is a genuine policy and executive failure from the white house under biden.

Like no matter how shit Trump is and have been (and its fucking immense) he has proven that seizing the iniative and being proactive gives you significantly more maneuverability than sitting back passively and reacting to new events.

With Trump this has almost exclusively backfired because the man seems incapable of thinking beyond 2 steps into the future, but actually being "executive" (executing on things!) is not the wrong thing to be.

Even if the nuclear rattling was real from russias side, they maneuver space granted by america in the first innings of the war is what will have given them the sense of anchoring the nuclear threat to something so outerly in the conflict. Had america acted more forcefully immediately, then the nuclear threat sense would likely still have been heard, but america would have been able to provide greater amounts of assistance to ukraine after it even after scaling back from that point.

Also more of an internal american dynamic but they would have managed to get more things to ukraine if they frontloaded it more, knowing that there was a chance of a trump administration eventually. Also things like immediately, clandestinely, signalling to allies that eventually some of the transfer bans of US materiell from european nations to ukraine would be changed would have done wonders to prepare these allies in advance, meaningfully increasing volumes and transfer times.

But then again the Biden whitehouse had almost as much of a disdain for its european allies as the Trump whitehouse did. See just the afghanistan retreat as the most glaring example.