Is Weak Leadership Eroding The Mutually-Assured-Destruction Nuclear Deterrent?
Are our enemies now counting on us to be too weak to make hard decisions in war?
The secret to Reagan’s success was simple: Peace Through Strength.
You have to present a credible threat meaningful enough that nobody really wants to mess with you. That ‘credible threat’ has two dimensions.
One side is the actual military capability of both men and machines. You need the might to back up any threats. It doesn’t matter how loudly a chihuahua barks — it’s still not a rottweiler.
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The other side is political will. You can be sitting on the deadliest military in the world, but if you enemies know (or worse still, think they know) that you will hesitate and dither when it comes time to use it, it is no longer an effective deterrent.
That is where the West is now finding itself with Russia.
Specifically, with respect to nuclear weapons.
The one thing that kept the Cold War from going hot was the lurking suspicion that if things got dicey, the other side might fire off a nuke. As was famously portrayed in the old 80s flick ‘War Games’, the only way to win that game is to not play at all.
And so was born the doctrine of nuclear deterrence known as ‘mutually assured destruction’
There’s just one problem. The Russians no longer think the West has the will to use them.
There are two kinds of nukes. There are the ones we think of as city-destroyers, and there is a lesser version usually with a shorter range. The shorthand for those Non-strategic-nuclear-weapons is NSNW. That acronym will be important in the following quote. These weapons, in the Russian arsenal, will generally reach Europe, but not across the Atlantic.
Monday’s report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) raised the question of whether Russia might be emboldened to fire a NSNW in the belief that the West lacks the resolve to deliver a nuclear response.
“The Russian perception of the lack of credible Western will to use nuclear weapons or to accept casualties in conflict further reinforces Russia’s aggressive NSNW thought and doctrine,” it said.
It said the logic of using a NSNW would be to escalate a conflict in a controlled fashion, “either to prevent the US and NATO from engaging, or to coerce them into war termination on Russian terms”.
Moscow denies wielding nuclear threats but several of President Vladimir Putin’s statements since the onset of the war in Ukraine have been interpreted as such in the West – starting on day one of the Russian invasion when he warned of “consequences that you have never faced in your history” for anyone who tried to hinder or threaten Russia. — Reuters
We heard a lot about how Trump’s recklessness was a wildcard that would plunge the world into WWIII. In reality, it may have been PRECISELY this unpredictability (like that other American ‘cowboy’, Ronald Reagan) who kept the worst instincts of our enemies in check.
Joe Biden, his dithering, and the leash put around his neck by his own party is not nearly the same kind of a deterrent.
Meanwhile, the less scrupulous major powers around the world have been licking their chops and sizing up their opportunities.
