SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
soviet union
Destroying Civilizations: Our MADness and Nuclear Winter
A reminder that the Trump administration wasn’t the first to threaten the civilizational destruction of a country.
Apr 27, 2026
In a memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote that “the current strategic posture” of the United States “is to destroy both the Soviet Union and Communist China as viable societies even after a well-planned and executed surprise attack on our forces.”
In a 1967 speech in San Francisco that he called “Mutual Deterrence,” the formal introduction to the public of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), McNamara said “we must be able to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country — on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population — and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms.” McNamara described this as “our assured-destruction capability.”
What this means is that the Trump administration wasn’t the first to threaten the civilizational destruction of a country. That threat has been embedded in the conceptual framework of the MAD US nuclear posture since at least 1967, which includes the perverse menace to absorb “the total weight of nuclear attack” on our own country. No president since then, or defense secretary or national security adviser, or majority party of Congress, has thought to get ourselves and the rest of the world out of the MAD policy.
In the 1960s, there was little to no knowledge of nuclear winter as a nuclear-war induced catastrophic climate effect. However, a 1963 classified nuclear war-game study by President Kennedy’s National Security Council, which described “the combined effects on survivors of radiation, blast, fires, floods, substandard diet and sanitary conditions, and lack of medical services and care” of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union should have sufficiently informed McNamara of at least the direct effects of absorbing the full weight of a Soviet nuclear attack. The same war-games study also estimated US fatalities from 63 million to 134 million and Soviet fatalities from 136 million to 143 million. The US MAD nuclear posture was developed in the immediate aftermath of this report.
The thinking among MAD policy planners at the time, and today, is that rational actors on both the US and Soviet side would not launch a nuclear first-strike knowing that it would be suicidal for the country that launched first.
This is one of several MAD fallacies. For example, last year, three academics in New Zealand authored a study titled, “The Frequently Impaired Health of Leaders of Nuclear Weapons States.” They reported personality disorders, substance use disorders, multi-infarct dementia, depression, and anxiety among a sizeable percentage of leaders. The authors concluded: “These findings indicate that physical and mental health conditions among leaders of these nuclear weapon states have been common.” They advised: “Given the importance of the decision-making around nuclear weapons by political leaders, further research on this group should be prioritized.”
Twenty years after McNamara established Mutual Assured Destruction as US nuclear policy, Carl Sagan’s pioneering study, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” published in the journal Science in 1983, opened the door to extensive scientific study of the climate-related effects of nuclear war.
Using more sophisticated climate models as applied to nuclear winter, prominent climate scientists reported in Nature Food in 2022 that “more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia, underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war.”
Alan Robock, a coauthor of the study and a leading climate scientist from Rutgers University, had previously described nuclear winter as follows: “Nuclear winter is the term for a theory describing the climatic effects of nuclear war. Smoke from the fires started by nuclear weapons, especially the black, sooty smoke from cities and industrial facilities, would be heated by the Sun, lofted into the upper atmosphere, and spread globally, lasting for years. The resulting cool, dark, dry conditions at Earth’s surface would prevent crop growth for at least one growing season, resulting in mass starvation over most of the world… More people could die in the noncombatant countries than in those where the bombs were dropped, because of these indirect effects… A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could produce so much smoke that it would produce global environmental change unprecedented in human history… The only way to be sure to prevent the climatic effects of nuclear war is to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”
Writing in 2021 in “Ending Nuclear Weapons Before They End US,” Australian physician Tilman Ruff, co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warned: “Evidence of the consequences of nuclear war, particularly global climatic and nutritional effects of the abrupt ice age conditions from even a relatively small regional nuclear war, indicates that these are more severe than previously sought. None of the nine nuclear-armed states is disarming… Abrogation of existing nuclear arms control agreements, policies of first nuclear use and war fighting, growing armed conflicts worldwide, and increasing use of information and cyberwarfare, exacerbate dangers of nuclear war.”
An added stress today is the fact that “nuclear armed countries are considering the integration of artificial intelligence into existing nuclear command, control, and communications structures as a way to increase speed and efficiency,” thus adding to the “already unacceptable level of risk,” as ICAN reports. The ICAN-identified risks include reduced decision-making time and rapid escalation, perceived increases in vulnerability that incentivizes nuclear weapon use, cyber risks, and data poisoning.
President Trump, who inherited the MAD-based strategic nuclear posture from previous administrations, would do well to focus on preventing nuclear war/nuclear winter now by negotiating a permanent cessation of military action in and against Iran, a conflict that embodies any number of escalatory scenarios to nuclear war. Trump could then be the first US president to convene a summit of all nine nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, China, the U.K., France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—to begin the process of abolishing nuclear weapons, including by joining the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon. Trump could propose the idea to China’s President Xi during their upcoming bilateral summit next month in Beijing.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Who Will Trump Disappear From History Next?
In democracies as well as in communist dictatorships, the people in power are often more committed to maintaining that power than to any obligation to tell the truth.
Jul 08, 2025
In early June, The Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of “DEI-related content.” Illustrated with more than a dozen samples of the targeted photos (which the Post‘s reporters were able to find reproduced on nongovernment websites), the Post‘s new story offered more details on the images marked for deletion because they were deemed to touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues—overwhelmingly depicting subjects identified as “gay, transgender, women, Hispanic, and Black.”
The headline over the story didn’t mince words: “Here Are the People Trump Doesn’t Want to Exist.”
Identified from a database obtained by The Associated Press, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation’s first Black military pilots during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.
It’s clearly far too soon to suggest that Americans are headed for an era of repression comparable in any way to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union or post-Mao China. It’s not too early, however, to be conscious of that possibility.
Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot’s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted “DEI” into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, “gay” was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised. Some of those photos were fairly quickly reposted, along with other images whose removal had drawn criticism—photographs of the Code Talkers, for example. But thousands of photos were kept offline, making it clear that the basic goal of that purge, the intent to revise history and erase truths and realities that the Trumpists believe challenge their ideology, remains unchanged.
Reading the Post roundup and other articles on the subject reminded me of an event that, while not identical, was similar in meaningful ways to the Trump team’s chainsaw assault on the Pentagon photo archives. It, however, took place in a very different time and setting—nearly 49 years ago, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I was then a journalist in Hong Kong, covering stories in China and elsewhere in Asia. Several years into that assignment, in September 1976, China’s longtime Communist ruler, Mao Zedong, died in Beijing. Less than a month later, in early October, his successors arrested his widow, Jiang Qing, and her three principal associates, now condemned as counterrevolutionary criminals for their leading roles in Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution.
Only weeks earlier, hundreds of millions of Chinese and other readers around the world had seen photographs in the Chinese communist newspaper, the People’s Daily, and other official media showing all four sitting in the front row of mourners at Mao’s funeral. After they were arrested, Chinese publications continued to carry those photos—but with Jiang and her three allies, now labeled the “Gang of Four,” airbrushed out. The editing was anything but subtle: Blurred smudges or blank spots appeared where they had been in the originals, while their names in the captions were blotted out by vertical rows of X’s.
Though I haven’t found copies of those memorable images, an online search turned up a different set of before-and-after shots without the smudges and blotted-out captions I remember but with equally obvious gaps where each of the four had been standing when the photo was taken.
The technology in that now-distant era was different, but the Communist Party officials who doctored those photographs were acting in the same way and for the same reasons that motivated President Donald Trump’s minions nearly a half-century later, when they eliminated those supposedly DEI-related images and descriptions from the Pentagon archives. Both intended to wipe out any evidence that conflicted with the preferred (and often wildly false) historical narratives propagated by their rulers. Both sought to obliterate visual records that might have raised uncomfortable questions about the political messaging of their leaders and the policies and underlying values they reflected. Both were entirely ready and willing to disregard truth and deny reality in order to protect falsehoods their bosses wanted people to believe.
I have no way of knowing what, if anything, President Trump or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or their censors might know about that earlier example—or anything else about Mao, for that matter, or if any of them have ever even heard of Jiang Qing or the Gang of Four. It’s likely that, like most Americans, they know little or nothing about that now-distant Chinese past. It’s more than likely that they’ve never even heard the name Jiang Qing or the label Gang of Four. Still, the parallels are a chilling reminder that, in democracies as well as in communist dictatorships, the people in power are often more committed to maintaining that power than to any obligation to tell the truth.
Another Alarming Precedent
I had another first-hand encounter with airbrushed history some years later on a short visit to the other 20th-century communist superpower. That glimpse came during a university-sponsored study tour to the Russian Far East in the summer of 1990, just a year and a half before the final breakup of the Soviet Union. In the decades preceding our trip, the Soviet authorities had preserved the communist structures of government, while continuing to proclaim Marxist-Leninist ideology. They had, however, repudiated the brutal legacy of Joseph Stalin’s rule, which ended with his death in 1953. Consistent with that shift in official thinking was an exhibit at the Vladimir K. Arseniev Museum in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok (named for an explorer and naturalist who had been a pioneer in that once remote region), which I visited twice while there. The exhibit, which had been installed just a year before our trip, offered a remarkable display of artworks and relics that recalled the terror of the Stalin era.
On my first visit to the museum, accompanied by two students from the local university hosting our tour, I walked through the Stalin exhibit with Irina Yatskova, a brisk, forthright woman who was the chief of the museum’s Soviet history department. Irina was also co-chair of the provincial branch of the Memorial Committee, a nationwide organization seeking redress for victims of the terror campaigns of the Stalin era. Over the doorway where we entered the gallery, strands of barbed wire hung between bare boards. They were meant to represent the gates outside the entrance to one of the concentration camps of that era. Inside, one wall was covered with photos from the Stalin years, images of smiling workers or grateful peasants thanking the Soviet ruler for their supposedly happy lives. In front of that display stood a huge blown-up photo of Stalin himself, circled by a ring of inscriptions reproducing the worshipful titles he was customarily accorded during his years in power—“creator of happiness and friendship,” “leader and teacher of the Communist Party,” and dozens more in the same vein.
If Trump and Elon Musk don’t resolve their feud, will we see censors combing the White House archives for photos showing them together and reissuing them with Musk’s image airbrushed out?
On another wall, a stylized map showed the route by which prisoners were transported to concentration camps scattered across the Soviet Arctic—a journey that began on the Trans-Siberian railroad from the Russian heartland to Vladivostok and then by ship for another 1,400 miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan, the gateway to Russia’s vast frozen northern region. A row of display cases in front of the map contained bits of memorabilia: prisoners’ ID cards, photographs, a few letters, and two shriveled roses tied with a red ribbon—brought there by a former prisoner’s daughter, Irina told me. There was also a panel listing the names of prominent victims of Stalin’s terror, including many of the top leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution who were later exiled, imprisoned, or executed as Stalin eliminated possible rivals for power.
There was, however, a glaring omission from that list. The name of Leon Trotsky, by far the most prominent of the old Bolsheviks who had fallen out of favor under Stalin’s rule, wasn’t on that panel. And Trotsky was similarly missing from a display in a different exhibit, dating from a previous era and reflecting an earlier version of ideological orthodoxy. Focused on the original Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, portrayed in the heroic style traditional in past official propaganda, the exhibit included many photos from 1917 and the following years of civil war between the Bolsheviks and their enemies. None of them, however, showed Trotsky, even though he was at the time a highly visible revolutionary leader, second only to Lenin himself. When I mentioned that to Svetlana Soboleva, one of the teachers hosting our group who accompanied me on a second visit to the museum a few days later, she replied with a question of her own: How did I know Trotsky wasn’t in the photos, since the captions were in Cyrillic script, which at the time I couldn’t read? I knew because I would recognize Trotsky if I saw him, I replied, and I hadn’t seen him in any of the pictures.
Svetlana looked at me in surprise. “I’ve never seen a photograph of Trotsky!” she said. I was startled—and puzzled. If Stalin’s other high-ranking victims had indeed been officially rehabilitated and their images restored to public view, why, I wondered, was Trotsky still a non-person?
I must have asked that question at the time, but I don’t remember how I framed it, or how she answered. Now, relevant details are easy to find on the Internet—for instance, on a page at the Rare Historical Photos site, which notes that, after sending Trotsky into exile, Stalin ordered him “eliminated from all photos.” His censors also erased other rivals or potential rivals, as strikingly shown in a spread of four successive copies of the same Stalin photo. The original print, from 1926, has him standing with three contemporaries; in three subsequent versions each of them would be deleted, one at a time.
A different web page on the same topic, posted on the HistoryNet site, carries the apt subheadline: “Was Stalin the forefather of Photoshop?”
Where Will Trump’s Censors Turn Next?
It’s hard not to see a straight line between Stalin’s version of photoshopping and the purge of the Pentagon archives in 2025, though it’s equally important not to overstate the connection. The United States today in no way resembles the Soviet Union of the 1930s, or China at the time of Mao’s death (or today). The communist regimes had no safeguards against official abuses of power; America’s political and legal systems have many. The rule of law, a functioning structure of government by elected representatives, and independent news media constitutionally protected from official repression, all continue to defend the basic rights of citizens and other residents, and still attempt to defend truth in the face of official distortions. It’s clearly far too soon to suggest that Americans are headed for an era of repression comparable in any way to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union or post-Mao China. It’s not too early, however, to be conscious of that possibility, a thought that would never have crossed my mind before witnessing the opening months of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
Writing this essay, I found myself wondering where his photoshoppers might go from here. Months or years from now, whose names and visual images might they seek to erase from the visual and written record of our history? If Trump and Elon Musk don’t resolve their feud, will we see censors combing the White House archives for photos showing them together and reissuing them with Musk’s image airbrushed out? Obviously, that’s not a serious thought at this point. But it is one that would never have occurred to me, had the Pentagon files not recently undergone that photo purge. Am I 100% certain that this will never happen? Or will I (and the rest of us) just have to wait and see?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Reimagining Socialism: An Interview With David Kotz
"The biggest problem with regulated capitalism is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run," said the economist.
Dec 24, 2024
In the 1990s, all the talk was about the end of socialism and the unchallenged military and economic superiority of the United States. Nonetheless, two decades later, socialism was revived as a possible political alternative as the Great Recession of 2008 and the intensification of neoliberalism’s cruelties tore a huge hole in people’s faith in capitalism, especially among young people in the United States whose hearts had been captured by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ fiery calls for universal healthcare, free public college, and economic and climate justice. Socialism remains a political alternative taken seriously by many across the United States although its vision is still far away from becoming a hegemonic political project.
However, there are different kinds of socialism, and some of them, such as social democracy and market socialism, seek reform rather than the actual replacement of capitalism. On the other hand, the Soviet model, which is the only version of socialism that gave birth to an alternative socioeconomic system to that of capitalism, had many undesirable features and proved unsustainable.
So what would be the ideal system of socialism in the 21st century? In the interview that follows, radical economist David Kotz dissects the lessons drawn from the experience of the Soviet model, explains why reforming capitalism does not solve the problems built into the system of capitalism, and makes a case in defense of democratic socialism as the only sustainable alternative to capitalism. David Kotz is the author of The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism and of the soon-to-be-published book Socialism for Today: Escaping the Cruelties of Capitalism. He is professor emeritus of economics and senior research fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2010-19, Kotz also served as distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the department of political economy at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
C.J. Polychroniou: David, in a soon-to-be-published book titled Socialism for Today, you make the case that democratic socialism is the only alternative to the long list of severe problems (massive social inequalities and economic disparities, environmental degradation, racism, poverty, homelessness, and so on) that plague the United States under capitalism. Now, you acknowledge that a shift to a radically different economic system would be a difficult and costly process but also maintain that the problems mentioned above cannot be solved by reforming capitalism. What do you understand by the term “reform of capitalism,” and do you think all struggles to reform capitalism have ultimately failed?
David Kotz: By reform of capitalism, we generally mean the introduction of institutions and policies that modify the way the system works but without replacing its core features—private ownership of the means of production, the wage-labor relation, and the pursuit of profit by the capitalist class as the basic logic of the system. Since the end of World War II, we have seen two types of reform of capitalism. First, the type of reform that emerged in the industrialized countries after the Second World War and came to be called regulated capitalism or social democratic capitalism and, second, the unrestrained version of capitalism that emerged in the 1980s and has been nothing short of a disaster.
Social democratic capitalism included a more active role for government in the economy, a major role for unions in the capital-labor relation, and changes in the way corporations conduct their businesses. Reforming capitalism along a social democratic line was a process that had started before World War II, thanks to the rise of working-class politics and the fact that socialist parties, in some cases, rose to power. But big business and its political representatives also went along out of fear that capitalism might not survive the political pressures from below without reforms. Sweden led the way to social democratic capitalism in the 1930s, but reform capitalism also spread to other parts of Western Europe after the end of the Second World War. In the United States, reform capitalism took place with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies on account of the Great Depression and had many common features with European social democracy.
"Full equality is antithetical to the logic and functioning of capitalism. A capitalist economy cannot work without exploiting workers."
Regulated capitalism in the United States produced many benefits for working people. Starting in the early 1950s, labor productivity went up, wages increased, and income inequality remained relatively stable. By the late 1960s, regulated capitalism also led to major improvements in air and water quality and in occupational safety and health. Those regulations were passed under pressure from a broad coalition of environmental activists, consumer product safety activists, and labor unions. People of color also advanced in economic opportunities. Nonetheless, while regulated capitalism created favorable conditions for making progress toward social, economic, and racial equality, full equality remained a chimera. The empirical evidence suggests that racial/ethnic equality and gender equality can be reduced through political and economic struggle but cannot be eliminated. Full equality is antithetical to the logic and functioning of capitalism. A capitalist economy cannot work without exploiting workers. The improvements made by regulated capitalism were indeed limited and did not resolve all the problems generated by capitalism. Unions had to make major concessions to secure agreements for the reforms from the powerful business interests. The official poverty rate declined over the period of the duration of regulated capitalism, but deep pockets of poverty remained in many parts of the country. The imperialist drive of capitalism also was not tamed in postwar regulated capitalism, and capitalist democracies remained only partially democratic as wealthy individuals and large corporations remained politically powerful.
The biggest problem with regulated capitalism is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run. Why? Because it generates a powerful drive on the part of capitalists to resist restriction in the pursuit of the maximization of profit, which is what capitalism is all about. Capitalism has always faced periodic economic crises. When such crises occur, capitalists will grab the opportunity to overthrow regulated capitalism. This is what happened in the 1970s, and regulated capitalism gave way to a decade of accelerating inflation and a severe business cycle. The neoliberal reforms of capitalism in the early 1980s were born out of the inability of regulated capitalism to persist and bring long-term stability.
C.J. Polychroniou: OK, but since the aim seems to be full equality and the absence of exploitation from human affairs, the argument can also be rather easily made that 20th-century efforts to build a full-fledged socialist alternative to capitalism also failed. Isn’t that so?
David Kotz: There were two types of post-capitalist systems that emerged from efforts to move beyond capitalism. One was the Soviet model that emerged after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The second was market socialism that surfaced following the collapse of the Soviet model. Neither type succeeded in building a sustainable alternative system. But let me focus on the first type since it did abolish capitalism and build an alternative system. The Soviet model, which spread to many other countries around the world, though with some variations, relied initially on an institution called “soviets,” elected by workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors. It was supposed to be the supreme authority in the new social and political order. But soon after the revolution, the Bolshevik party established a repressive regime that did not tolerate dissent. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin became the top leader of the Soviet Union. He established a brutal dictatorship that went on to eliminate much of the leadership that had made the revolution.
Under the Soviet model, all enterprises were owned by the state and allocation decisions were made by a highly centralized and hierarchical form of economic planning. Five-year and one-year plans were formulated for the entire country. Enterprises were given target outputs and provided with the inputs and labor time needed to produce them. Enterprise decision-makers did not aim for maximum profit. There were markets in the Soviet model in the sense that people bought consumer goods in stores and workers decided on jobs in the labor market. However, buying and selling in the Soviet economy did not generate “market forces.” Market forces refers to a system in which relative profitability determines which products will get additional inputs and which will be cut back. Thus, market exchange took place, but the system was not guided by market forces.
Centralized economic planning transformed the Soviet economy from a backward agricultural economy to an industrialized economy in record time. In just a couple of decades, an industrial base was built that allowed the Soviet Union to produce military hardware that was key to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Between the 1950-70s, the Soviet economy was growing so fast that Western analysts were afraid that it would soon surpass the leading capitalist economies. The Soviet model transformed the lives of the Soviet people for the better in many measurable ways. Between 1950 and 1975, consumption per person in the Soviet Union grew faster than in the U.S. By the 1980s, Soviet production surpassed that of the U.S. in steel, cement, metal-cutting and metal-forming machines, wheat, milk, and cotton. It had more doctors and hospital beds per capita than the United States. There was continuous full employment, stable prices, and no ups and downs of the business cycle, while income was relatively equally distributed.
However, the system had serious economic problems. Many sectors of the economy were inefficient, many consumer goods were of low quality, and many consumer services were simply unavailable. Households often faced shortages of consumer goods.
C.J. Polychroniou: In thinking then about a sustainable alternative system to capitalism, what do we keep from the experience of the Soviet model?
David Kotz: As I sought to indicate earlier, the Soviet model brought significant economic and social progress for some 60 years. In my view, the problems of the Soviet model stemmed from its authoritarian and repressive political institutions and the highly centralized form of economic planning that was adopted. But while the Soviet model lacked popular democracy, it did include the key institutions that socialists have long supported: production for use rather than profit, public ownership of enterprises, and a planned economy. The entire experience of the Soviet model holds useful and important lessons for a future socialism.
C.J. Polychroniou: What about market socialism? What lessons should we draw from that experience?
David Kotz: The idea of combining market allocation with socialist planning has a long history. New models of market socialism were proposed following the collapse of the Soviet model in 1991. The hope was that markets would guarantee economic efficiency while a socialist state assured economic justice and material security. Market socialism did not emerge in Russia after the collapse of state socialism, but it did emerge in China after 1978 under the post-Mao leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In China, market forces were introduced gradually and with a high degree of state oversight to avoid economic chaos. The record shows that market socialism not only reproduced many of the problems of capitalism but has a tendency to promote a return to capitalism. That’s because market forces can do their job of allocating resources only by activating the profit motive as the primary force of productive activity.
C.J. Polychroniou: In your book, you argue that economic planning is the institution that can achieve the aim of creating just and sustainable societies—not market forces. But you also argue that an “effective and sustainable socialism” requires direct participatory planning and new forms of public ownership of the means of production. Can you briefly lay out the basic features of democratic socialism?
David Kotz: Here I can respond only briefly to this question, which I consider in detail in my forthcoming book. My view follows closely the model of socialism in Pat Devine’s book Democracy and Economic Planning. The following are some of the key features of a future democratic socialism in my view:
- Economic allocation decisions are made by all parties affected by the decision. That includes workers, consumers, and the local community.
- Differences are settled whenever possible by negotiation and compromise among the relevant parties. If necessary, majority voting can be used.
- The mass media are free to criticize the state and its officials.
- Individuals are free to criticize the state and its officials.
Democratic socialism will inevitably face a contradiction between wide participation in decision-making and the need to make allocation decisions in a timely manner, allocation decisions that are inter-dependent in an actual economy. It will not be perfect, but it promises the best possible future for the human species.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Great October Revolution: A Nightmare Dressed Like a Daydream?
The legacy of the Russian Revolution obliges, 107 years later, neither celebration nor mourning. Dreams are surely renewable, and a new world is still waiting to be born.
Oct 25, 2024
This year marks the 107th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In the evening of October 25, 1917, the Winter Palace in Petrograd (today’s St. Petersburg) was stormed. This event marked the beginning of the Great October Revolution, one of the most significant political events of the twentieth century that shaped the course of history for decades ahead.
Leading up to the events of October 25 was another revolution in late February 1917, which brought to power a group of leaders from bourgeois political parties that formed a provisional government headed initially by Georgy Lvov, a liberal reformer, and then by Aleksander Kerensky, a social democrat who as Prime Minister from July to October 1917 continued Russia's involvement in World War I despite that being very unpopular among the soldiers and with the masses in general. In early March of that year Tsar Nicholas II, who had ruled imperial Russia since 1894 but had managed to make autocracy the most unpopular it had ever been, abdicated. Five months later, Russia was pronounced a republic.
Although the provisional government did introduce some reforms on the political front, prompting even Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin to declare Russia in April 1917 “the freest country in the world”, it was the Red October Revolution that turned the old order completely upside down by inaugurating a socialist regime and making Soviet-style communism a global ideological and political force that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.
Still, more than one hundred years later, the rise of the Bolsheviks to power continues to divide scholars, the chattering classes and even the educated public. There are several issues that are particularly divisive, such as whether the October Revolution was a popular insurgency or essentially a coup, and whether Stalinism evolved naturally from the basic principles and political strategies of Lenin or was an unexpected development.
Likewise, there is still a great deal of ambiguity, disagreement and confusion over the nature of the regime that flourished in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924. For example, did the Soviet Union represent an “actual socialist society”, a “degenerated workers’ state”, or simply a “totalitarian state economy” in which the communist ideology functioned as a mere instrument of political legitimization and imperial rule?
When it happened, the Great October Revolution produced global hysteria, untamed enthusiasm and hope about the possibility of the creation of heaven on earth (a new utopia) in equal measures. For the bourgeois classes everywhere, the inauguration of the Soviet regime was anathema to core values of the “western civilization”, while for radicals and communists it signified a natural culmination of the inevitable march of history towards human freedom and a social order devoid of exploitation.
However, an objective evaluation on socialism and the legacy of Soviet communism gives no room for mourning or celebration. It was essentially the epic story of an impossible dream that turned in due time into a political and historical nightmare because of the interplay of a vast array of factors that included “backward” socioeconomic conditions, outside intervention, an absence of democratic traditions, and misconceived notions about socialism and democracy. Hence, while one can easily romanticize about the October Revolution, the cold reality of history smacks you in the face.
For starters, the Great October Revolution was unlike the February Revolution which erupted as a result of spontaneous action by hundreds of thousands of hungry and angry men and women workers and militant troops. What happened in October 1917 was the outcome of a well-designed strategy on the part of the leader (Lenin) of a minority party (the Bolsheviks) to wrest control from the provisional government because of a strong ideological aversion to “bourgeois democracy” and desire for power. Unsurprisingly Lenin’s call for “all power to the Soviets” ended up being something entirely different: all power went to the party and its politburo.
The October Revolution was not a coup in itself, but neither was it a popular uprising that enjoyed the kind of mass support that the February Revolution had. In fact, it was not until the autumn of 1917 that Lenin’s “land, peace, bread” slogan had been embraced by some workers in St Petersburg and Moscow.
Yet, even this does not mean that the Bolshevik program and Lenin’s ideas of rule were accepted by the majority of the Russian people: In the November 1917 elections, the first truly free election in Russian history, Lenin’s party received only one quarter of the vote, while the Social Revolutionaries managed to receive over 60 percent.
Lenin had stomach neither for parliamentary democracy nor for sharing power with any other political organization. His unwavering intent to establish socialism in Russia, regardless of the ripeness of the social and economic conditions, and his firm conviction that only the Bolsheviks represented the true interests of the workers, would compel him to adopt strategies and policies that would soon deprive the Revolution of whatever potential it had originally had for the establishment of a new social order based on workers’ control of the means of production and democracy (which Lenin, sadly enough, associated with the “dictatorship of the proletariat”).
Indeed, not long after the November elections, Lenin would ban several opposition newspapers and unleash a campaign of “Red Terror” against all class enemies (with the Social Revolutionaries being the first victims following their uprising in Moscow in early July 1918). The orchestration of the “Red Terror,” which lasted until the end of the Russian civil war, was assigned to Cheka (a Bolshevik police organization that reported to Lenin himself on all anti-communist activities), thereby laying the foundations for the emergence of a full-fledged police state under Stalinism.
The clearest illustration of how far to the “right” the Bolsheviks had moved following the outbreak of the October Revolution is the brutal repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 by Red Army troops. Disheartened by the Bolsheviks’ dictatorial tendencies, a garrison of the key fortress of Kronstadt revolted in March 1921 against the communist government and the ideas of “war communism” – even though the Kronstadt sailors had been, back in 1917, among the strongest supporters of the October Revolution and the idea of “Soviet power”. To be sure, they were, until then, in Lev Trotsky’s own words, “the pride and joy of the revolution”.
With the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, it became clear that Lenin’s concept of the “vanguard party” and his understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” did not permit dissent of any kind and that a socialist political order was to be based on one-party rule.
As for the policy of “war communism”, it ended a complete disaster. Lenin himself admitted as much in a speech on October 17, 1921, when he said, “we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution”.
But this did not mean that all Bolsheviks shared Lenin’s views on “war communism” or that they embraced the policy that was followed in the 1920s by a partial return to the market system of production and distribution. The soon-to-be “new Tzar” Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, regarded the New Economic Policy as the betrayal of the October Revolution. His “revolution from above”, launched in 1928 with the policy of collectivization and dekulakization (a campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the more “well-to-do” peasants) reopened the gates of hell and converted Soviet socialism once and for all into a barbarous and murderous regime.
Stalinism did not merely formalize the worst aspects of Leninism but became, in reality, an actual stumbling block for the transition into socialism both inside the Soviet Union and throughout the rest of the world where the ideas of social justice and equality continued to move the minds and hearts of millions of decent people.
Hence, the end of Stalinism and the collapse of Soviet communism (which in the course of its 74 years did manage to turn a “backward” country into an industrialized nation that was able to defeat Nazism and make undeniable advances on several economic, cultural, and social fronts) mark simply the end of a dream turned into a nightmare.
In this context, the legacy of the Russian Revolution obliges, 107 years later, neither celebration nor mourning. Dreams are surely renewable, and a new world is waiting to be born as neoliberalism, militarism, and the climate crisis are wreaking havoc on the planet, but the possibilities available to create an egalitarian, socially just, ecologically friendly, and decent society lie today outside the ideas, practices and policies of the October Revolution.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Armageddon Agenda:Harris, Trump, and the Race to Oblivion
After nearly 80 years we face the very real danger that, for the first time since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, nuclear weapons will again be detonated on this planet.
Sep 13, 2024
The next president of the United States, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial discord, and economic inequality. In the foreign policy realm, she or he will face vexing decisions over Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China/Taiwan. But one issue that few of us are even thinking about could pose a far greater quandary for the next president and even deeper peril for the rest of us: nuclear weapons policy.
Consider this: For the past three decades, we’ve been living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower than at any time since the Nuclear Age began — so low, in fact, that the danger of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). But those quiescent days should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers have deteriorated in recent years and progress on disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact, upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while China — previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation — has begun a major expansion of its own arsenal.
The altered nuclear equation is also evident in the renewed talk of possible nuclear weapons use by leaders of the major nuclear-armed powers. Such public discussion largely ceased after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when it became evident that any thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would result in their mutual annihilation. However, that fear has diminished in recent years and we’re again hearing talk of nuclear weapons use. Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to employ nuclear munitions in response to unspecified future actions of the U.S. and NATO in support of Ukrainian forces. Citing those very threats, along with China’s growing military might, Congress has authorized a program to develop more “lower-yield” nuclear munitions supposedly meant (however madly) to provide a president with further “options” in the event of a future regional conflict with Russia or China.
Thanks to those and related developments, the world is now closer to an actual nuclear conflagration than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And while popular anxiety about a nuclear exchange may have diminished, keep in mind that the explosive power of existing arsenals has not. Imagine this, for instance: even a “limited” nuclear war — involving the use of just a dozen or so of the hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) possessed by China, Russia, and the United States — would cause enough planetary destruction to ensure civilization’s collapse and the death of billions of people.
And consider all of that as just the backdrop against which the next president will undoubtedly face fateful decisions regarding the production and possible use of such weaponry, whether in the bilateral nuclear relationship between the U.S. and Russia or the trilateral one that incorporates China.
The U.S.-Russia Nuclear Equation
The first nuclear quandary facing the next president has an actual timeline. In approximately 500 days, on February 5, 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear accord between the U.S. and Russia limiting the size of their arsenals, will expire. That treaty, signed in 2010, limits each side to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads along with 700 delivery systems, whether ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), or nuclear-capable heavy bombers. (That treaty only covers strategic warheads, or those intended for attacks on each other’s homeland; it does not include the potentially devastating stockpiles of “tactical” nuclear munitions possessed by the two countries that are intended for use in regional conflicts.)
At present, the treaty is on life support. On February 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin ominously announced that Russia had “suspended” its formal participation in New START, although claiming it would continue to abide by its warhead and delivery limits as long as the U.S. did so. The Biden administration then agreed that it, too, would continue to abide by the treaty limits. It has also signaled to Moscow that it’s willing to discuss the terms of a replacement treaty for New START when that agreement expires in 2026. The Russians have, however, declined to engage in such conversations as long as the U.S. continues its military support for Ukraine.
Accordingly, among the first major decisions the next president has to make in January 2025 will be what stance to take regarding the future status of New START (or its replacement). With the treaty’s extinction barely more than a year away, little time will remain for careful deliberation as a new administration chooses among several potentially fateful and contentious possibilities.
Its first option, of course, would be to preserve the status quo, agreeing that the U.S. will abide by that treaty’s numerical limits as long as Russia does, even in the absence of a treaty obliging it to do so. Count on one thing, though: such a decision would almost certainly be challenged and tested by nuclear hawks in both Washington and Moscow.
Of course, President Harris or Trump could decide to launch a diplomatic drive to persuade Moscow to agree to a new version of New START, a distinctly demanding undertaking, given the time remaining. Ideally, such an agreement would entail further reductions in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals or at least include caps on the number of tactical weapons on each side. And remember, even if such an agreement were indeed to be reached, it would also require Senate approval and undoubtedly encounter fierce resistance from the hawkish members of that body. Despite such obstacles, this probably represents the best possible outcome imaginable.
The worst — and yet most likely — would be a decision to abandon the New START limits and begin adding yet more weapons to the American nuclear arsenal, reversing a bipartisan arms control policy that goes back to the administration of President Richard Nixon. Sadly, there are too many members of Congress who favor just such a shift and are already proposing measures to initiate it.
In June, for example, in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025, the Senate Armed Services Committee instructed the Department of Defense to begin devising plans for an increase in the number of deployed ICBMs from 400 of the existing Minuteman-IIIs to 450 of its replacement, the future Sentinel ICBM. The House Armed Services Committee version of that measure does not contain that provision but includes separate plans for ICBM force expansion. (The consolidated text of the bill has yet to be finalized.)
Should the U.S. and/or Russia abandon the New START limits and begin adding to its atomic arsenal after February 5, 2026, a new nuclear arms race would almost certainly be ignited, with no foreseeable limits. No matter which side announced such a move first, the other would undoubtedly feel compelled to follow suit and so, for the first time since the Nixon era, both nuclear powers would be expanding rather than reducing their deployed nuclear forces — only increasing, of course, the potential for mutual annihilation. And if Cold War history is any guide, such an arms-building contest would result in increased suspicion and hostility, adding a greater danger of nuclear escalation to any crisis that might arise between them.
The Three-Way Arms Race
Scary as that might prove, a two-way nuclear arms race isn’t the greatest peril we face. After all, should Moscow and Washington prove unable to agree on a successor to New START and begin expanding their arsenals, any trilateral nuclear agreement including China that might slow that country’s present nuclear buildup becomes essentially unimaginable.
Ever since it acquired nuclear weapons in 1964, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a minimalist stance when it came to deploying such weaponry, insisting that it would never initiate a nuclear conflict but would only use nuclear weapons in a second-strike retaliatory fashion following a nuclear attack on the PRC. In accordance with that policy, China long maintained a relatively small arsenal, only 200 or so nuclear warheads and a small fleet of ICBMs and SLBMs. In the past few years, however, China has launched a significant nuclear build-up, adding another 300 warheads and producing more missiles and missile-launching silos — all while insisting its no-first-use policy remains unchanged and that it is only maintaining a retaliatory force to deter potential aggression by other nuclear-armed states.
Some Western analysts believe that Xi Jinping, China’s nationalistic and authoritarian leader, considers a larger arsenal necessary to boost his country’s status in a highly competitive, multipolar world. Others argue that China fears improvements in U.S. defensive capabilities, especially the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems, that could endanger its relatively small retaliatory force and so rob it of a deterrent to any future American first strike.
Given the Chinese construction of several hundred new missile silos, Pentagon analysts contend that the country plans to deploy as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035 — roughly equivalent to deployed Russian and American stockpiles under the New START guidelines. At present, there is no way to confirm such predictions, which are based on extrapolations from the recent growth of the Chinese arsenal from perhaps 200 to 500 warheads. Nonetheless, many Washington officials, especially in the Republican Party, have begun to argue that, given such a buildup, the New START limits must be abandoned in 2026 and yet more weapons added to the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile to counter both Russia and China.
As Franklin Miller of the Washington-based Scowcroft Group and a former director of nuclear targeting in the office of the secretary of defense put it, “Deterring China and Russia simultaneously [requires] an increased level of U.S. strategic warheads.” Miller was one of 12 members of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, a bipartisan group convened in 2022 to reconsider America’s nuclear policies in light of China’s growing arsenal, Putin’s nuclear threats, and other developments. In its final October 2023 report, that commission recommended numerous alterations and additions to the American arsenal, including installing multiple warheads (instead of single ones) on the Sentinel missiles being built to replace the Minuteman ICBM and increasing the number of B-21 nuclear bombers and Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines to be produced under the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion nuclear “modernization” program.
The Biden administration has yet to endorse the recommendations in that report. It has, however, signaled that it’s considering the steps a future administration might take to address an expanded Chinese arsenal. In March, the White House approved a new version of a top-secret document, the Nuclear Employment Guidance, which for the first time reportedly focused as much on countering China as Russia. According to the few public comments made by administration officials about that document, it, too, sets out contingency plans for increasing the number of deployed strategic weapons in the years ahead if Russia breaks out of the current New START limits and no arms restraints have been negotiated with China.
“We have begun exploring options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on the land, sea, and air legs [of the nuclear delivery “triad” of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers] that could offer national leadership increased flexibility, if desired, and executed,” said acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Policy Vipin Narang on August 1st. While none of those options are likely to be implemented in President Biden’s remaining months, the next administration will be confronted with distinctly ominous decisions about the future composition of that already monstrous nuclear arsenal.
Whether it is kept as is or expanded, the one option you won’t hear much about in Washington is finding ways to reduce it. And count on one thing: even a decision simply to preserve the status quo in the context of today’s increasingly antagonistic international environment poses an increased risk of nuclear conflict. Any decision to expand it, along with comparable moves by Russia and China, will undoubtedly create an even greater risk of instability and potentially suicidal nuclear escalation.
The Need for Citizen Advocacy
For all too many of us, nuclear weapons policy seems like a difficult issue that should be left to the experts. This wasn’t always so. During the Cold War years, nuclear war seemed like an ever-present possibility and millions of Americans familiarized themselves with nuclear issues, participating in ban-the-bomb protests or the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. But with the Cold War’s end and a diminished sense of nuclear doom, most of us turned to other issues and concerns. Yet the nuclear danger is growing rapidly and so decisions regarding the U.S. arsenal could have life-or-death repercussions on a global scale.
And one thing should be made clear: adding more weaponry to the U.S. arsenal will not make us one bit safer. Given the invulnerability of this country’s missile-bearing nuclear submarines and the multitude of other weapons in our nuclear arsenal, no foreign leader could conceivably mount a first strike on this country and not expect catastrophic retaliation, which in turn would devastate the planet. Acquiring more nuclear weapons would not alter any of this in the slightest. All it could possibly do is add to international tensions and increase the risk of global annihilation.
As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan research and advocacy outfit, put it recently: “Significant increases in the U.S. deployed nuclear arsenal would undermine mutual and global security by making the existing balance of nuclear terror more unpredictable and would set into motion a counterproductive, costly action-reaction cycle of nuclear competition.”
A decision to pursue such a reckless path could occur just months from now. In early 2025, the next president, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will be making critical decisions regarding the future of the New START Treaty and the composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Given the vital stakes involved, such decisions should not be left to the president and a small coterie of her or his close advisers. Rather, it should be the concern of every citizen, ensuring vigorous debate on alternative options, including steps aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals. Without such public advocacy, we face the very real danger that, for the first time since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nuclear weapons will again be detonated on this planet, with billions of us finding ourselves in almost unimaginable peril.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Finland vs. Stalin and a Possible Endgame for Ukraine
As with Finland in 1939, national unity alongside a clear-eyed view of worst-case scenarios and the limited military options present the best hope for Ukrainian independence.
Dec 24, 2023
As public support for Ukraine has waned over time, and Washington’s policy elites are shifting their focus more toward the conflict in Gaza, an endgame for Ukraine is desperately needed. U.S. and European officials have reportedly broached the issue of possible peace negotiations with their Ukrainian counterparts. This begs the question: What could a peace treaty between Kyiv and Moscow look like? One historical instance stands out among many as a potential model for how the Russo-Ukrainian War could end.
The “Winter War,” or the Soviet-Finnish War that took place from November 1939 to March 1940 (and was renewed by the Finns as allies of Germany between June 1941 and September 1944), has drawn some comparisons with the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia. After Finland rejected an ultimatum to concede a considerable portion of its territory and the Soviet signing of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Joseph Stalin’s Red Army invaded Finland to install a puppet Communist Finnish government and eliminate a potentially hostile presence near the Soviet Union’s second city and only Baltic port of Leningrad.
Similar to the initial phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Soviet officials predicted that Helsinki would fall to Soviet troops in as little as three days. However, despite the Soviets outnumbering the Finns in soldiers by three to one, Helsinki succeeded in holding off the Red Army for more than three months, inflicting extremely heavy casualties on the invading forces.
Though Finland was eventually defeated and forced to concede about 11 percent of its territory, the Finns scored a moral victory. It is widely considered that the grit and courage of Finland’s resistance convinced Stalin that incorporating Finland into the Soviet Union or turning it into a Communist client state like Poland would be more trouble than it was worth. This also contributed to Stalin’s eventual agreement to sign a peace treaty with Finland in 1944 in return for a small amount of additional territory and a commitment on Helsinki’s part to neutrality. Finland thus became the only part of the former Russian Empire that was not reincorporated into the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.
Thereafter, Finland implemented the Paasikivi-Kekkonen doctrine, which aimed to preserve Finland’s survival as an independent country by maintaining a neutral foreign policy stance, while Finnish nationalism became a central ideological and political driving force in Finnish society. The Soviet Union stuck to the terms of the treaty with Finland, and during the Cold War Finland developed as a remarkably prosperous and successful Western democracy. On this basis, after the Cold War ended, Finland was able to join the European Union in 1995 and then NATO in 2023.
While “Finlandization” was considered a pejorative suggestive of accommodation, if not appeasement among Western geopoliticians during the Cold War, it turned out to be a diplomatic triumph. Finland has long had one of the world’s highest per capita GDPs, scores 100% on Freedom House’s Democracy Index (the United States scores 83), and Finns have long ranked as the world’s happiest people. The Austrian State Treaty of 1955, which guaranteed Austrian neutrality, by which Soviet and NATO troops withdrew from the country, also ensured that Austria developed as a successful and prosperous Western democracy.
Kyiv might learn from the Finnish example that surrendering some territory, though deeply painful, is still worth it if the greater part of the country thereby secures its independence and capacity for economic and political development. Hopefully, the strength of Ukrainian nationalism and the tough and united resistance of Ukrainians to Russia’s invasion have also persuaded Putin, as Stalin was persuaded by Finnish resistance, that his goal of turning the whole of Ukraine into a Russian client state is impossible.
This is already a great victory for Ukraine, not just in terms of Russia’s initial goals but the history of the past 300 years during which Russia has dominated Ukraine.
The government of Ukraine currently remains steadfast in its maximalist aims of recovering all of its internationally recognized territory, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. Military reality, however, suggests that this goal is extremely unlikely to be achieved and that an agreement freezing the existing battle lines may well be the best that Kyiv can hope for, at least for the present.
On the other hand, if the war continues, Russia’s massive advantages in manpower, industry, and weapons production could lead to far more significant Ukrainian losses — just as Finland would likely have suffered complete disaster if it had continued to fight after March 1940 or September 1944.
Washington can do its part by not encouraging unrealistic war goals and thereby possibly exposing Ukraine to future disaster.
Ukraine has already won in key respects. Vladimir Putin has no hope of subjugating the whole of Ukraine as a vassal state in the foreseeable future. Kyiv is moving closer to the West and could be integrated into the European Union (EU) in the future. Moreover, Moscow’s actions have actually reinforced Ukrainian nationalism.
As with Finland, this national unity presents the best hope for Ukrainian independence.
Keep ReadingShow Less
On Russia's Endless War—and Ours
Believing peace is possible becomes increasingly hard when your elected leaders and the propaganda all around you seem so committed to conflict and violence.
Nov 02, 2023
Reacting to the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, Americans have been remarkably focused on whether we should support Israel or the residents of Gaza. In either case, we act as if Israel’s only possible decision was whether or not to launch a war against Gaza. In the country that waged a disastrous 20-year “global war on terror” in response to the 9/11 attacks, it seems strange that there’s been so little discussion about what such a decision might mean in the long term. Going to war is just that — one decision among many possibilities, including taking steps to strengthen and democratize the states where such armed militias may otherwise flourish.
As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, it’s become a focus of mine to show just what’s happened to us because our government, more than two decades after the 9/11 attacks, continues to fight a “war on terror” (whatever that may mean) in some 85 countries. Yes, that’s right: 85 countries! We’ve armed foreign militaries, flown our drones in a devastating fashion, run prisons (often in places with far laxer human-rights standards than ours), trained foreign militaries, and sometimes fought directly alongside them.
Over the years, the 2,977 American lives taken by Osama bin Laden and his followers on September 11, 2001, have exploded into nearly one million lives lost globally thanks to our government’s decision to go to war. Framed by the sheer scale of death and destruction wrought by this country’s forever wars, our hasty retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, long seen as a shamefully botched mission unaccomplished, should instead have been viewed as a genuinely courageous act, even if it was just one of dozens of countries where the U.S. hemorrhaged lives and dollars galore.
Imagine the “footprint” our post-9/11 wars created. For one thing, we’ve spent more than $8 trillion dollars (and counting) in that fight, money that could have funded the creation of millions of jobs here at home, provided affordable preschool in all 50 states, and jump-started the transition to clean energy. And now, we’ll probably be sending more than $75 billion in aid, most of it military rather than humanitarian, to Ukraine and Israel in the coming months. Regardless of what you think Israel’s response should be, the fact remains that we could do a lot with that money here at home.
And worse yet, those funds devoted to war were largely wasted. Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, terrorist groups have only proliferated in number and strength globally. A case in point, in fact, was that very Hamas campaign. Remember that Israel always has been a vital U.S. military and intelligence partner and those October 7th surprise attacks represented a staggering intelligence failure of both governments. And mind you, over the years Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made no secret of his opposition to allowing a stronger Palestinian Authority to develop in Gaza.
America’s Terrorism Problem
Meanwhile, our government’s forever wars have helped stoke terror here at home. Republican politicians and conservative journalists have used a combination of angry language and racist rhetoric and policies to ratchet up anxiety about people of color. As America’s forever wars entered their second decade and then their third, the notion of brown and black people as threats to our national identity came to be baked into policies and laws and into the popular imagination.
Forced registration requirements for young Muslim men placed tens of thousands of them on the government’s radar screen, while sting operations were carried out in Muslim-American communities. Meanwhile, several generations of young Americans were sent to fight disastrous counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond, returning to a war-starved healthcare system that couldn’t deal effectively with their multiple traumas. All of that contributed to a beleaguered national culture in which the dangerous Other looked like a young Muslim man, at least to deranged white people, as evidenced by the recent fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy by his 71-year-old landlord.
Through these trends and others, our war-on-terror culture also set in place government infrastructure aimed at the surveillance of our citizenry and expanded our sense of what our government can possibly do to us. That became all too clear when Department of Homeland Security officials began abducting peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020, and Trump administration officials tried to intimidate Black Lives Matter activists. Who knows where the fear institutionalized after the 9/11 attacks may be directed, depending on who becomes our next terrorizer-in-chief?
An Uncomfortable Parallel
Donald Trump has already given us a sense of some of his targets, were he to be re-elected in 2024, most recently in his threats against federal prosecutors and his urge to execute his own former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley. Of course, there was nothing new in that. In 2017, as president, he infamously labeled the news media an “enemy of the people” — a term used by one of the deadliest dictators in modern history, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, to single out millions of citizens for extrajudicial execution based on perceived disloyalty.
And by the way, my mentioning that Russian dictator was anything but unintentional. As someone who has, for more than 20 years, traveled to Russia, studied its history, and worked on human-rights issues there, while watching Russian President Vladimir Putin consolidate power, I have a sense of how historical trauma wrought by terror in your own homeland can impact the way you think, what you’re willing to tolerate, and what you might choose not to see.
During World War II (or to Russians, “The Great Patriotic War”), the collection of nation-states then known as the Soviet Union lost tens of millions of citizens or more than 10% of its population fighting off Adolf Hitler’s invading army. Most of the Russians I’ve gotten to know or interviewed in my years there had at least one parent, grandparent, or sibling whose life was either lost in or forever altered by that war. So I’ve been less than surprised by the way Russian President Vladimir Putin has all too successfully tapped into that shared trauma to reincarnate the figure of Stalin.
More than a decade ago, I first noticed banners featuring his face in the May 9th “Victory Day” celebratory parades in Moscow and St. Petersburg that marked the defeat of the Germans in World War II. Such images were often featured alongside aging war veterans who recounted their memories of ancient battles, as people wept. (Note that veterans of Russia’s more recent counterinsurgency wars in Chechnya, to the south, featured far less prominently, perhaps because the country never did quite “win” that war and still continues to face threats of armed violence there.)
Elevating Stalin has become a vital part of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to justify his unprovoked war on Ukraine. In fact, following his decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin ordered all school textbooks revised to downplay the violence Stalin wrought, while elevating him as a leader who — future shades of Putin and Russia — “clearly defended the Soviet Union’s foreign policy interests.”
In reality, when it came to Ukraine, Stalin’s decision in the 1930s, amid a devastating man-made famine, to collectivize farming and forcibly relocate staggering numbers of Ukrainians resulted in millions starving to death, followed by the devastation of the Nazi invasion. So, consider it an irony indeed that Putin continues to use the term “Nazi” to describe the present Ukrainian government and its forces, even though a Jewish president leads them. In a recent Victory Day speech, he insisted that Russian soldiers in Ukraine are “fighting for the same thing their fathers and grandfathers did.”
Creating Dangers Within
Long before invading Ukraine, Putin and his state-supported media normalized violence against Russians deemed foreign or different — especially those seen as being influenced by the West — to deflect attention from the country’s real problems, including burgeoning inequality and a remarkably low life expectancy. A series of laws targeting “gay propaganda” formalized long-standing homophobia, while imposing hefty sanctions on media outlets, nonprofit agencies, and schools that depicted anything remotely considered gay or transgender in nature.
At the same time, state-sponsored white supremacist groups encouraged hatred towards migrants from majority-Muslim regions of Russia and nearby Central Asian countries. The police increasingly conducted raids on majority-Muslim neighborhoods and mosques in Russian cities and acts of violence against such groups were generally overlooked by the authorities. In addition, they stepped up raids on migrant communities, expressly to forcibly enlist men to fight in Ukraine. At the same time, the Kremlin and its political allies launched assassination campaigns against journalists and activists who sought to document human rights abuses, especially by the country’s military.
With the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s efforts to suppress dissent only intensified. The country’s last independent media outlets were forced to close, due to laws forbidding public dissemination of “deliberate false information” about the country’s armed forces. Antiwar demonstrations and opinion have been similarly suppressed. Recently, the leader of a prominent human rights organization documenting Stalin’s purges and more recent atrocities in Ukraine was detained on charges of supposedly “rehabilitating Naziism,” which could result in up to 15 years’ imprisonment.
Russia as a Warning
Compared to our still reasonably healthy civil society, such actions may appear beyond the pale, but they still strike me as a stark warning about the dangers of, among other things, putting a country’s military on a pedestal in the wake of national trauma. That’s certainly something we in the United States have also tended to do, as ever more issues divide us. Admittedly, most Americans have by now largely forgotten that we are, in some sense, still at war.
That’s obviously harder to do in Russia, though better-off Russians in relatively wealthy cities have similarly been largely shielded from the direct effects of the war in Ukraine that has already taken a staggering human toll, at least tens of thousands of Russian deaths. The reason? Because the bulk of those casualties have been sustained by poor, rural communities. Yet even ordinary citizens are increasingly finding their lives altered by that devastating war and the repressive environment that now surrounds it. I shuddered recently upon learning of a Russian father who was sentenced to prison after his teenage daughter drew a picture in school expressing opposition to the war.
Here in America, I’m ashamed to say that I barely blink anymore when I hear about people facing threats or even actual attacks because of their racial or ethnic identity, or their political views. For me, this started in 2011 when we launched the Costs of War Project and I began to bone up on America’s foreign wars. Images of bloodied Iraqi children being carried away from sites U.S. planes had bombed and of our troops returning from our spreading war zones with dazed looks and missing limbs were just the beginning. My own desensitization continued during the Trump era when police attacks on unarmed Black men like George Floyd became more common, those January 6th rioters erected a noose in front of the capitol intended for Vice President Mike Pence, and I found myself repeatedly answering the incredulous questions of my young children about such incidents and my work.
All too sadly, the transition from a vibrant civil society to some version of authoritarianism tends to be gradual. (Think, for instance, about the possibility of Trump 2025 and how slowly it might creep up on us.)
I remember one weeknight in 2008 sitting at a table in a café in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. I was working on my (sadly all too topical) doctoral dissertation involving Vladimir Putin’s suppression of political activism. All of a sudden, I heard a rumbling sound on the main thoroughfare outside. When I looked out the window, a line of tanks had appeared on the main street. This was no national holiday with a military parade, but the government had evidently decided to run a training exercise through the city to place part of its shiny arsenal on display. Many of those around me didn’t even give the tanks a passing glance, nor admittedly was I that surprised.
Still, that random and ominous display of military might would not have been possible at the start of Putin’s reign. Russian streets were then still a chaotic, colorful mix of market stalls, migrants speaking a cacophony of different languages, and vendors selling newspapers and magazines on almost any topic imaginable. By 2008, however, those streets had been cleared and many vendors were afraid to set up shop lest their activities be deemed offensive.
I told a Russian friend of mine whose academic research focused specifically on casualties within the armed forces during the Chechen wars about those tanks. She had already begun to face harassment and anonymous threats of violence from those who found her work “insulting to the armed forces of Russia.”
“Here in Russia,” she warned me, “we are like slowly boiling frogs.”
Just as “Nazi” has come to represent anything that offends the personal wishes of Russian elites or gets in the way of their political and imperial desires, so has “terrorism” come to stand in for so much here in America. Despite the vast differences between us and our political foe, leaders on both sides focus on funding armed conflicts even as deficits wrought by prolonged war have deprived and angered ordinary citizens.
Russia is a warning of what we might someday face as a nation if we become inured to violence at home and abroad. It’s not just Israel’s response that’s at issue now, though there’s ample evidence to suggest that a brutal counterinsurgency war in Gaza will only weaken an already divided, anti-democratic government. The U.S. decision to continue to fund and fight our war on terror, not to speak of wars and cold wars of various kinds globally, will determine the environment in which we and our children live going forward. All too sadly, war, when we are the ones fighting it, has been largely missing in action in our own media sphere and that, believe me, is anything but healthy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Doomsday Clock
Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and the Prospects for Survival
Jun 13, 2016
In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The Bulletin's statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and "unchecked climate change." The call condemned world leaders, who "have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe," endangering "every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty -- ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization."
Since then, there has been good reason to consider moving the hands even closer to doomsday.
As 2015 ended, world leaders met in Paris to address the severe problem of "unchecked climate change." Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is. To pick almost at random, shortly before the opening of the Paris conference, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab released a study that both surprised and alarmed scientists who have been studying Arctic ice. The study showed that a huge Greenland glacier, Zachariae Isstrom, "broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat," an unexpected and ominous development. The glacier "holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it's on a crash diet, losing 5 billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean."
Yet there was little expectation that world leaders in Paris would "act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe." And even if by some miracle they had, it would have been of limited value, for reasons that should be deeply disturbing.
When the agreement was approved in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted the talks, announced that it is "legally binding." That may be the hope, but there are more than a few obstacles that are worthy of careful attention.
In all of the extensive media coverage of the Paris conference, perhaps the most important sentences were these, buried near the end of a long New York Times analysis: "Traditionally, negotiators have sought to forge a legally binding treaty that needed ratification by the governments of the participating countries to have force. There is no way to get that in this case, because of the United States. A treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. So the voluntary plans are taking the place of mandatory, top-down targets." And voluntary plans are a guarantee of failure.
"Because of the United States." More precisely, because of the Republican Party, which by now is becoming a real danger to decent human survival.
The conclusions are underscored in another Times piece on the Paris agreement. At the end of a long story lauding the achievement, the article notes that the system created at the conference "depends heavily on the views of the future world leaders who will carry out those policies. In the United States, every Republican candidate running for president in 2016 has publicly questioned or denied the science of climate change, and has voiced opposition to Mr. Obama's climate change policies. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, who has led the charge against Mr. Obama's climate change agenda, said, 'Before his international partners pop the champagne, they should remember that this is an unattainable deal based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, and that Congress has already voted to reject.'"
"The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world's population in the past generation."
Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called "moderate Republicans." Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a "radical insurgency" that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With the rightward drift, the Republican Party's dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base, mobilized on other grounds: evangelical Christians who await the Second Coming, nativists who fear that "they" are taking our country away from us, unreconstructed racists, people with real grievances who gravely mistake their causes, and others like them who are easy prey to demagogues and can readily become a radical insurgency.
In recent years, the Republican establishment had managed to suppress the voices of the base that it has mobilized. But no longer. By the end of 2015 the establishment was expressing considerable dismay and desperation over its inability to do so, as the Republican base and its choices fell out of control.
Republican elected officials and contenders for the next presidential election expressed open contempt for the Paris deliberations, refusing to even attend the proceedings. The three candidates who led in the polls at the time -- Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson -- adopted the stand of the largely evangelical base: humans have no impact on global warming, if it is happening at all.
The other candidates reject government action to deal with the matter. Immediately after Obama spoke in Paris, pledging that the United States would be in the vanguard seeking global action, the Republican-dominated Congress voted to scuttle his recent Environmental Protection Agency rules to cut carbon emissions. As the press reported, this was "a provocative message to more than 100 [world] leaders that the American president does not have the full support of his government on climate policy" -- a bit of an understatement. Meanwhile Lamar Smith, Republican head of the House's Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, carried forward his jihad against government scientists who dare to report the facts.
The message is clear. American citizens face an enormous responsibility right at home.
A companion story in the New York Times reports that "two-thirds of Americans support the United States joining a binding international agreement to curb growth of greenhouse gas emissions." And by a five-to-three margin, Americans regard the climate as more important than the economy. But it doesn't matter. Public opinion is dismissed. That fact, once again, sends a strong message to Americans. It is their task to cure the dysfunctional political system, in which popular opinion is a marginal factor. The disparity between public opinion and policy, in this case, has significant implications for the fate of the world.
We should, of course, have no illusions about a past "golden age." Nevertheless, the developments just reviewed constitute significant changes. The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world's population in the past generation. And this is not happening just in the U.S.; in Europe the impact may be even worse.
The Black Swan We Can Never See
Let us turn to the other (and traditional) concern of the atomic scientists who adjust the Doomsday Clock: nuclear weapons. The current threat of nuclear war amply justifies their January 2015 decision to advance the clock two minutes toward midnight. What has happened since reveals the growing threat even more clearly, a matter that elicits insufficient concern, in my opinion.
The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.
We have learned more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. "In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin," Goodman writes, "the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon's risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets."
We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.
Other recently revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair reports that "the closest the U.S. came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the U.S. was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm."
This newly revealed example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.
Blair adds other examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, "a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order." A few years later, in the early 1970s, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha "retransmitted an exercise... launch order as an actual real-world launch order." In both cases code checks had failed; human intervention prevented the launch. "But you get the drift here," Blair adds. "It just wasn't that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur."
Blair made these comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne that has only recently been cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a moment of serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately. At the peak of the crisis, on October 28th, a missile crew received authorization to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.
As Blair observed, such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes with appropriate words: "Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still alive."
These reports, like those in Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems.The Russian ones aredoubtless much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the systems of others, notably Pakistan.
"A War Is No Longer Unthinkable"
Sometimes the threat has not been accident, but adventurism, as in the case of Able Archer. The most extreme case was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the threat of disaster was all too real. The way it was handled is shocking; so is the manner in which it is commonly interpreted.
With this grim record in mind, it is useful to look at strategic debates and planning. One chilling case is the Clinton-era 1995 STRATCOM study "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence." The study calls for retaining the right of first strike, even against nonnuclear states. It explains that nuclear weapons are constantly used, in the sense that they "cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict." It also urges a "national persona" of irrationality and vindictiveness to intimidate the world.
Current doctrine is explored in the lead article in the journal International Security, one of the most authoritative in the domain of strategic doctrine. The authors explain that the United States is committed to "strategic primacy" -- that is, insulation from retaliatory strike. This is the logic behind Obama's "new triad" (strengthening submarine and land-based missiles and the bomber force), along with missile defense to counter a retaliatory strike. The concern raised by the authors is that the U.S. demand for strategic primacy might induce China to react by abandoning its "no first use" policy and by expanding its limited deterrent. The authors think that they will not, but the prospect remains uncertain. Clearly the doctrine enhances the dangers in a tense and conflicted region.
The same is true of NATO expansion to the east in violation of verbal promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev when the USSR was collapsing and he agreed to allow a unified Germany to become part of NATO -- quite a remarkable concession when one thinks about the history of the century. Expansion to East Germany took place at once. In the following years, NATO expanded to Russia's borders; there are now substantial threats even to incorporate Ukraine, in Russia's geostrategic heartland. One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were applying for membership.
Aside from that, Russia understands as well as China (and U.S. strategists, for that matter) that the U.S. missile defense systems near Russia's borders are, in effect, a first-strike weapon, aimed to establish strategic primacy -- immunity from retaliation. Perhaps their mission is utterly unfeasible, as some specialists argue. But the targets can never be confident of that. And Russia's militant reactions are quite naturally interpreted by NATO as a threat to the West.
One prominent British Ukraine scholar poses what he calls a "fateful geographical paradox": that NATO "exists to manage the risks created by its existence."
The threats are very real right now. Fortunately, the shooting down of a Russian plane by a Turkish F-16 in November 2015 did not lead to an international incident, but it might have, particularly given the circumstances. The plane was on a bombing mission in Syria. It passed for a mere 17 seconds through a fringe of Turkish territory that protrudes into Syria, and evidently was heading for Syria, where it crashed. Shooting it down appears to have been a needlessly reckless and provocative act, and an act with consequences.
"It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter."
In reaction, Russia announced that its bombers will henceforth be accompanied by jet fighters and that it is deploying sophisticated anti-aircraft missile systems in Syria. Russia also ordered its missile cruiser Moskva, with its long-range air defense system, to move closer to shore, so that it may be "ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft," Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced. All of this sets the stage for confrontations that could be lethal.
Tensions are also constant at NATO-Russian borders, including military maneuvers on both sides. Shortly after the Doomsday Clock was moved ominously close to midnight, the national press reported that "U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War." Shortly before, a Russian warplane came within seconds of colliding with a Danish civilian airliner. Both sides are practicing rapid mobilization and redeployment of forces to the Russia-NATO border, and "both believe a war is no longer unthinkable."
Prospects for Survival
If that is so, both sides are beyond insanity, since a war might well destroy everything. It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter.
But that is today's world. And not just today's -- that is what we have been living with for 70 years. The reasoning throughout is remarkable. As we have seen, security for the population is typically not a leading concern of policymakers. That has been true from the earliest days of the nuclear age, when in the centers of policy formation there were no efforts -- apparently not even expressed thoughts -- to eliminate the one serious potential threat to the United States, as might have been possible. And so matters continue to the present, in ways just briefly sampled.
"Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course."
That is the world we have been living in, and live in today. Nuclear weapons pose a constant danger of instant destruction, but at least we know in principle how to alleviate the threat, even to eliminate it, an obligation undertaken (and disregarded) by the nuclear powers that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The threat of global warming is not instantaneous, though it is dire in the longer term and might escalate suddenly. That we have the capacity to deal with it is not entirely clear, but there can be no doubt that the longer the delay, the more extreme the calamity.
Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course. A large share of the responsibility is in our hands -- the opportunities as well.
Keep ReadingShow Less
On the A-Bomb's 70th Anniversary, Obama Wants to Spend a Trillion Dollars on New Nuclear Weapons
Aug 08, 2015
News organizations love anniversary stories, and if for some reason you haven't heard, it's the 70th anniversary of when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The first exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, and the second over Nagasaki on August 9.
Not surprisingly, there's been a proliferation of print and broadcast stories on the making of the bomb, the politics of the bomb, the dropping of the bomb, the survivors of the bomb -- you name it. The Washington Post even ran a story about a 390-year-old Japanese white pine now in the U.S. National Arboretum that survived the Hiroshima blast.
Despite all this coverage, however, I didn't notice any stories that bothered to mention that the Obama administration wants the U.S. government to spend as much as $1 trillion over the next three decades on a new generation of nuclear warheads, bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Isn't it time, as nutritionist Susan Powter used to say, to stop the insanity?
U.S. Military Budget Higher than Cold War Average
Having grown up during the Cold War, nuclear bombs are all too familiar. In October 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, my elementary school conducted regular drills, lining up all the boys and girls and leading us single file to the building's basement fallout shelter. In retrospect, it was a moderately better option than cowering under our desks. Years later, in the mid-1980s, I was the editor of Nuclear Times, a bimonthly magazine that covered what turned out to be the end of the Cold War. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev waved the white flag at the United Nations in 1988, there was great excitement about what was then called the "peace dividend." No more Cold War, no more Cold War defense spending. Perhaps the U.S. government could finally use the billions it was lavishing on the military, the nuclear weapons complex, and defense contractors for other, more socially useful, ends.
But the peace dividend never happened. At $610 billion, the annual U.S. military budget today is actually higher than it was on average during the Cold War and is more than the combined military budgets of the next seven countries: China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and our longtime NATO allies France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It eats up more than half of the U.S. annual discretionary budget.
To be sure, thanks to a series of treaties, both the United States and Russia have cut their respective nuclear arsenals considerably since the end of the Cold War. In 1988, the Soviets had 37,000 nuclear weapons and the United States had 23,000. Today, Russia has an estimated stockpile of 4,500 warheads, of which 1,800 strategic warheads are deployed on missiles and at bomber bases. The United States, meanwhile, has an estimated stockpile of 4,800 warheads. Approximately 2,100 of them are deployed on ballistic missiles or at bomber bases. That's a lot less than 30 years ago, but keep in mind that just one of those warheads is five to 40 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, which exploded with a force of 20,000 tons of TNT.
The 3+2 Warhead Plan Doesn't Add Up
In April 2009 -- just a few months after taking office -- President Obama gave a widely acclaimed speech in Prague that focused largely on the threat posed by nuclear weapons. "The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War," he said. "And as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it and start it." He then cited some of the "concrete steps" the United States would take "toward a world without nuclear weapons."
Later that year, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, largely because of that speech. In April 2010, he was back in Prague to follow through with one of his promised concrete steps: signing a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, further reducing both countries' arsenals, and reinstituting a strict verification system that the Bush administration had dropped.
Since then, however, the Obama administration has apparently forgotten that during that Prague speech, Obama called for an "end to Cold War thinking." Remarkably, the administration is proposing that the U.S. government spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to refurbish or replace the current nuclear arsenal.
Approximately $60 billion is slated to replace existing nuclear weapons with a suite of new warheads. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, would handle the task. The NNSA plan specifically calls for building new nuclear material production facilities and consolidating the current stockpile of seven types of warheads into five. The arsenal of tomorrow would consist of three warheads deployed on Air Force and Navy long-range missiles and two types of air-delivered weapons deployed on cruise missiles and bombers.
The so-called "3+2" plan, however, violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Obama administration's pledge not to develop new nuclear weapons. According to a 2013 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report, it is also fiscally irresponsible and technologically problematic.
"The United States needs to extend the life of its nuclear arsenal, but it should refurbish its existing weapons instead of spending tens of billions of dollars to build new ones," said report co-author Lisbeth Gronlund, co-director of UCS's Global Security Program.
The NNSA plan's major technical drawback, she added, is that it could be difficult for the agency to certify that its new warheads are safe, secure, and reliable without nuclear explosive testing. The United States, which conducted its last explosive test in 1992, has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty prohibiting them.
"The NNSA can vouch for the safety and reliability of currently deployed or refurbished warheads," she said, "but the same level of confidence may not be possible if the agency makes substantial modifications."
The Air Force and Navy Want New Toys
While the Energy Department is counting on funding for new warhead designs, the Defense Department is waiting for new nuclear bombers, cruise missiles, and submarines.
The Air Force wants a new stealth plane, dubbed the Long Range Strike Bomber, or B-3 bomber for short, that can reach targets deep inside Russia and China. The Air Force would like 80 to 100 of them at an estimated cost of $550 million each. Loren Thompson, an executive at the defense contractor-funded Lexington Institute, estimates the plane will more likely cost $900 million per plane after factoring in inflation and a $20-billion research and development program to figure out its design. The planes wouldn't be operational until at least 2025.
Northrop Grumman and Boeing, the two main contractors that produced the problem-plagued B-2 stealth bomber, are vying for the contract. You may remember the bat-shaped, black B-2. At $3 billion apiece in today's dollars -- the most expensive plane ever built -- it didn't quite perform as advertised. It turned out the bomber only worked properly in fair weather. Its skin, which gives it its radar-evading "stealth," deteriorated in rain, heat, and humidity. The Air Force originally planned to order 132 B-2s but settled for only 20 after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Even so, do we need a new stealth bomber? The Air Force has been spending billions of dollars to upgrade the three bombers it already has, the Center for Public Integrity reported in a March 2012 expose, and "has acknowledged the B-1 and B-52 will be structurally sound for at least another 29 years -- and the B-2 potentially for another 50 or more."
The Air Force also covets a new nuclear-armed cruise missile to replace its Air-Launched Cruise Missile, due for retirement in 2030. Called the Long-Range Standoff (LRSO) weapon, its proponents bill it as "a hundred times" more capable than its predecessor -- faster, more accurate, stealthy, longer range -- and nuclear-tipped. The estimated LRSO budget is pegged at as much as $32 billion: $20 billion for the missile and $8 billion to $12 billion for the warhead.
Putting aside the cost, the LRSO is both unnecessary and dangerous, according to UCS senior analyst Stephen Young.
"The Air Force is already counting on an updated B61-12 [nuclear] gravity bomb and the Long Range Strike Bomber, the new super-stealthy penetrating bomber," Young pointed out in a blog post earlier this year. "Why exactly do we need both a penetrating bomber with a gravity bomb and a long-range cruise missile that the same bomber would carry?"
More troubling, "nuclear-armed cruise missiles create a real risk of miscalculation and unintended escalation," Young added. It would be impossible for an adversary to know whether the United States had launched a conventional or nuclear cruise missile, which could very well trigger a nuclear war.
Not to be outdone, the Navy wants to replace its Ohio-class subs with a dozen new-generation, nuclear-armed submarines by 2030. It estimates the total cost of the new subs at $79 billion, or on average, $6.6 billion each, while the Congressional Budget Office projects a total cost of $92 billion, or $7.7 billion each.
Critics say the Navy does not need 12 new nuclear submarines. With budget constraints likely to continue, the Pentagon will have to weigh the cost of those submarines against other pressing needs.
Let's Really Put an End to Cold War Thinking
Fortunately, cooler heads in Congress are pushing back on the rush to saddle U.S. taxpayers with a trillion-dollar bill for weapons that can never be used. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey and Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer have reintroduced legislation this session that would cut $100 billion over the next 10 years from U.S. nuclear weapons programs.
The proposed bill, aptly titled the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures (SANE) Act, would pay for only eight new replacement submarines, cut new warhead programs, defer the development of new ICBMs, delay the development of the B-3, and cancel new nuclear weapons-making facilities.
"We cannot afford these weapon systems, and we don't need them," Blumenauer said in a press release he and Markey issued when they originally introduced the bill in February 2014. "They are dangerous and costly to store and maintain. ...We can make the world, and our country, safer by reducing spending on these programs that we haven't used in 69 years and are better suited for the Cold War than the strategic challenges we face today."
The SANE Act doesn't have a ghost of a chance to pass Congress. However, President Obama can do several things on his own- without Congress and without Russia- during the final lap of his last term to make good on the promises he made in Prague six years ago. David Wright, co-director of UCS's Global Security Program, spelled them out in a July blog post:
The president should take U.S. land-based missiles off hair-trigger alert and remove options from U.S. war plants to launch nuclear weapons based on warning of an attack. This option has led to the increased risk of a nuclear launch a disturbing number of times in past decades, and has been called for by high-level military and political officials -- including President Obama.
He should also declare a policy of "sole purpose," that is, make it U.S. policy that the only use for its nuclear weapons is to deter, and if necessary respond to, a nuclear attack. Today, the United States reserves the option to use nuclear weapons first.
[Finally,] he should require that the United States not develop new nuclear weapons, but instead refurbish U.S. warheads as they age to keep the U.S. deterrent credible. Currently the administration is proposing a new, untested warhead design that may lead to pressure on a future administration to restart nuclear testing. A resumption of testing would undermine the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty as well as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Again, President Obama has the authority to take these concrete steps before he leaves office. And what more fitting way to commemorate the atomic bomb's 70th anniversary than by doing just that? Otherwise, perhaps he should give his Nobel Peace Prize back.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Russia vs. China: The Coming of Cold War 2.0
The conflict in Washington over who should lead America’s enemies list
Jun 30, 2015
America's grand strategy, its long-term blueprint for advancing national interests and countering major adversaries, is in total disarray. Top officials lurch from crisis to crisis, improvising strategies as they go, but rarely pursuing a consistent set of policies. Some blame this indecisiveness on a lack of resolve at the White House, but the real reason lies deeper. It lurks in a disagreement among foreign policy elites over whether Russia or China constitutes America's principal great-power adversary.
Knowing one's enemy is usually considered the essence of strategic planning. During the Cold War, enemy number one was, of course, unquestioned: it was the Soviet Union, and everything Washington did was aimed at diminishing Moscow's reach and power. When the USSR imploded and disappeared, all that was left to challenge U.S. dominance were a few "rogue states." In the wake of 9/11, however, President Bush declared a "global war on terror," envisioning a decades-long campaign against Islamic extremists and their allies everywhere on the planet. From then on, with every country said to be either with us or against us, the chaos set in. Invasions, occupations, raids, drone wars ensued -- all of it, in the end, disastrous -- while China used its economic clout to gain new influence abroad and Russia began to menace its neighbors.
Among Obama administration policymakers and their Republican opponents, the disarray in strategic thinking is striking. There is general agreement on the need to crush the Islamic State (ISIS), deny Iran the bomb, and give Israel all the weapons it wants, but not much else. There is certainly no agreement on how to allocate America's strategic resources, including its military ones, even in relation to ISIS and Iran. Most crucially, there is no agreement on the question of whether a resurgent Russia or an ever more self-assured China should head Washington's enemies list. Lacking such a consensus, it has become increasingly difficult to forge long-term strategic plans. And yet, while it is easy to decry the current lack of consensus on this point, there is no reason to assume that the anointment of a common enemy -- a new Soviet Union -- will make this country and the world any safer than it is today.
Choosing the Enemy
For some Washington strategists, including many prominent Republicans, Russia under the helm of Vladimir Putin represents the single most potent threat to America's global interests, and so deserves the focus of U.S. attention. "Who can doubt that Russia will do what it pleases if its aggression goes unanswered?" Jeb Bush asserted on June 9th in Berlin during his first trip abroad as a potential presidential contender. In countering Putin, he noted, "our alliance [NATO], our solidarity, and our actions are essential if we want to preserve the fundamental principles of our international order, an order that free nations have sacrificed so much to build."
For many in the Obama administration, however, it is not Russia but China that poses the greatest threat to American interests. They feel that its containment should take priority over other considerations. If the U.S. fails to enact a new trade pact with its Pacific allies, Obama declared in April, "China, the 800-pound gorilla in Asia, will create its own set of rules," further enriching Chinese companies and reducing U.S. access "in the fastest-growing, most dynamic economic part of the world."
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military strategists of a seemingly all-powerful United States -- the unchallenged "hyperpower" of the immediate post-Cold War era -- imagined the country being capable of fighting full-scale conflicts on two (or even three fronts) at once. The shock of the twenty-first century in Washington has been the discovery that the U.S. is not all-powerful and that it can't successfully take on two major adversaries simultaneously (if it ever could). It can, of course, take relatively modest steps to parry the initiatives of both Moscow and Beijing while also fighting ISIS and other localized threats, as the Obama administration is indeed attempting to do. However, it cannot also pursue a consistent, long-range strategy aimed at neutralizing a major adversary as in the Cold War. Hence a decision to focus on either Russia or China as enemy number one would have significant implications for U.S. policy and the general tenor of world affairs.
Choosing Russia as the primary enemy, for example, would inevitably result in a further buildup of NATO forces in Eastern Europe and the delivery of major weapons systems to Ukraine. The Obama administration has consistently opposed such deliveries, claiming that they would only inflame the ongoing conflict and sabotage peace talks. For those who view Russia as the greatest threat, however, such reluctance only encourages Putin to escalate his Ukrainian intervention and poses a long-term threat to U.S. interests. In light of Putin's ruthlessness, said Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a major advocate of a Russia-centric posture, the president's unwillingness to better arm the Ukrainians "is one of the most shameful and dishonorable acts I have seen in my life."
On the other hand, choosing China as America's principal adversary means a relatively restrained stance on the Ukrainian front coupled with a more vigorous response to Chinese claims and base building in the South China Sea. This was the message delivered to Chinese leaders by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter in late May at U.S. Pacific Command headquarters in Honolulu. Claiming that Chinese efforts to establish bases in the South China Sea were "out of step" with international norms, he warned of military action in response to any Chinese efforts to impede U.S. operations in the region. "There should be... no mistake about this -- the United States will fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows."
If you happen to be a Republican (other than Rand Paul) running for president, it's easy enough to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy, calling for full-throttle campaigns against China, Russia, Iran, Syria, ISIS, and any other adversary that comes to mind. This, however, is rhetoric, not strategy. Eventually, one or another approach is likely to emerge as the winner and the course of history will be set.
The "Pivot" to Asia
The Obama administration's fixation on the "800-pound gorilla" that is China came into focus sometime in 2010-2011. Plans were then being made for what was assumed to be the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and the winding down of the American military presence in Afghanistan. At the time, the administration's top officials conducted a systematic review of America's long-term strategic interests and came to a consensus that could be summed up in three points: Asia and the Pacific Ocean had become the key global theater of international competition; China had taken advantage of a U.S. preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan to bolster its presence there; and to remain the world's number one power, the United States would have to prevent China from gaining more ground.
This posture, spelled out in a series of statements by President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top administration officials, was initially called the "pivot to Asia" and has since been relabeled a "rebalancing" to that region. Laying out the new strategy in 2011, Clinton noted, "The Asia-Pacific has become a key driver of global politics. Stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas... it boasts almost half of the world's population [and] includes many of the key engines of the global economy." As the U.S. withdrew from its wars in the Middle East, "one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region."
This strategy, administration officials claimed then and still insist, was never specifically aimed at containing the rise of China, but that, of course, was a diplomatic fig leaf on what was meant to be a full-scale challenge to a rising power. It was obvious that any strengthened American presence in the Pacific would indeed pose a directchallenge to Beijing's regional aspirations. "My guidance is clear," Obama told the Australian parliament that same November. "As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region. We will preserve our unique ability to project power and deter threats to peace."
Implementation of the pivot, Obama and Clinton explained, would include support for or cooperation with a set of countries that ring China, including increased military aid to Japan and the Philippines, diplomatic outreach to Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and other nations in Beijing's economic orbit, military overtures to India, and the conclusion of a major trade arrangement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that would conveniently include most countriesin the region but exclude China.
Many in Washington have commented on how much more limited the administration's actions in the Pacific have proven to be than the initial publicity suggested. Of course, Washington soon found itself re-embroiled in the Greater Middle East and shuttling many of its military resources back into that region, leaving less than expected available for a rebalancing to Asia. Still, the White House continues to pursue a strategic blueprint aimed at bolstering America's encirclement of China. "No matter how many hotspots emerge elsewhere, we will continue to deepen our enduring commitment to this critical region," National Security Adviser Susan Rice declared in November 2013.
For Obama and his top officials, despite the challenge of ISIS and of disintegrating states like Yemen and Libya wracked with extremist violence, China remains the sole adversary capable of taking over as the world's top power. (Its economy already officially has.) To them, this translates into a simple message: China must be restrained through all means available. This does not mean, they claim,ignoring Russia and other potential foes. The White House has, for example, signaled that it will begin storing heavy weaponry, including tanks, in Eastern Europe for future use by any U.S. troops rotated into the region to counter Russian pressure against countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. And, of course, the Obama administration is continuing to up the ante against ISIS, most recently dispatching yet more U.S. military advisers to Iraq. They insist, however, that none of these concerns will deflect the administration from the primary task of containing China.
Countering the Resurgent Russian Bear
Not everyone in Washington shares this China-centric outlook. While most policymakers agree that China poses a potential long-term challenge to U.S. interests, an oppositional crew of them sees that threat as neither acute nor immediate. After all, China remains America's second-leading trading partner (after Canada) and its largest supplier of imported goods. Many U.S. companies do extensive business in China, and so favor a cooperative relationship. Though the leadership in Beijing is clearly trying to secure what it sees as its interests in Asian waters, its focus remains primarily economic and its leaders seek to maintain friendly relations with the U.S., while regularly engaging in high-level diplomatic exchanges. Its president, Xi Jinping, is expected to visit Washington in September.
Vladimir Putin's Russia, on the other hand, looks far more threatening to many U.S. strategists. Its annexation of Crimea and its ongoing support for separatist forces in eastern Ukraine are viewed as direct and visceral threats on the Eurasian mainland to what they see as a U.S.-dominated world order. President Putin, moreover, has made no secret of his contempt for the West and his determination to pursue Russian national interests wherever they might lead. For many who remember the Cold War era -- and that includes most senior U.S. policymakers -- this looks a lot like the menacing behavior of the former Soviet Union; for them, Russia appears to be posing an existential threat to the U.S. in a way that China does not.
Among those who are most representative of this dark, eerily familiar, and retrograde outlook is Senator McCain. Recently, offering an overview of the threats facing America and the West, he put Russia at the top of the list:
"In the heart of Europe, we see Russia emboldened by a significant modernization of its military, resurrecting old imperial ambitions, and intent on conquest once again. For the first time in seven decades on this continent, a sovereign nation has been invaded and its territory annexed by force. Worse still, from central Europe to the Caucuses, people sense Russia's shadow looming larger, and in the darkness, liberal values, democratic sovereignty, and open economies are being undermined."
For McCain and others who share his approach, there is no question about how the U.S. should respond: by bolstering NATO, providing major weapons systems to the Ukrainians, and countering Putin in every conceivable venue. In addition, like many Republicans, McCainfavors increased production via hydro-fracking of domestic shale gas for export as liquefied natural gas to reduce the European Union's reliance on Russian gas supplies.
McCain's views are shared by many of the Republican candidates for president. Jeb Bush, for instance, described Putin as "a ruthless pragmatist who will push until someone pushes back." Senator Ted Cruz, when asked on Fox News what he would do to counter Putin, typically replied, "One, we need vigorous sanctions... Two, we should immediately reinstate the antiballistic missile batteries in Eastern Europe that President Obama canceled in 2009 in an effort to appease Russia. And three, we need to open up the export of liquid natural gas, which will help liberate Ukraine and Eastern Europe." Similar comments from other candidates and potential candidates are commonplace.
As the 2016 election season looms, expect the anti-Russian rhetoric to heat up. Many of the Republican candidates are likely to attack Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic candidate, for her role in the Obama administration's 2009 "reset" of ties with Moscow, an attempted warming of relations that is now largely considered a failure. "She's the one that literally brought the reset button to the Kremlin," said former Texas Governor Rick Perry in April.
If any of the Republican candidates other than Paul prevails in 2016, anti-Russianism is likely to become the centerpiece of foreign policy with far-reaching consequences. "No leader abroad draws more Republican criticism than Putin does," a conservative website noted in June. "The candidates' message is clear: If any of them are elected president, U.S. relations with Russia will turn even more negative."
The Long View
Whoever wins in 2016, what Yale historian Paul Kennedy has termed "imperial overstretch" will surely continue to be an overwhelming reality for Washington. Nonetheless, count on a greater focus of attention and resources on one of those two contenders for the top place on Washington's enemies list. A Democratic victory spearheaded by Hillary Clinton is likely to result in a more effectively focused emphasis on China as the country's greatest long-term threat, while a Republican victory would undoubtedly sanctify Russia as enemy number one.
For those of us residing outside Washington, this choice may appear to have few immediate consequences. The defense budget will rise in either case; troops will, as now, be shuttled desperately around the hot spots of the planet, and so on. Over the long run, however, don't think for a second that the choice won't matter.
A stepped-up drive to counter Russia will inevitably produce a grim, unpredictable Cold War-like atmosphere of suspicion, muscle-flexing, and periodic crises. More U.S. troops will be deployed to Europe; American nuclear weapons may return there; and saber rattling, nuclear or otherwise, will increase. (Note that Moscow recently announced a decision to add another 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles to its already impressive nuclear arsenal and recall Senator Cruz's proposal for deploying U.S. anti-missile batteries in Eastern Europe.) For those of us who can remember the actual Cold War, this is hardly an appealing prospect.
A renewed focus on China would undoubtedly prove no less unnerving. It would involve the deployment of additional U.S. naval and air forces to the Pacific and an attendant risk of armed confrontation over China's expanded military presence in the East and South China Seas. Cooperation on trade and the climate would be imperiled, along with the health of theglobal economy, while the flow of ideas and people between East and West would be further constricted. (In a sign of the times, China recently announced new curbs on the operations of foreign nongovernmental organizations.) Although that country possesses far fewer nuclear weapons than Russia, it is modernizing its arsenal and the risk of nuclear confrontation would undoubtedly increase as well.
In short, the options for American global policy, post-2016, might be characterized as either grim and chaotic or even grimmer, if more focused. Most of us will fare equally badly under either of those outcomes, though defense contractors and others in what President Dwight Eisenhower first dubbed the "military-industrial complex" will have a field day. Domestic needs like health, education, infrastructure, and the environment will suffer either way, while prospects for peace and climate stability will recede.
A country without a coherent plan for advancing its national interests is a sorry thing. Worse yet, however, as we may find out in the years to come, would be a country forever on the brink of crisis and conflict with a beleaguered, nuclear-armed rival.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy