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Arms Control: Past Practices Threaten Extended Deterrence Today
Dr. Keith B. Payne
Dr. Keith B. Payne is a co-founder of the National Institute for Public Policy, Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Defense and Strategic Studies, Missouri State University, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and former Senior Advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Introduction
The U.S. alliance system is critical to American security. It is a unique U.S. advantage; neither Russia nor China has anything remotely comparable. Allies provide political, operational and material support for American security goals. This has been true since then Lieutenant Colonel George Washington was a 22-year old soldier in the French and Indian Wars.
While there always is friction with allies, and some “entrapment” risks,[1] allies are a critical element of U.S. power vis-a-vis contemporary foes, including Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Yet, U.S. alliances are under great pressure to adapt to unprecedented structural problems that could otherwise lead to their dissolution. One of these structural problems is the weakening of American military power in the context of hostile Russian and Chinese goals, a growing Sino-Russian entente, and their buildup of conventional and nuclear force capabilities.
One source of this particular structural problem is the U.S. arms control approach and norms. There are few, if any, open discussions of the manifest fact that Washington’s arms control agenda and norms have produced results that have fallen far short of their expressed goals,[2] and that the U.S. practice of arms control to advance that agenda and those norms has contributed to a weakening of American military power that now undermines the U.S. alliance system. This is an unintended consequence of U.S. arms control enthusiasms, but it is no less real. It is unfashionable to discuss this inconvenient truth because many in Washington deem arms control to be a good unto itself.
Nevertheless, Washington should care about this inconvenient truth because U.S. alliances are increasingly unsettled, and one of the sources of this development is the U.S. agenda for, and practice of, arms control. Allied governments often have endorsed U.S. arms control endeavors at the time. That point, however, is irrelevant to this discussion. Regardless of that support, the pernicious consequences of American arms control practice for extended deterrence, assurance, and alliances are increasingly apparent in a dramatically worsening threat context.
This brief essay offers seven main points on this subject.
Seven Main Points
Main Point One: Extended Deterrence, Assurance and Alliance Cohesion
Credible U.S. extended deterrence and the assurance it provides allies are keys to alliance cohesion. Extended deterrence and assurance often are presented as distinct, separate goals. They are not. Credible extended deterrence is the primary means of assurance. Allies have emphasized that coming under the U.S. extended deterrent, including nuclear deterrence, is a main reason for aligning with the United States. Finnish officials have said this most recently.[3]
Allies, including Germany, have also said that a credible U.S. extended nuclear deterrent is the security guarantee that enables them to refrain from seeking their own independent nuclear capabilities and that if U.S. extended deterrence no longer is credible, they will need to pursue alternatives for their security. Most of those alternatives hold potentially severe downsides for alliance cohesion and, by extension, U.S. security.
It is no overstatement to conclude that credible extended deterrence is essential to allied assurance, alliance cohesion, and non-proliferation. If credible extended deterrence crumbles, assurance will crumble, and alliances will crumble—sparking a likely cascade of nuclear proliferation; the relationships are that direct and serious.
Main Point Two: Structural Problems Challenging Alliances
Since the end of the Cold War, interrelated structural problems have arisen that undermine credible extended deterrence, and thus the U.S. system of alliances. Structural problems are political and material realities that cannot be papered over even by robust words out of Washington. Structural problems have no easy fixes.
These structural problems include: 1) an unprecedented threat context in terms of opponents’ military power, revolutionary goals and emerging cooperation/coordination; 2) America’s greatly reduced relative and absolute conventional and nuclear military capabilities since the end of the Cold War;[4] 3) many allies to whom Washington has given “iron clad” security guarantees individually are quite weak militarily relative to the threats they face; and 4) U.S. great power opponents are sovereign unitary actors, while America’s alliances consist of many, diverse, sovereign parties with competing interests and perceptions.
This fourth structural problem is potentially pernicious and warrants a comment. Surveys consistently reveal deep public opposition within many NATO states to enter into war on behalf of an ally. In one poll, only 34 % of Germans, 25 % of Greeks and Italians, 33 % of Hungarians, 32 % of Turks, and 41 % of French agreed that their countries should go to war on behalf of a NATO ally. Only five national publics were above 50 % in this regard.[5] In a recent poll, a majority of the publics in only two out of 10 NATO states surveyed supported deploying their nations’ troops to secure Latvian borders in a Ukraine-type crisis there.[6]
This type of fractured public opinion within NATO states is important because NATO forces ultimately are controlled by their many different capitals, not by the Supreme Allied Commander. Consequently, the power that NATO would or would not bring to a fight, and how long national capitals might take to decide, is open to question. Some allies may join robustly; others may decide to do little. The much-vaunted Article V of the Atlantic Treaty does not specify the required parameters of each state’s obligation.
Ignoring this political reality is evident in misleading comparisons of Russian and NATO conventional forces. NATO’s combined forces often are juxtaposed to Russian forces, with the latter looking modest in comparison.[7] The apparent intended message is that there really is not a serious Russian military threat given NATO’s overwhelming conventional power, and little need for NATO nuclear capabilities for deterrence.[8] That message may be comforting but it wholly ignores the reality of diverse political decision-making centers and its plausible consequences.
This fourth structural problem also helps explain why the NATO Alliance, with a combined GDP 20 times greater than Russia’s, seems unable to end Moscow’s war against Ukraine, an Alliance partner. An Indian observer’s stark commentary is telling: “You [NATO] have hosted conferences supporting Ukraine and then do nothing more. But when it comes to action, Russia 2.0 is grinding forward. It tells countries like us that if something like this were to happen in the Indo-Pacific, you have no chance against China. If you cannot defeat a $2tn [trillion] nation, don’t think you are deterring China. China is taking hope from your abysmal and dismal performance against a much smaller adversary.”[9]
Yet another structural problem is that the center of power for U.S. alliances is in the United States, and typically thousands of miles away from the likely areas of conflict—placing significant burdens on America’s capability to project power to distant locales. The U.S. capacity to marshal and deploy forces to fight multiple, distant, great power conflicts simultaneously has declined greatly since the Cold War and increasingly is vulnerable to enemy fire. In contrast, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran generally border, or are much closer to the U.S. allies that are the targets of their respective expansionist ambitions.
Main Point Three: A Self-Inflicted Structural Problem
Some of these structural problems—such as geographic proximity—are inherent in the nature of U.S. alliances. But several are self-inflicted. For example, a long-standing U.S. arms control agenda has unintentionally degraded extended deterrence and assurance, and thus contributed to the structural problems confronting U.S. alliances. This U.S. arms control agenda that endangers America’s global alliance system reflects Washington’s enduring problematic views of nuclear weapons, opponents and the goals of arms control.
For more than three decades following the Cold War, Washington has acted as if the expected “New World Order” were real and that great power conflict were a thing of the past. In 2012, for example, a “Nuclear Policy Commision,” led by Gen. James Cartright (ret.), former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, recommended that the United States significantly reduce its total inventory of nuclear weapons given the “irrelevance” of nuclear weapons “in dealing with 21st Century threats,” and because “The risk of nuclear confrontation between the United States and either Russia or China belongs to the past, not the future….”[10] Yet, now, roughtly a decade later, the risks of nuclear confrontations with Russia and China (and North Korea) appear to have increased dramatically.
Washington has largely chosen not to face the reality that Russian and Chinese deference to the United States after the Cold War was given grudgingly and only because of dominating U.S. power at the time. They had no other prudent alternatives. Absent that fleeting, overwhelming U.S. power, that cooperation was doomed to end—as it has. Yet, accustomed to the privileges of being a lone superpower, Washington appears reluctant to recognize the depth of Russian and Chinese hostility, and that their deference to the United States ended with a shifting power relationship. Indeed, in Washington, U.S. relations with both continue to be dubbed “strategic competition,” suggesting a gentlemanly level of restraint and adherence to rules that defy reality because the United States is far less capable of enforcing rules—including arms control compliance.
Correspondingly, Washington has proceeded as if its priority goal is to set a wise and virtuous arms control example for opponents eager to follow the U.S. lead: supposedly, if the United States restrains itself, then opponents will show the same benign restraint.[11] If not, then not. This “action-reaction” theory for U.S. self-restraint is alive and well,[12] but is contrary to the abundant evidence that foes do not deem Washington’s restraint to be wise or virtuous, do not emulate it unless compelled to do so,[13] and that Moscow and Beijing see U.S. restraint as coming not from strength, but from weakness, which is provocative.[14] As Russian President Putin has bluntly put the matter: “…we have more such nuclear weapons than NATO countries. They know about it and never stop trying to persuade us to start nuclear reduction talks. Like hell we will, right? A popular phrase. Because, putting it in the dry language of economic essays, it is our competitive advantage.”[15]
Nevertheless, expectations of an action-reaction dynamic are key to the rationale for much of the official and unofficial U.S. arms control agenda, including enduring calls for a nuclear No First Use (NFU) policy, for strict limits on U.S. missile defense, and for Washington’s continuing push to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons “so as to pave the way for arms control and disarmament.”[16] These goals and the rationales behind them reflect the U.S. post-Cold War “holiday” away from serious strategic thought, and now threaten credible extended deterrence and alliance cohesion.
Main Point Four: Internal Contradictions in the U.S. Arms Control Agenda Threaten Extended Deterrence and Alliances
The problem arms control has created for extended deterrence and assurance is that U.S. actions intended to advance Washington’s arms control agenda and norms have contributed to the extended deterrence and assurance gaps that the United States now must fix. Multiple internal contradictions are inherent in this archaic agenda and are near-certain both to deny Washington its arms control goals and to undercut extended deterrence. Five of these are presented below:
First, deep U.S theater nuclear and conventional force reductions following the Cold War were meant to provide a virtuous arms control example for the world and strengthen stability. For example, under the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiative (PNI), the United States eliminated all forward deployed short-range ground-based nuclear systems and ended deployment of tactical nuclear weapons on naval vessels and aircraft.[17] Yet, such moves have led to gaps in U.S. nuclear capabilities that contribute to allied doubts regarding extended deterrence and to an increasing interest among some for independent nuclear capabilities. The most obvious of these “gaps” is the absence of realistic U.S. nonstrategic nuclear options in the Indo-Pacific theater, and the presence of only minimal remaining nonstrategic capabilities in Europe. This places the extended nuclear deterrence burden largely on U.S. strategic nuclear forces—a burden they are ill-suited to carry credibly alone given the particularly severe risks of their employment for the United States. [18]
Second, U.S. nuclear force moderation and reductions following the Cold War were meant to encourage opponents to follow suit, but they have instead led Moscow to disdain America’s pleading for arms control because U.S. forces are increasingly aged while Russia’s are not. Sergei Ivanov, then Russian Deputy Prime Minister, made this point most succinctly: “When I hear our American partners say: ‘let’s reduce something else’, I would like to say to them: ‘excuse me, but what we have is relatively new.’ They [the United States] have not conducted any upgrades for a long time. They still use Trident [submarine-launched ballistic missiles].”[19] Strategic logic validates this disdain: Why should Moscow consider eliminating largely modernized Russian nuclear forces when the United States has so few remaining nonstrategic nuclear weapons with which to bargain and most U.S. strategic nuclear modernization programs will not mature for years while some appear in disarray?
Third, Washington openly based its rationale for nuclear disarmament on America’s fleeting unipolar conventional force superiority, i.e., U.S. conventional capabilities were deemed so superior to the rest of the world’s that Washington could essentially forego nuclear weapons. Yet, of course, this well-advertised U.S. conventional superiority that supposedly made U.S. nuclear disarmament plausible also gave opponents a powerful incentive to retain and improve their nuclear forces. The U.S. rationale for seeking nuclear disarmament was a reason opponents fully rejected the notion.
Fourth, while foes worked diligently to expand both their conventional and nuclear capabilities, Washington willingly abandoned its conventional force dominance, but continued to push reducing the role and number of nuclear weapons—as if the shifting conventional force balance in favor of opponents had somehow become irrelevant. Clinging to the optimistic expectations engendered by the U.S. 1990s position of unparalleled power, Washington continued to reason and behave as if that power position remained long after it had ended.
Fifth, in the past, the United States minimized homeland defense capabilities to promote deterrence stability and arms control. Yet doing so actually facilitated Moscow’s increased investment in, and the expansion of its Strategic Rocket Forces—which led to the destabilizing vulnerability of U.S. strategic nuclear forces in the 1980s. Now, the continuing minimization of U.S. homeland defenses leaves Washington fully vulnerable to Russian and Chinese coercive, limited nuclear threats which, in turn, undercut the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence.
These five basic contradictions in the U.S. arms control agenda and approach have contributed to the structural problem of potentially inadequate U.S. military wherewithal to meet numerous distant “iron clad” extended deterrence commitments concurrently against an increasingly powerful entente of hostile powers.
Main Point Five: Fanning Allied Motivations for Nuclear Proliferation
By undercutting extended deterrence and assurance, the U.S. pursuit of its arms control agenda has actually contributed to allied doubts about extended deterrence credibility and increased incentives for some allies to acquire independent nuclear capabilities—an effect that is wholly contrary to Washington’s arms control agenda. Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary-general recently observed that, “A [European] conversation is opening up because nuclear power has regained a place in Europe’s security that, though perhaps less central than during the Cold War, is more important than what anyone could have imagined in the past 20 years.” [20] And, according to recent surveys, with North Korea spurning all U.S. pleading for it to “denuclearize,” almost 70 percent of South Koreans want Seoul to have independent nuclear capabilities.[21] This is the near inevitable consequence of Washington’s earlier decision to eliminate most of its nonstrategic nuclear weapons in a forlorn bid to reduce the number and salience of nuclear weapons globally. As a result, Washington must now scramble to solve a proliferation problem its arms control agenda has helped to create.
Main Point Six: Case Studies Illustrate the Pernicious Effects of the U.S. Arms Control Agenda and Approach
Multiple separate case studies illustrate how specific U.S. arms control endeavors have led to results that have undercut extended deterrence and assurance. These case studies include:
Each of these case studies is examined separately in an immediately forthcoming, comprehensive study of the subject.[22]
Main Point Seven: Rethinking the Arms Control Agenda and Practice
Finally, as noted earlier, several of the structural problems now confronting the U.S. alliance system are inherent. In contrast, the self-inflicted causes of these problems can, in principle, be rectified by changes in U.S. policies and behavior. The U.S. arms control agenda and approach that have caused contemporary deterrence and assurance problems—and thus endanger alliances—can be corrected with smarter policy guidance, but only if Washington will undertake a realistic, zero-based review of its approach to arms control. Such a review will be opposed strenuously by both individuals and institutions with deeply invested interests in traditional U.S. arms control thinking and norms. But it is necessary.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the U.S. system of global alliances is essential to meeting the unprecedented security challenge of a looming Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian entente. This is an ensemble of powerful foes determined to change the world, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1930s—with a key difference being that this century’s set of foes possesses arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. For three decades leading up to this harsh threat context, much of Washington has been determined to see a cooperative new world order that does not exist and pursue arms control policies as if it does. In this illusory world, self-declared enemies are merely competitors, and righteous U.S. arms control behavior will be reciprocated and lead the way to greater stability, cooperation and amity. In reality, that arms control agenda and approach are based on a pleasing illusion, and have contributed to a structural problem that must be corrected if the United States is to sustain the global alliance system necessary to meet the threat, i.e., correcting the “gaps” in U.S. arms needed to support Washington’s alliance commitments, particularly including extended deterrence.
Washington appears to have repeated the mistakes of its arms control enthusiasms of the early 20th century, as described by the distinguished U.S. diplomat, George Kennan:
The evil of these utopian enthusiasms was not only, or even primarily, the wasted time, the misplaced emphasis, the encouragement of false hopes. The evil lay primarily in the fact that these enthusiasms distracted our gaze from the real things that were happening… The cultivation of these utopian schemes, flattering to our own image of ourselves, took place at the expense of our feeling for reality. And when the rude facts of the power conflict finally did intrude themselves directly upon us, in the form of enemies against whom we were forced to fight in the two World Wars, we found it difficult to perceive the relation between them and the historical logic of our epoch, because we understood the latter so poorly.[23]
An old adage is: “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” The meaning, of course, is that when a condition is intolerable, it is best to stop those actions that, if continued, would only make it worse. In the case of U.S. alliances, one need is to revise, and recover from a U.S. arms control agenda and approach that has contributed to the structural problems that now threaten to undo the decades of American treasure expended to effectively deter enemies and build alliances.
[1] See the discussion in, Glenn H. Snyder, “The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics,” World Politics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (July 1984), pp. 461-495.
[2] See, David Trachtenberg, Michaela Dodge, and Keith Payne, The “Action-Reaction” Arms Race Narrative vs. Historical Realities (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, 2021), passim, available at https://nipp.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Action-Reaction-pub.pdf.
[3] See, Anne Kauranen, “NATO’s nuclear deterrent must be real for Finland, says new president,” Reuters, March 1, 2024, available at https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-inaugurates-alexander-stubb-president-nato-era-2024-03-01/.
[4] See David J. Trachtenberg, The Demise of the “Two-War Strategy” and Its Impact on Extended Deterrence and Assurance, Occasional Paper, National Institute for Public Policy, Vol. 4, No. 6 (June 2024), passim, available at https://nipp.org/papers/the-demise-of-the-two-war-strategy-and-its-impact-on-extended-deterrence-and-assurance-david-j-trachtenberg/.
[5] See, for example, Walter Russell Mead, “Europeans Try to Have it Both Ways,” Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2020, available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/europeans-try-to-have-it-both-ways-11581974424; and John Vandiver, “Poll: Willingness to defend allies from attack low in some NATO states,” Stars and Stripes, June 10, 2015, available at http://www.stripes.com/news/europe/poll-willingness-to-defend-allies-from -attack-low-in-some-NATO-states-1.351606#document/p20/a222531.
[6] Matthias Mahder, “Increased support for collective defence in times of threat: European public opinion before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Policy Studies (Vol. 45, January 2024), p. 8, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377328896_ Increased_support_for_collective_defence_in_times_of_threat_European_public_opinion_ before_and_after_Russia%27s_invasion_of_Ukraine.
[7] Tytti Erästö, “Reducing The Role Of Nuclear Weapons In Military Alliances,” SIPR Insights on Peace and Security, No. 2024/01, (June 2024), p. 20.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Patrick Wintour, “‘We’re in 1938 now’: Putin’s war in Ukraine and lessons from history,” The Guardian, June 8, 2024, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/08/putin-war-ukraine-forgotten-lessons-of-history-europe.
[10] General (ret.) James Cartright, et al., Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission Report, (May 2012), pp. 1, 3, 6, available at https://www.globalzero.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/gz_us_nuclear_policy_commission_report.pdf.
[11] See, Trachtenberg, Dodge, and Payne, The “Action-Reaction” Arms Race Narrative vs. Historical Realities, op. cit., pp. 31-38.
[12] See, for example, Bruce G. Blair, Jessica Sleight and Emma Claire Foley, The End of Nuclear Warfighting: Moving to a Deterrence-Only Posture (Washington, D.C.: September 2018), pp. 9, 33.; and, Michael T. Klare, “Now Is Not the Time to Start an Arms Race,” The Nation, March 31, 2020, available at https://www.thenation.com/article/world/coronavirus-cold-war- race/. More recently, see Erästö, “Reducing The Role Of Nuclear Weapons In Military Alliances,” op. cit., passim; and, Benjamin Giltner, “A Third Continental Missile Interceptor Site?” RealClearDefense.com, July 8, 2024, available at https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/ 2024/07/08/a_third_continental_missile_interceptor_site_1042908.html.
[13] Trachtenberg, Dodge, and Payne, The “Action-Reaction” Arms Race Narrative vs. Historical Realities, op. cit., pp. 4-11, 65-68.
[14] See, Eric Edleman and Frank Miller, “Understanding that Weakness is Provocative is Deterrence 101,” The Dispatch, October 9, 2022, available at https://thedispatch.com/article/understanding-that-weakness-is-provocative/.
[15] Vladimir Putin, “Remarks at the Plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum,” June 16, 2023, available at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71445.
[16] Erästö, “Reducing The Role Of Nuclear Weapons In Military Alliances,” op. cit., p. 2.
[17] See, Department of State, Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments, June 2020, pp. 23-26, available at https://www.state.gov/wp- content/uploads/2020/06/2020-Adherence-to-and-Compliance-with- Arms-Control-Nonproliferation-and-Disarmament-Agreements-and- Commitments-Compliance-Report.pdf.
[18] This point has been emphasized by former U.S. officials and expert commentators in moments of candor. In 1979, for example, Henry Kissinger remarked publicly that, “Our European allies should not keep asking us to multiply strategic assurances that we cannot possibly mean, or if we do mean, we should not want to execute, because if we execute, we risk the destruction of civilization.” See, Henry Kissinger, “The Future of NATO,” in, NATO, The Next Thirty Years, Kenneth Myers, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), p. 8. More recently, see, Michael Hochberg and Leonard Hochberg, “Our Restraint Destroys Your Deterrence,” RealClear Defense, February 10, 2024, available at https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/02/10/our_restraint_destroys_your_deterrence_1010986.html.
[19] Quoted in, Mark B. Schneider, “Russia’s Growing Strategic Nuclear Forces and New START Treaty Compliance,” Information Series, No. 407, National Institute for Public Policy, June 21, 2016, available at https://nipp.org/information_series/schneider-mark-russias-growing-strategic-nuclear-forces-and-new-start-treaty-compliance-information-series-no-407/.
[20] Quoted in, Laura Kayali, Thorsten Jungholt, and Philipp Fritz, “Europe is Quietly Debating a Nuclear Future Without the US,” Politico, July 4, 2024, available at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/04/europe-us-nuclear-weapons-00166070.
[21] “66 pct of South Koreans support developing own nuclear weapons – poll,” Yonhap News Agency (South Korea), June 27, 2024, available at https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/ 2024/06/113_377671.html#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20report%20released,Korean%20regime%20abandons%20its%20nuclear.
[22] See, Extended Deterrence and U.S. Alliances: Arms Control’s Pernicious Effects, Occasional Paper (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, forthcoming 2024).
[23] George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 20-23.
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