By Jordan Shilton, World Socialist Website, 5/12/24

Recent months have witnessed levels of military activity in the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland that are unprecedented since World War II. One major NATO exercise has followed another, with tens of thousands of troops participating, while the US has expanded its bilateral defence agreements with all three countries to create what resembles a massive American staging ground for an invasion of Russia from the north.

During the first two weeks of March, some 20,000 NATO troops from 13 countries participated in Nordic Response 2024. The exercise was the successor to the long-running biennial Norwegian Cold Response manoeuvre, which was expanded to include Sweden and Finland following their accession to the aggressive US-led military alliance. The deployment included large contingents of ground, air, and naval forces in a simulated battle triggered by the invasion of a “fictitious adversary.” The exercise included the first trial of a Joint Nordic Air Operations Command, with the air forces of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden controlled from one base in Bodo, northern Norway.

Nordic Response was part of the larger Steadfast Defender mobilisation, a series of continuous military manoeuvres involving 90,000 NATO personnel that began in January and extends into June. The area of operations stretches from the Arctic through the Nordic and Baltic regions to Central Europe. In its first stage, the exercise involved the transportation of US military personnel across the Atlantic to support European NATO members in a war scenario. The next stage, which is now well advanced, involves the transit of American personnel from their landing sites along the Nordic coast eastwards towards the Russian border.

Operation Immediate Response started in late April, when a cargo ship carrying large quantities of US military supplies docked at the northern Norwegian port of Narvik. The exercise involved transporting the equipment, which belongs to the 10th Mountain Division of the US Army, by rail and road through Sweden to Finland, where it will be used in the Northern Forest manoeuvre. Around 1,600 US soldiers and 200 military vehicles arrived in Finland this past week after completing the 550-kilometre journey. Another location for the exercise further south was Kalundborg in Denmark, where military equipment was also brought ashore. “This operation is important within the NATO framework. It shows the Americans’ ability and will to deploy rapidly and our ability to receive and be a transit country,” commented Colonel May Brith Valen-Odlo from the Norwegian armed forces. “In line with NATO’s new plans, we could quickly become a transit country to receive forces, prepare them, and send them through Sweden and Finland.”

The last time Norway and Sweden served as “transit countries” was for Nazi Germany during World War II. After the Nazis invaded the country and set up a puppet regime under Vidkun Quisling in April 1940, the Wehrmacht’s Armee Norwegen (Army Norway) was established. As part of the subsequent launching of the war of extermination against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the 163rd Infantry Division was transferred from Norway via neutral Sweden to serve alongside the Finnish army as it invaded the Soviet Union. The Nazi advance along this front took troops within 30 kilometres of Leningrad, which Finnish soldiers helped blockade with their Nazi allies. Armee Norwegen commanders led operations against Soviet troops in Lapland.

In the months leading up to the latest major NATO manoeuvres, the US concluded a series of bilateral agreements with the Nordic countries to secure unrestricted access to dozens of military facilities within striking distance of the Russian border. Three defence cooperation agreements (DCA) concluded with Finland, Sweden, and Denmark in December 2023, and an updated DCA finalised with Norway in February 2024, cover a total of 47 “Agreed areas” of operation across the four countries. In an “agreed area,” which is usually associated with a military base or training ground, US soldiers can operate freely and store materiel to be used in future deployments. A total of 15 of these “agreed areas” are in the Arctic regions of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, close to the Russian border with Norway and Finland. American military personnel also have the power to exercise authority over civilians within or in the “immediate vicinity” of the “agreed areas.” In “extreme cases,” this power can be extended beyond the “immediate vicinity” of an “agreed area.” The agreements make clear that the US has the first right to prosecute its soldiers under American laws for any crimes committed while on- or off-duty.

The initiative for these agreements, which recall the dictates of a neocolonial power over its occupied territories, was taken by the United States. The US government insisted that the first DCA agreed with Norway in 2021 was an “indispensable precondition” for further US investments in military infrastructure in the country. American imperialism views access to the Arctic as essential under conditions in which climate change is opening up the region to resource exploitation and intercontinental trade. Washington is determined to ensure its dominant position in the high north at the expense of Russia, China, and other potential rivals. This includes its erstwhile European allies, who, led by German imperialism, are making their own moves to boost their presence in the region.

Military cooperation is also being expanded dramatically between the Nordic nations themselves. The Nordic Defence Command (NORDEFCO) was established in 2009 by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The collaboration initially served principally as a mechanism to enable Finnish and Swedish forces to participate in NATO exercises, and gain experience in training and using NATO equipment to the alliance’s standards. Now, however, with all the nations in NATO, the command structure is being consolidated to integrate Nordic operational capabilities.

A new Vision 2030 strategy was recently unveiled by NORDEFCO that includes “vigorous joint action” in eight defence and security areas. Writing in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, the defence ministers from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and Iceland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, stated, “Altogether, we have unique knowledge of the North Atlantic, the Arctic and the Baltic Sea, and an almost 1,500 kilometers long land border with Russia. In total, we have over 250 fighter planes and 350,000 soldiers. Together, we will be able to provide the conditions required for the reception, deployment, and further movement of allied troops to and through our countries.”

One main area of focus is strengthening the “deterrence and defence” of the Nordic and Euro-Atlantic regions by improving operational cooperation. A recent NORDEFCO meeting was held in the Faroe Islands to discuss NATO military options stretching from Greenland in the west, where the US has maintained a military presence since World War II, through Iceland, which relies on its NATO allies for air protection as it has no armed forces of its own, to the Nordic countries in the Arctic and Baltic regions. The alliance also aims to strengthen “host nation support and logistical support” for troops from other NATO allies operating in the region, cooperation in the purchasing of defence materiel, and the “Nordic defence industrial base” to improve the reliability of supply lines.

The strategy document underscores that the ambition is to subordinate all areas of society to the goal of waging war. NORDEFCO will strive for “Total defence to secure adequate support from all sectors of society to the defense sector in all threat scenarios and situations,” the document noted.

Of all the Nordic countries, Finland has gone farthest in implementing a “total defence” strategy. With a population of just under 5.5 million, it can mobilise over a quarter of a million soldiers rapidly and has some 900,000 members in the military reserve. Finland recently spent close to $10 billion to purchase 64 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, the equivalent of a country the size of Germany purchasing around 1,000 of these aircraft.

During a visit to Berlin last week, Finnish President Alexander Stubb received a warm response to his appeal for other countries to “be like Finland.” According to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose government has massively increased military spending and revived Germany’s global imperialist ambitions, Germany can learn a lot from the Finnish approach. “We would like to learn from the Finnish experiences with Russia as a neighbour,” Scholz said in connection with Stubb’s visit. “We are also interested in the Finnish approach to civil defence.”

By Nicolai Petro & Arta Moeini, The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, 5/9/24

The 2020s have seen the return and new appeal of “containment” thinking in U.S. grand strategy. Facing the erosion of unipolarity, the rise of China as a global power, and the newfound assertiveness of other regional and major powers such as Russia and Iran, some American strategists have resurrected and retooled this familiar Cold War concept. For instance, a recent Foreign Affairs article, “To Prevail, Washington Must Revive Containment”, proposes that America deal with its adversaries, especially Russia, through a “new containment”.

By advancing a particular reading of the original containment doctrine, the authors suggest a long-term U.S. strategy that will (1) create a cordon sanitaire around Russia globally while avoiding direct conflict, (2) contest Russian influence in the Global South through development assistance, trade, and investment, and (3) simultaneously contain China as well as Russia. According to the authors, all these objectives could be accomplished by demanding that more of Europe’s military expenditures be marshaled against Russia so that America’s resources can subsequently be shifted to the Indo-Pacific region to counter China.

Such an approach would also pave the way for Ukrainian “victory”, the authors claim, if not through the recapture of lost territory, then through Ukraine’s military and political integration with the West. This would leave Russia dealing with the long-term consequences of a failed invasion, which might just lead to the type of problems that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union after Afghanistan (one can only imagine how thrilled the Ukrainians will be with this comparison). Furthermore, the authors hope that persistent sanctions on Russia will eventually create an economic crisis of the kind “the Soviet Union experienced in the 1980s,” weakening the country’s resolve. Despite favoring containment, however, the authors suggest that the U.S. and Russia should still find a way to have meaningful dialogues on arms control, cyber-warfare, and regional conflicts, and even cooperate on issues such as climate change.

Such talk of New Containment seems like a wasteful exercise of pouring new wine into old wineskins and is increasingly fanciful given the current trajectory of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Fully assessing the problems of New Containment, however, requires a firm grasp of the older, Cold War containment model and the different types of containment strategies one could adopt.

Containments Old and New

Firstly, the Old Containment made strategic sense for the West because the alliance faced a military rival that was highly selective about where it actually intervened, not to mention one that did not threaten our core interests. Since both sides were equally concerned about avoiding threats to the core interests of the other side, our counter-measures to Soviet expansionism could be varied. Initially, Washington focused its resources on promoting economic development and strengthening the political stability of its important allies in key regions. As they grew more confident, American policymakers also adopted an indirect military approach that deliberately avoided or minimized the risk of direct superpower confrontation—orchestrating proxy wars in specific geopolitical chokepoints where (with few major exceptions such as Vietnam) our power projection capabilities were generally superior to those of the USSR.

Today, however, NATO is attempting to project power into areas where Russian power projection capacity is practically unlimited, and which Russia has repeatedly declared to be of vital interest to its national security. It has also demonstrated in Ukraine that it is willing to defend these interests at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives, and even near-total isolation from the West. The risks associated with countering Russia’s “escalation dominance”—the notion that, in regions adjacent to it, Russia has an insurmountable military and logistical advantage over its rivals—wisely deterred the Obama administration from direct and overt intervention in Ukraine in 2014. Such careful and sensible risk management appears to be wholly missing from the outlook of “new containment” proponents.

Secondly, various countries agreed with Washington’s Old Containment policy, because they regarded the West as offering a superior socio-economic model and the potential for economic prosperity, particularly by the 1980s. Most importantly, America and its allies enjoyed a monopoly over access to cutting-edge technologies, which developing countries desperately needed. Today, that is no longer the case. A growing number of countries are willing and eager to invest in alternative political and economic models, such as the BRICS+, that they believe better serve their interests.

Thirdly, the Old Containment’s solution to what George Kennan deemed the USSR’s “implacable” ideological challenge offered hope to the Russians themselves, rather than demonizing them. Containment anticipated the fall of communism in the Soviet bloc but promised their people eventual reintegration with the Western community of nations: it represented a ray of light at the end of a dark tunnel. The post-communist era would signify a return to normalcy, with even Russia welcomed into the global community of nations. Today, given the Manichaean portrayals of our strategic conflict with Russia, this possibility looks increasingly difficult to achieve. Western publics are being encouraged to reject all things Russian, and even to recast elements of Russian culture as originally belonging to other countries. The objective now, it sadly seems, is to erase the memory of Russians having ever been part of Europe and Western culture. While this is probably not the intent of the authors of the Foreign Affairs piece, it will be an almost inevitable consequence of any New Containment policy.

Whereas the Old Containment could appeal to the patriotism of average Russians, by pointing out, as the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn often did, that it was communism that had prevented Russians from being able to worship as they choose, express their political beliefs, or take pride in their history, the New Containment denies them any accomplishments at all, leaving Russian patriots without even the prospect of future partners in the West. The New Containment thus suffers from a devastating absence of any hopeful vision of the future. Were Kennan alive today, we suspect he would advise Western leaders that, while they should denounce Russian aggression, they should be very careful to avoid condemning in the same breath the entirety of Russian art, culture, history, and religion. Indeed, Kennan might have counseled the transatlantic elites to laud Russia’s civilizational contributions to the human story, and stress their anticipation of a time when these achievements could once again be celebrated as part of the West’s common cultural heritage.

It remains to be seen whether current efforts in the West (and more recently in Russia) to simply erase that shared European heritage will succeed, but its immediate result has been to solidify the view in Russia that this is a struggle that it cannot afford to lose. It has also created a new reservoir of sympathy for Russia in the non-Western World, which has long been subjected to similar deculturation and dehumanization by Western elites.

In Russia, and indeed much of the world, the absence of any positive vision beyond containment that would eventually reintegrate Russia confirms that what we are witnessing is a last-ditch effort to preserve the dominance of the liberal international order, now euphemistically referred to as “the rules-based order”. While the ruling class in select nations may buy into this approach, hoping to ride the West’s coattails and thereby maintain themselves in power,  one would be hard-pressed to find many leaders committing to such a reactionary vision over the long term. 

Different Containments

To better understand the dangers inherent in the New Containment, we must also shed the mythology surrounding its current usage and recover what it meant historically and its varied forms.

Back in the Cold War era, there were two iterations of Containment used by America’s Cold Warriors. The first, as proposed by Kennan himself and repeatedly clarified in the intervening decades, was about “the political containment of a political threat” posed by the aggressive global expansionism of Soviet ideology and its universalist eschatology. Kennan, a classical realist, “recognized the limitations of a force-based approach” to political and ideological challenges and “worried about overly-broad and militaristic definitions of U.S. interests.” The second strand, which became the dominant approach in Washington after the Korean War and was promoted by the more hawkish strategists like Nitze, interpreted Containment in global, military, and strategic terms. While the former sought to contain Soviet territorial expansion by neutralizing the appeal of Soviet ideology and the USSR’s propaganda in Western societies, the latter relied on the threat of military confrontations across the globe just short of nuclear war.

By the 1980s, with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Neoconservatism in the United States, Containment was dovetailed by liberalism, which sought to use America’s global image and galvanizing soft power to internally transform Soviet culture and society through persistent campaigns hyping the glamour of the Western way of life. “Rollback”, an aggressive variant of military containment strategy that created global flashpoints against which the Soviets became increasingly over-extended, was thus combined with an expanded and deliberate push for a cultural capture of the USSR by Western values, the spread of which the Soviets could hardly contain. This proved a successful recipe for dismantling the USSR, but it had the long-term cost of recasting Western societies themselves in terms of an ideology, that of “liberalism”.

Kennan’s original intuition—also reflected later by French social scientist Emmanuel Todd who predicted the fall of the USSR—was that the internal contradictions and societal dislocations inherent in Soviet ideology would eventually cause its downfall. All the West had to do, therefore, was to carry on long enough for that ideology to self-destruct under the weight of its own problems. It was Kennan’s particular view that, once this transformation had occurred, and the communist regime was overthrown, it would be wise to leave Russia alone—to give it time to heal until it could re-emerge as a normal, non-ideological, Great Power. But America’s descent into ideology in the intervening years made that a moot prospect, and Washington instead sought in earnest to liberalize and Americanize post-Soviet societies.

As such, since the end of the Cold War, we have slowly witnessed the genesis of a third kind of Containment, mostly theorized outside of the West, that interprets the concept in civilizational terms. The supposed goal of this new variant of containment is to defend or inoculate traditional and non-Western societies against the homogenizing force of Western progressive values and the deracinating effects of the liberal form of life. This civilizational containment model has only accelerated in the aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The upshot is that, while Western leaders have employed the language of “clash of civilizations” to paint Russia-West relations in ideological binaries as a contest of “democracy” vs. “authoritarianism”, Kremlin-friendly Russian elites such as Aleksander Dugin have begun to identify Russia as a civilizational Katechon meant to contain the spread of liberal Western ideology (which ironically brings to mind the earlier liberal resistance against the spread of Leninism).

Although a defense of cultural particularity against the modern onslaught of Western universalism informed the original appeal of civilizational containment, the perception in Russia of a Manichaean and liberal Western crusadism is now producing, as Maria Engstrom has observed, an equally Manichaean reaction couched in Russia’s own Christian messianic tradition that also sees the world in stark black and white terms. This new ideological framing increasingly pathologizes the initially non-aggressive form of cultural realism that was adopted by Russian intellectuals to affirm and defend the distinctiveness of Russian civilization, allowing Russian hawks to justify “a new wave of militarization and anti-Western sentiment” in Russia.

This unfortunate development ultimately poses a far greater challenge for the West than simple strategic competition among great powers, particularly as each side seems to be increasingly defining the ideological/civilizational encroachment of the other as an existential threat to itself. On the one hand, Russia (along with many other regional and civilizational powers in the Global South) aims to protect its cultural sovereignty; on the other, the West seems to regard any resistance to its cultural hegemony as reactionary, revisionist, and adversarial. Furthermore, the fact that the West threatens the so-called rogue states with an ever-expanding list of generally ineffective or counterproductive sanctions has also put into doubt the supremacy of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

As Europe uses the war in Ukraine to establish its territorial expanse to the exclusion of Russia, and Moscow turns increasingly hostile to the West, the schism between Russia and Europe appears to be calcifying. A potential ontological othering between Russia and the West would create a permanent us vs. them dynamic that could raise anti-Westernism in Russia and Russophobia in the West, reducing both civilizations into ideological effigies justifying endless cycles of conflict and escalation. 

Confronting this bleak possibility—especially in a multicivilizational-multipolar world order that is currently taking shape—necessitates, therefore, abandoning the exhausted, antiquated containment framework for a fundamentally new approach informed by cultural realism: one that affirms both the uniqueness of different forms of life and their plurality, and which aims for a global modus vivendi based on strategic empathy, civilizational engagement, and diplomacy.

From Containment to Concert of Civilizational Powers

The advocates of a New Containment yearn to restore the Cold War’s supposedly Golden Age of relatively peaceful discontent in which a permanent quest for global hegemony appeared both normal and possible to attain. The closest the Western and Soviet elites ever came to such coexistence, however, was during the brief détente of the Nixon era. The rest of the time, both sides were plagued by neuroses and anxieties that they sought to suppress by spending more and more money on their respective military establishments. The comforting familiarity of this remedy forms, perhaps, a large part of containment’s appeal today.

Nevertheless, it is important to remember that, by the end of the 1990s, the two inspirational godfathers of containment, Kennan and Nitze, both strongly opposed NATO expansion and warned against adopting an aggressive stance against Russia. They saw these policies as undermining half a century of painstaking efforts to cultivate in Russia the view that the West was ultimately not its enemy even if it did not always have the most friendly or honorable of intentions. Today, however, our policies have left us both overextended and with few friends inside Russia (and similarly in China).

The West’s obsession with the complete military defeat of Russia in Ukraine makes it glaringly obvious, in the rest of the world if not in Washington, that this is a fight to preserve America’s global dominance. Under the veil of moralistic and rhetorical language lies a contest for expanding the West’s power and sphere of influence, not values. Moreover, the view that Ukraine must continue to fight, no matter the costs, rather than negotiate for peace, brings to mind the famous quote of an American Major after the battle of Ben Tre, Vietnam, that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

The truth is that the Uniparty in Washington is still wedded to the idea of global hegemony, setting the ultimate aim of U.S. grand strategy in terms of maintaining an unchallenged global position—as the world’s sole permanent superpower. The bipartisan consensus in the Beltway continues to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that America can achieve this impossible target by weakening our great power competitors through war and conflict. The trouble, as George Washington presciently warned, is that strategic entanglement in such distant conflicts actually weakens us in the process.

Russia, after all, is already reduced to a regional power that is struggling even to retain its sphere of influence in its near-abroad. Russia is not the Soviet Union, nor is it a great power: it is nonsensical to marshal resources to try to “contain” an already-diminished power. By insisting on Containment in this new strategic environment, we reveal ourselves to be guided by our ideological and ontological constructs instead of reality, while manufacturing security dilemmas that have real, lasting consequences. We also convey to the Russians that we seek their total subordination to American (Western) interests, in much the same manner that the defeated Axis powers were subordinated to the United States after the Second World War. Such a Western posture only makes the ongoing conflict appear more existential for Russia, as a fight for the very survival of its way of life.   

Containment, old or new, therefore functions on antiquated presumptions about how the world used to work. It perpetuates two false narratives: 1) that Moscow has no agency or strategic autonomy and can only ever react to Western policies, and 2) that Russian ontological insecurity in relation to Western actors is unimportant in the formation of Russian strategy and geopolitical behavior. These assumptions are compounded by the blithe premise that Russia, despite every evidence to the contrary, will suffer irreparable losses if isolated by the West, and therefore must eventually yield to our will. Beneath the containment logic, there also exists an equally fanciful belief that China and BRICS+ nations will also eventually be forced to see the world as we do.

This is all wishful thinking. By attempting to isolate Russia, we have managed to isolate ourselves. Not only has Russia decisively turned its back on the current generation of Western leaders, but it is fast forging new relations and bonds with the rest of the world. The new global dynamic is accelerating the Great Transition to multipolarity and will increasingly undermine Western influence if it fails to adapt to this new world, ending not only its geopolitical but also its cultural hegemony. A Zeitenwende indeed!

New Containment cannot meet the challenge of a changing world order and a new balance of power that benefits Russia, China, Iran, and the other middle powers in the “non-West”, because it is out of step with the new structural realities—accelerated by multipolarity and our own highly costly and myopic strategic culture. It is also bound to fail, because, fundamentally, as power becomes more evenly distributed in a multiplex system, a shrinking fraction of the world cannot contain the whole.

There is a better way to enhance both American security and global stability that abandons the familiar but problematic logic of bloc-thinking and its zero-sum framing of the world for a cultural realism that emphasizes global cultural pluralism, the importance of dialogue and engagement among civilizations, mutual recognition of interest, and strategic empathy. Building on what Richard Hass and Charles Kupchan have called a “global concert of powers”, such a realist and interest-based, neo-Metternichian approach prioritizing a global equilibrium could give way to a “concert of civilizations” that advances peaceful co-existence and global stability in the multipolar world.

How to develop this new strategic mindset, that reconceives America’s role in the world in alignment with the “Concert”, would require a cultural reset as much as anything. But that is a topic for future discussion. For now, though, we must create space for diplomacy and engage in dialogue with our adversaries to resolve the ongoing global conflicts that threaten to spiral out of control—to allow us to reach that time of fundamental reconceptualization in one piece.

Well, I guess I’ve hit the big time since I actually appear on this list…along with some good company:

https://texty.org.ua/projects/112617/roller-coaster/#Natylie%20Baldwin

Antiwar.com, 6/9/24

A State Department-linked Ukrainian NGO published a study on June 6 that listed hundreds of individuals and organizations that oppose aid to Ukraine in an effort to smear them as spreading “Russian propaganda.”

The NGO Texty.org.ua listed Antiwar.com and several of its staff members, including Eric Garris, Scott Horton, Kyle Anzalone, and many Antiwar.com contributors. Organizations that Antiwar.com works closely with were also named, including the Libertarian Institute and the Ron Paul Institute.

The American Conservative, which was also included in the list, reported that Texty.org.ua was co-founded by Anatoly Bondarenko. Bondarenko has worked as an instructor for a State Department program known as TechCamp, which provides training for foreign journalists and activists.

TechCamp’s website lists Bondarenko as a trainer for a Ukraine program that brought together “more than 60 local journalists, civil society, community leaders, and private sector partners in Eastern Europe” with the goal of helping to increase “digital and media literacy.”

The Texty.org.ua report is titled “Roller Coaster: From Trumpists to Communists. The forces in the US impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it.”

The study acknowledges that most of the people listed “do not have direct, proven ties to the Russian government or propagandists.” But it claims that “the arguments they use to urge authorities to distance themselves from Ukraine echo key messages of Russian propaganda aimed at depriving Ukrainians of the ability to defend themselves with Western weapons and funds.”

The report links to Antiwar.com’s Ukraine news page as an example of “anti-Ukrainian statements.”

Other listed people and organizations are from across the political spectrum, from former President Donald Trump to Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Dozens of Republican members of Congress were named, including Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), J.D. Vance (R-OH), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and many others.

Media outlets frequently linked to on the front page of Antiwar.com were also listed, including Responsible Statecraft and The Grayzone. Peace groups, including CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, World Beyond War, and others, were also smeared.

By Matthew Evangelista, Lawfare, 3/31/24

Editor’s Note: One of the most frightening possibilities of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is that it increases the risk of nuclear war. This risk, however, doesn’t necessarily end once the shooting stops. Cornell University professor Matthew Evangelista explores the implications of extending the nuclear umbrella to Ukraine and argues that the world would be better off without such a shield.

Dan Byman

However and whenever Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine ends, Ukrainians will need a postwar security policy. Their choice holds implications for European security more broadly. Some observers, and many Ukrainians, anticipate Ukraine’s eventual membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As a NATO member, Ukraine would benefit from the ostensible protection afforded by “extended nuclear deterrence”—the prospect that the United States might respond to an attack against a NATO ally, even carried out with only conventional forces, by a retaliatory strike with nuclear weapons against the attacker. Others find the proposal for Ukraine to join NATO dubious or undesirable, and some question the credibility of the extended-deterrent threat or worry that it increases the risk of unintended escalation to global nuclear war. The best thing for postwar Ukraine, however, would be to avoid tying its security to nuclear weapons—its own or NATO’s. Instead, it should focus on ensuring its conventional forces are robust and defensively oriented, adequate to deter but not to provoke another Russian attack.

One might have expected Russia’s February 2022 invasion to have shaken confidence in the view that nuclear weapons foster an overall peace. Granted, Ukraine received no extended-deterrent promise from the United States (even though the Budapest Memorandum, signed when Ukraine agreed to relinquish the Soviet nuclear weapons held on its territory after the dissolution of the USSR, offered “security assurances”). Still the proponents of nuclear weapons had touted their contribution to maintaining the peace, beyond the countries explicitly sheltered under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. In 1987, for example, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher criticized Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev’s advocacy of nuclear disarmament—a view he shared with the nuclear abolitionist Ronald Reagan. Thatcher asserted, by contrast, that “we do not believe that it is possible to ensure peace for any considerable amount of time without nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the most powerful and most terrible guarantee of peace that was invented in the 20th century. There is no other guarantee.” Thirty years later, in July 2017, 122 countries meeting at UN headquarters in New York City voted in favor of a legally binding treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The nuclear-armed members of NATO—the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—vowed never to sign or ratify the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021. “Accession to the ban treaty,” they argued, “is incompatible with the policy of nuclear deterrence, which has been essential to keeping the peace in Europe and North Asia for over 70 years.” In making this claim, they were echoing not only Thatcher but also Vladimir Putin, who had stated in October 2016 that “nuclear weapons constitute a factor of deterrence and a factor guaranteeing peace and security throughout the whole world.” On the contrary, it is possible that Russia’s nuclear arsenal enabled the attacks of both 2014 and 2022, with Putin confident that it would deter NATO from coming to Ukraine’s defense.

Yet confidence in nuclear deterrence persists, based on the understanding that it prevented Soviet aggression against Europe during the Cold War. In fact, however, this claim is incorrect. Nuclear deterrence was never put to the test in Europe, because there was nothing to deter. What Robert Jervis wrote more than 20 years ago remains true today: “The Soviet archives have yet to reveal any serious plans for unprovoked aggression against Western Europe, not to mention a first strike against the United States.” Instead, the archival documents showed that Soviet military plans immediately following World War II were defensively oriented—with forces arrayed in belts at 50, 100, and 150 kilometers from the inter-German border. Only with the deployment to NATO Europe of tactical nuclear weapons in the early 1950s did the Soviet Army adopt an offensive orientation. The introduction of U.S. nuclear weapons into Europe did not enhance security but, rather, fostered instability and raised the risk of war.

Extended nuclear deterrence brought the continent to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in September 1961 during the Berlin Crisis—a lesson on the nuclear umbrella’s risks that bears pondering today. The Vienna summit of June 1961 failed to settle the anomalous situation of West Berlin—a democratic outpost surrounded by communist East Germany and hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops—and secure a peace treaty that would formally recognize the postwar borders. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev vowed to pursue his Plan B: a separate treaty with East Germany that would allow its leaders to determine access to Berlin, which they had declared its capital. NATO officials developed plans to deploy military force to ensure access to the city in the event the communist regime tried to deny it. The NATO secretary general declared that “the Alliance will stand ready for nuclear action at all times[,]” including a provision “to employ nuclear weapons selectively in order to demonstrate the will and ability of the Alliance to use them.”

The notion of employing nuclear weapons for signaling purposes owes much to the work of RAND strategist Thomas Schelling, who drafted a memorandum advocating such “nuclear bargaining” over Berlin in June 1961. According to McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to President Kennedy, the memorandum made a “deep impression” on the president when he read it on Bundy’s recommendation. Meanwhile, other Kennedy advisers, such as Paul Nitze, were advocating that the United States use its nuclear weapons preemptively to attempt a disarming first strike against the Soviet Union if access to Berlin were blocked. As he described in his memoir, Nitze told the president that a U.S. first strike “could assure us victory in at least a military sense in a series of nuclear exchanges, while we might well lose if we allowed the Soviets to strike first.” The cost would be 9-10 million U.S. casualties in a retaliatory strike by the surviving Soviet weapons, but the other side would suffer 10 times that number, according to Nitze’s calculations.

What was not known at the time, but has been discovered since in Soviet bloc military plans, is that the Soviet armed forces were training to respond to preparations for a NATO nuclear strike with massive nuclear preemption, intended to destroy the NATO weapons before they could be used. Notions of nuclear bargaining, signaling, and graduated escalation were artificial constructs in the minds of U.S. strategists but bore no relationship to how the other side might actually respond.

No wonder prominent US officials, as well as their European counterparts, harbored doubts about the credibility or plausibility of NATO’s reliance on nuclear weapons. Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to President Nixon in early 1969, for example, averred that extended nuclear deterrence “depended on a first strike” by the United States, something he claimed the European allies did not understand. Nixon concurred. The “nuclear umbrella in NATO” was, according to the president, “a lot of crap.”

Is the situation any different today? No one knows how Russian leaders would react to NATO’s threat or use of nuclear weapons—but probably not according to hopeful scenarios of “escalation dominance” that foresee U.S. forces prevailing at each step of the “ladder of escalation” and Russian leaders, clearly anticipating an unfavorable outcome, backing down in advance.

Along with other skeptics of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, I consider a conventional military strategy for Ukraine, such as the one designed by Barry Posen as early as 1994, more promising. It shares elements of ideas developed by European peace researchers during the Cold War to provide defensively oriented conventional forces that were sufficiently dispersed so as not to offer targets for nuclear strikes. Current versions fall under the rubric of “confidence-building defense” and include such strategies as the “spider-in-the-web.” These nonoffensive defense strategies were designed not to threaten the other side and risk provoking an attack during periods of tension. Historical examples include the decentralized, militia-based territorial defense systems of Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Sweden, and Finland. Their forces were suited to defending their territories but not seizing and occupying the territory of their neighbors. For postwar Ukraine, such a system would mean clearly relinquishing an ability to regain any territory lost to Russia—a prerequisite for a stable peace, however unjust. Adopting such a territorial defense strategy would not require a declaration of neutrality and would not preclude cooperation with NATO countries in the provision of conventional weapons, for example, so long as they did not pose an offensive threat to Russia that could provoke it to resume the war. Combining a defensive orientation for Ukrainian military forces with well-prepared mass civilian resistance to occupation—a technique attempted spontaneously with some success in the first months of the 2022 invasion—could serve as a deterrent to aggression, without risking the catastrophic consequences of nuclear escalation.

However much Ukraine’s supporters would prefer an end to the war that would leave the country with its pre-2014 borders intact, a more likely outcome would entail a territorial compromise. Under those conditions, a postwar Ukrainian security policy should be oriented toward robust defense without providing any pretext for renewed Russian aggression. Nuclear deterrence offers no panacea but, rather, incalculable risks. Postwar Ukraine should forswear, not covet, a “nuclear umbrella.”

By James Carden, Responsible Statecraft, 6/6/24

In 1946 reporter John Hersey published a harrowing report from Hiroshima that followed the travails of a number of survivors of the Bomb, including those of Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a Jesuit missionary from Germany.

On a search for water for some of the wounded, Kleinsorge came across a group of survivors

“…about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye-sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot.”

Passages such as these revealed the horrors Japanese survivors endured in the aftermath of the American nuclear attack. Hersey’s Hiroshima became, in the view of essayist Roger Angell, “part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust.”And throughout the Cold War, the idea of fighting a nuclear war was anathema to the respective leaders of the American and Soviet superpowers — a revulsion that found its ultimate expression in the pledge made by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan that “a nuclear cannot be won and should never be fought.”

Yet little by little, as the Cold War has receded into memory, American and Russian leaders have torn up a series of arms control measures beginning with the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (2002), the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty (2019), and the Open Skies treaty (2020). For its part, in 2023 Russia unilaterally withdrew from both the Convention Armed Forces in Europe treaty and suspended participation in the landmark New START treaty.

And one of the more worrisome developments in a time which does not lack for them has been a worrying epidemic of loose talk about the use of nuclear weapons.

Of late, the Russians have been the worst offenders. Yet perhaps even more troubling is the blithe disregard with which some American analysts dismiss Putin’s stated readiness to deploy these weapons. As Brown University professor of Slavic studies Vladimir Golstein memorably puts the matter:

“Putin conducts nuclear exercises, Putin warns the densely populated areas in Europe, Putin talks about going to heaven as the result of nuclear confrontation — what else does one need? Knowing Russians, I am extremely certain that they would respond. Sooner or later, but they would.”

Consider the, well, explosive language coming from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to the revelation, made by Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski on May 25, that the U.S. “told the Russians that if you detonate a nuclear bomb, even if it doesn’t kill anyone, we will hit all your targets and positions in Ukraine with conventional weapons and destroy them all.”

Medvedev responded with threats of his own:

“Americans hitting our targets means starting a world war, and a foreign minister, even of a country like Poland, should understand that. And third, considering that yet another Polack, [President Andrzej] Duda, has recently announced the wish to deploy TNW [thermonuclear weapons] in Poland, Warsaw won’t be left out, and will surely get its share of radioactive ash. Is it what you really want?”

According to a May 28 report in the Chinese-state run news service Xinhua, Russia has accused NATO forces of “practicing nuclear strikes against Russia.” This accusation comes only a week after reports that Russia itself has launched tactical nuclear drills in “response to provocative statements and threats of individual Western officials against the Russian Federation,” according to the Russian defense ministry.

And then there are the alarming statements coming from Russian analysts and government advisers. A video circulating on social media shows Russian political scientist Konstantin Sivkov issuing nuclear threats against Poland, while the noted academic and Kremlin adviser, Sergei Karaganov published an article calling for Russia to launch limited nuclear strikes on Western Europe. As theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists points out, Karaganov’s “proposal and other Russian political and military thinking about nuclear weapons raise profound questions about whether Russia might attempt to conduct a so-called limited nuclear war.”

As can only be expected, certain American politicians are pitching in to make things worse. Within the last few weeks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has called for Israel to do its very worst by invoking the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as justification. A month into the Israel-Hamas War, a member of the Israeli cabinet issued his own irresponsible nuclear threat, while the U.S. continues to run diplomatic cover for Israel by denying the existence of its nuclear weapons program.

Meanwhile, recent statements coming out of Iran hinting at a potential change in its nuclear doctrine have raised alarm bells with the International Atomic Energy Agency which is meeting this week in Vienna to discuss the matter.

Amidst the madness, there’s a silver lining.

There remain multiple organizations that have been doing valuable, utterly necessary work to raise awareness about the omnipresent threat of nuclear catastrophe, including the Nuclear Threat Initiative, NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth, and Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy. The founder of the latter two groups, the activist and award-winning documentary filmmaker Cynthia Lazaroff, believes citizen action is needed — and soon.

“We all have a voice,” says Lazaroff, who urges citizens to “contact their Congressional representatives and tell them how worried they are about the growing threat of nuclear war. Urge them to hold congressional hearings on escalating nuclear dangers,nuclear winter and the catastrophic humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons and to co-sponsor legislation like: H. Res. 77 and H.R. 2775 to back us away from the brink and eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all.”

The nuclear age is not past. It is our present — and one that the next administration needs to urgently confront, and ultimately, dismantle.