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http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/04/07/there_are_going_to_be_more_cold_wars_109234.html
April 7, 2016
There Are Going to Be More Cold Wars
By Christine M. Leah
Russia's prime minister recently accused NATO of restarting the Cold War amid increased military maneuvers and troop deployments to countries neighboring Russia. On 10 February 2016, Stanford’s CISAC tweeted this regarding former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry:
“Perry, regarding Russia: We are now in a period comparable to the dark days of the Cold War. How could we have let that happen?”
The end of “the Cold War” in 1991 was welcomed with relief by almost all parties to the conflict. It was thought that such a confrontation could never happen again. The reality is different. The term “Cold War” is misleading. Contrary to the remarks made by former Secretary Perry and Prime Minister Medvedev, it should come as no surprise at all that new tensions have emerged with Russia. This is merely the nature of the international system – geopolitical tensions, especially between great powers, are inevitable. British futurist writer H.G. Wells wrote in an article titled “The War That Will End War,” published in The Daily News on August 14, 1914—and yet major power war broke out in Europe in 1939. The end of “the Cold War” was welcomed with relief by almost all parties to the conflict. But considering military history more broadly, there is, au contraire, no reason not to expect more Cold Wars. Nuclear weapons are now an intractable element of international security (and especially great power rivalries) and thus, there are going to be many more “Cold Wars”. We may as well get smarter about managing them.
Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, the role of nuclear weapons in the deterrence debate has generated considerable intellectual confusion. This is due to a number of reasons, a central one being the tendency of many scholars, public policy figures, and peace activists (such as global nuclear zero advocates) to associate these weapons with the Cold War. The dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1989, and with it the end of the Cold War, gave new impetus and seeming credibility to anti-nuclear movements around the world. However, we should not forget that it was an interesting historical coincidence that the Cold War and the nuclear age emerged at roughly the same time. So when the Cold War ended, it only seemed logical to many that the nuclear age, too, had ended.
Scholars in the 1990s would dub this period the “post-Cold War era” of international relations. One in which the U.S. had more or less uncontested conventional military power and was able to intervene militarily in conflict-ridden zones such as Iraq without having to tread lightly around its superpower rival, where new prominence was given to the importance of “non-traditional” security issues, and where NATO would increasingly focus on “out-of-area” operations, such as interventions in Kosovo. Nuclear weapons had almost no discernible role to play in this new international context. Thus, nuclear strategy, funding for weapons systems, and intellectual work on deterrence were all sidelined in favor of peace and conflict studies, the study of globalization, the role of gender in international security, and constructivist discourse on international relations more broadly.
The events of September 11, 2001, would usher in yet a new paradigm shift. The terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York was the first “strategic” attack against the U.S. homeland in its history, bringing a new sense of vulnerability that had not existed before. The response of then President George W. Bush was to adopt a strategy of pre-emption: to abandon deterrence almost entirely and focus instead on rooting out rogue regimes and terrorists abroad that would hurt the U.S. and its allies. Hence the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq against al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which have both now converged and expanded into an on-going war against the Islamic State. Nuclear deterrence between great powers was even further marginalized in international security. During this period it became easy for nuclear abolitionists and analysts like Scott Sagan to get attention for their focus on the risks of nuclear terrorism as their main argument for abolition. But the possibility of terrorists acquiring and detonating a nuclear device has been an excuse used by many not to focus on the role of nuclear weapons in deterrence. Instead, more intellectual effort and finances were devoted to preventing nuclear terrorism and nuclear trafficking, especially in the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe.
But in recent years, “hard” geopolitics has made a slow, but firm “return” to the chessboard of international relations. Both the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and increasing Chinese aggression in the Asia-Pacific, and new investments by these countries in modernizing their nuclear forces in particular, demonstrate that both the so-called post-Cold War era and the post-911 era were both something of an aberration in the grand scheme of military history. Tensions are again rising not only between the United States and Russia, but also between the United States and China. But just because the U.S.-USSR rivalry was our first experience of a nuclear geopolitical rivalry does not mean that another Cold War could not emerge. Besides, South Asia has also had its own, unique Cold War. Perhaps we have just reached an interesting point in history that is very similar to the years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Also, we should remember that in the grand scheme of the history of strategy, the nuclear age is still young.
Nuclear weapons were not merely weapons of the Cold War, as many nuclear abolitionists have argued. In addition, thinking about how to deploy them is often dismissed as “Cold War thinking”.[ii] For too long many academics and strategic analysts have been guilty of equating the nuclear age with the Cold War.[iii] Some have taken this a step further and argued that since the Cold War is over, that we should somehow get rid of these weapons. In other words, they assign the relevance of nuclear weapons to a particular historical period. Take, for instance, an op-ed written by Tom Nichols in 2015, in which he argued :
Why do we need a new [Long-Range Stand-off missile]? We don’t, unless you think America should be prepared for a protracted, all-out war with the old Soviet Union. The purpose of the old [Air-Launched Cruise Missile] was to allow U.S. bombers to get close enough to fire its cruise weapons from a distance as part of a campaign of suppressing enemy air defenses and other targets at the edge of enemy territory. As part of an over nuclear war-fighting strategy, it made sense—at least, it made sense if you believed in nuclear war-fighting strategies.[iv]
This view, and its premises, are fundamentally flawed. Nuclear weapons are not just weapons of the Cold War. For instance, they have played a role in deterring major war between India and Pakistan, a rivalry that had nothing to do with the Cold War. U.S. nuclear weapons have also contributed to reassuring allies in the Asia-Pacific that the U.S. will threaten retaliation on their behalf if they are attacked by a major regional power. To argue that nuclear weapons are weapons purely borne of, and only related to, the Cold War reveals a very short-sighted view of history, war, and warfare. It is akin to saying that muskets and cannons were merely weapons of the Napoleonic wars.
The literature on nuclear strategy was developed in an age that was characterized by the Cold War rivalry, a limited number of nuclear weapons states, with a focus on Europe, where U.S. allies were all grouped together in one land bloc, and where there was a near-monopoly of these weapons by historically world super powers or dominant regional powers. But this has been a short period in the grand scheme of history, and we will have to find new ways of managing nuclear weapons and deterrence in a variety of new contexts. The variety of roles will be different from that during the Cold War.
Indeed, the first Cold War was unusual in its political configuration of bipolarity as well as its weapons – nuclear weapons. And maybe this has left residual habits of thinking—strategic echoes, perhaps—that may be as hard to shift as the weapons themselves. Since 1945, nuclear weapons have had a profound impact on how both nuclear weapons states, and non-nuclear weapons states, think about their security. They have become so deeply ingrained in strategic thinking, that to “extract” nuclear weapons from international security would also mean getting rid of certain strategic concepts, including: deterrence, extended deterrence, as well as re-thinking how to “do” alliances with mainly conventional forces. Conventional arms control would also have to be re-conceptualized. It would also have to deal with the conundrum of ballistic missiles as a dual-use system: both a delivery system for WMDs but also an instrument of conventional attacks, as the Middle East has shown us. For instance, including the Egyptian and Syrian missile attacks on Israel in 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1980–88 War between Iraq and Iran, the Afghan civil war 1988–91, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Yemen Civil War of 1994. However, by this I do not mean that we should carry reliance on deterrence too far. Deterrence is provocative, it can produce an endless security dilemma, and there are other instruments of peace and international security that can complement the perceived role of deterrence. No country should depend too much on deterrence, as this tends to generate more “desperate”, or provocative behavior. North Korea is a classic case in point. Deterrence is never guaranteed. It often works, but it has limitations, and it does not provide total control over what happens. After all, it is the art of things that do not happen.
Another problem that weighs into these issues is American ahistoricism. In part because of their origins as rebels and creators of a “new world”, Americans have a unique strategic culture characterized by optimism, the impulse to transform the international system in the service of liberal democratic ideals, a tendency to reject the European tradition of power politics, and to cast wars as crusades against evil.[v] Such notions run counter to, and almost ignore the elements of Russian strategic culture, which is characterized by a combination of fear about vulnerability and an appetite for achieving security and status by expansion, a valuing of coercive power or status imparted by higher authority, and a tendency to resolve political disputes by struggle and intrigue, occasionally by force, but not by negotiations, bargaining, voting, or legal adjudication. In addition, there has always been an underlying Russian attitude that views foreign states or actors as either enemies, or subjects, or transient allies, or useful fools to be manipulated. In summary, defensiveness bordering on paranoia, on the one hand, combined with assertiveness bordering on pugnacity, on the other.[vi]
This is not to say that one experience of nationhood, and the associated attitudes towards foreign policy, is better than another. But it should not come as any surprise that such different worldviews should lead to clashes. Of course NATO expansion under former U.S. President Bill Clinton irked the Russians. Of course ballistic missile defense installations in Central Europe would make Russia feel more vulnerable. Of course Russia would seek to “re-expand” its influence by annexing Crimea. If American policymakers had appreciated Russian strategic culture better in the 1990s, the current Ukraine crisis might have been averted. And we might not find ourselves in the current climate where Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons to “de-escalate” a conflict.
In summary, if one carefully studies and understands history, instead of ignoring it, then it should come as no surprise that we may, in fact, be in a new Cold War. And the other reality
is that nuclear weapons will continue to be a central feature of great power strategic relations. There will be more Cold Wars. So far we have been lucky in managing them. But we should never become complacent and ignore geopolitical sensitivities of other great powers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://mobile.twitter.com/StanfordCISAC/status/697584365665021952
[ii] See, for instance, Ward Wilson, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2013); Hans M. Kristensen, “Falling Short of Prague: Obama’s Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy”, Arms Control Association, (date not indicated). At: http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2013...gue-Obamas-Nuclear-Weapons-Employment-Policy; Barry M. Blechman, “Extended Deterrence: Cutting Edge of the Debate on Nuclear Policy”, Policy Forum Online, 13 August 2009, At: www.nautilus.org/faura/security/09066Blechman.html; Nick Ritchie, “Deterrence Dogma? Challenging the Relevance of British Nuclear Weapons”, International Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 1 (January 2009), pp.81-98; Catherine M. Kelleher and Scott L. Warren, “Getting to Zero Starts Here: Tactical Nuclear Weapons”, Arms Control Today, Vol. 39, No. 8 (October 2009), pp.6-12
[iii] See, for instance, Barry M. Blechman, “Extended Deterrence: Cutting Edge of the Debate on
Nuclear Policy,” Policy Forum Online, August 13, 2009. Available at: www.nautilus.org/fora/security/09066Blechman.html.
[iv] Tom Nichols, “The 1980s called. They don’t want their Cruise Missiles Back”, The National Interest, 3 November 2015. At: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-1980s-called-they-don’t-need-their-cruise-missiles-back-1423. See also, Tom Nichols, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2013).
[v] For an elaboration of these tendencies, see Thomas G. Mahnken, “United States Strategic Culture”, Report written for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. 13 December 2006.
[vi] See, for instance, Fritz W. Ermarth, “Russia’s Strategic Culture: Past, Present, And… In Transition?”, Report Prepared for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 31 October 2006.
Dr. Christine M. Leah is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Grand Strategy Program at Yale University. Previously, she was a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow in Nuclear Security at MIT, a visiting fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, a summer research fellow at RAND, and a research intern at IISS-Asia, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, IISS-London, the French Ministry of Defense, and the UMP office of Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy. She is the author of Australia and the Bomb, and has published in Comparative Strategy, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Asian Security, the Australian Journal of International Affairs, The National Interest, the Diplomat, War is Boring, and with RSIS and RAND.
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/04/07/there_are_going_to_be_more_cold_wars_109234.html
April 7, 2016
There Are Going to Be More Cold Wars
By Christine M. Leah
Russia's prime minister recently accused NATO of restarting the Cold War amid increased military maneuvers and troop deployments to countries neighboring Russia. On 10 February 2016, Stanford’s CISAC tweeted this regarding former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry:
“Perry, regarding Russia: We are now in a period comparable to the dark days of the Cold War. How could we have let that happen?”
The end of “the Cold War” in 1991 was welcomed with relief by almost all parties to the conflict. It was thought that such a confrontation could never happen again. The reality is different. The term “Cold War” is misleading. Contrary to the remarks made by former Secretary Perry and Prime Minister Medvedev, it should come as no surprise at all that new tensions have emerged with Russia. This is merely the nature of the international system – geopolitical tensions, especially between great powers, are inevitable. British futurist writer H.G. Wells wrote in an article titled “The War That Will End War,” published in The Daily News on August 14, 1914—and yet major power war broke out in Europe in 1939. The end of “the Cold War” was welcomed with relief by almost all parties to the conflict. But considering military history more broadly, there is, au contraire, no reason not to expect more Cold Wars. Nuclear weapons are now an intractable element of international security (and especially great power rivalries) and thus, there are going to be many more “Cold Wars”. We may as well get smarter about managing them.
Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, the role of nuclear weapons in the deterrence debate has generated considerable intellectual confusion. This is due to a number of reasons, a central one being the tendency of many scholars, public policy figures, and peace activists (such as global nuclear zero advocates) to associate these weapons with the Cold War. The dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1989, and with it the end of the Cold War, gave new impetus and seeming credibility to anti-nuclear movements around the world. However, we should not forget that it was an interesting historical coincidence that the Cold War and the nuclear age emerged at roughly the same time. So when the Cold War ended, it only seemed logical to many that the nuclear age, too, had ended.
Scholars in the 1990s would dub this period the “post-Cold War era” of international relations. One in which the U.S. had more or less uncontested conventional military power and was able to intervene militarily in conflict-ridden zones such as Iraq without having to tread lightly around its superpower rival, where new prominence was given to the importance of “non-traditional” security issues, and where NATO would increasingly focus on “out-of-area” operations, such as interventions in Kosovo. Nuclear weapons had almost no discernible role to play in this new international context. Thus, nuclear strategy, funding for weapons systems, and intellectual work on deterrence were all sidelined in favor of peace and conflict studies, the study of globalization, the role of gender in international security, and constructivist discourse on international relations more broadly.
The events of September 11, 2001, would usher in yet a new paradigm shift. The terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York was the first “strategic” attack against the U.S. homeland in its history, bringing a new sense of vulnerability that had not existed before. The response of then President George W. Bush was to adopt a strategy of pre-emption: to abandon deterrence almost entirely and focus instead on rooting out rogue regimes and terrorists abroad that would hurt the U.S. and its allies. Hence the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq against al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which have both now converged and expanded into an on-going war against the Islamic State. Nuclear deterrence between great powers was even further marginalized in international security. During this period it became easy for nuclear abolitionists and analysts like Scott Sagan to get attention for their focus on the risks of nuclear terrorism as their main argument for abolition. But the possibility of terrorists acquiring and detonating a nuclear device has been an excuse used by many not to focus on the role of nuclear weapons in deterrence. Instead, more intellectual effort and finances were devoted to preventing nuclear terrorism and nuclear trafficking, especially in the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe.
But in recent years, “hard” geopolitics has made a slow, but firm “return” to the chessboard of international relations. Both the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and increasing Chinese aggression in the Asia-Pacific, and new investments by these countries in modernizing their nuclear forces in particular, demonstrate that both the so-called post-Cold War era and the post-911 era were both something of an aberration in the grand scheme of military history. Tensions are again rising not only between the United States and Russia, but also between the United States and China. But just because the U.S.-USSR rivalry was our first experience of a nuclear geopolitical rivalry does not mean that another Cold War could not emerge. Besides, South Asia has also had its own, unique Cold War. Perhaps we have just reached an interesting point in history that is very similar to the years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Also, we should remember that in the grand scheme of the history of strategy, the nuclear age is still young.
Nuclear weapons were not merely weapons of the Cold War, as many nuclear abolitionists have argued. In addition, thinking about how to deploy them is often dismissed as “Cold War thinking”.[ii] For too long many academics and strategic analysts have been guilty of equating the nuclear age with the Cold War.[iii] Some have taken this a step further and argued that since the Cold War is over, that we should somehow get rid of these weapons. In other words, they assign the relevance of nuclear weapons to a particular historical period. Take, for instance, an op-ed written by Tom Nichols in 2015, in which he argued :
Why do we need a new [Long-Range Stand-off missile]? We don’t, unless you think America should be prepared for a protracted, all-out war with the old Soviet Union. The purpose of the old [Air-Launched Cruise Missile] was to allow U.S. bombers to get close enough to fire its cruise weapons from a distance as part of a campaign of suppressing enemy air defenses and other targets at the edge of enemy territory. As part of an over nuclear war-fighting strategy, it made sense—at least, it made sense if you believed in nuclear war-fighting strategies.[iv]
This view, and its premises, are fundamentally flawed. Nuclear weapons are not just weapons of the Cold War. For instance, they have played a role in deterring major war between India and Pakistan, a rivalry that had nothing to do with the Cold War. U.S. nuclear weapons have also contributed to reassuring allies in the Asia-Pacific that the U.S. will threaten retaliation on their behalf if they are attacked by a major regional power. To argue that nuclear weapons are weapons purely borne of, and only related to, the Cold War reveals a very short-sighted view of history, war, and warfare. It is akin to saying that muskets and cannons were merely weapons of the Napoleonic wars.
The literature on nuclear strategy was developed in an age that was characterized by the Cold War rivalry, a limited number of nuclear weapons states, with a focus on Europe, where U.S. allies were all grouped together in one land bloc, and where there was a near-monopoly of these weapons by historically world super powers or dominant regional powers. But this has been a short period in the grand scheme of history, and we will have to find new ways of managing nuclear weapons and deterrence in a variety of new contexts. The variety of roles will be different from that during the Cold War.
Indeed, the first Cold War was unusual in its political configuration of bipolarity as well as its weapons – nuclear weapons. And maybe this has left residual habits of thinking—strategic echoes, perhaps—that may be as hard to shift as the weapons themselves. Since 1945, nuclear weapons have had a profound impact on how both nuclear weapons states, and non-nuclear weapons states, think about their security. They have become so deeply ingrained in strategic thinking, that to “extract” nuclear weapons from international security would also mean getting rid of certain strategic concepts, including: deterrence, extended deterrence, as well as re-thinking how to “do” alliances with mainly conventional forces. Conventional arms control would also have to be re-conceptualized. It would also have to deal with the conundrum of ballistic missiles as a dual-use system: both a delivery system for WMDs but also an instrument of conventional attacks, as the Middle East has shown us. For instance, including the Egyptian and Syrian missile attacks on Israel in 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1980–88 War between Iraq and Iran, the Afghan civil war 1988–91, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Yemen Civil War of 1994. However, by this I do not mean that we should carry reliance on deterrence too far. Deterrence is provocative, it can produce an endless security dilemma, and there are other instruments of peace and international security that can complement the perceived role of deterrence. No country should depend too much on deterrence, as this tends to generate more “desperate”, or provocative behavior. North Korea is a classic case in point. Deterrence is never guaranteed. It often works, but it has limitations, and it does not provide total control over what happens. After all, it is the art of things that do not happen.
Another problem that weighs into these issues is American ahistoricism. In part because of their origins as rebels and creators of a “new world”, Americans have a unique strategic culture characterized by optimism, the impulse to transform the international system in the service of liberal democratic ideals, a tendency to reject the European tradition of power politics, and to cast wars as crusades against evil.[v] Such notions run counter to, and almost ignore the elements of Russian strategic culture, which is characterized by a combination of fear about vulnerability and an appetite for achieving security and status by expansion, a valuing of coercive power or status imparted by higher authority, and a tendency to resolve political disputes by struggle and intrigue, occasionally by force, but not by negotiations, bargaining, voting, or legal adjudication. In addition, there has always been an underlying Russian attitude that views foreign states or actors as either enemies, or subjects, or transient allies, or useful fools to be manipulated. In summary, defensiveness bordering on paranoia, on the one hand, combined with assertiveness bordering on pugnacity, on the other.[vi]
This is not to say that one experience of nationhood, and the associated attitudes towards foreign policy, is better than another. But it should not come as any surprise that such different worldviews should lead to clashes. Of course NATO expansion under former U.S. President Bill Clinton irked the Russians. Of course ballistic missile defense installations in Central Europe would make Russia feel more vulnerable. Of course Russia would seek to “re-expand” its influence by annexing Crimea. If American policymakers had appreciated Russian strategic culture better in the 1990s, the current Ukraine crisis might have been averted. And we might not find ourselves in the current climate where Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons to “de-escalate” a conflict.
In summary, if one carefully studies and understands history, instead of ignoring it, then it should come as no surprise that we may, in fact, be in a new Cold War. And the other reality
is that nuclear weapons will continue to be a central feature of great power strategic relations. There will be more Cold Wars. So far we have been lucky in managing them. But we should never become complacent and ignore geopolitical sensitivities of other great powers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://mobile.twitter.com/StanfordCISAC/status/697584365665021952
[ii] See, for instance, Ward Wilson, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2013); Hans M. Kristensen, “Falling Short of Prague: Obama’s Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy”, Arms Control Association, (date not indicated). At: http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2013...gue-Obamas-Nuclear-Weapons-Employment-Policy; Barry M. Blechman, “Extended Deterrence: Cutting Edge of the Debate on Nuclear Policy”, Policy Forum Online, 13 August 2009, At: www.nautilus.org/faura/security/09066Blechman.html; Nick Ritchie, “Deterrence Dogma? Challenging the Relevance of British Nuclear Weapons”, International Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 1 (January 2009), pp.81-98; Catherine M. Kelleher and Scott L. Warren, “Getting to Zero Starts Here: Tactical Nuclear Weapons”, Arms Control Today, Vol. 39, No. 8 (October 2009), pp.6-12
[iii] See, for instance, Barry M. Blechman, “Extended Deterrence: Cutting Edge of the Debate on
Nuclear Policy,” Policy Forum Online, August 13, 2009. Available at: www.nautilus.org/fora/security/09066Blechman.html.
[iv] Tom Nichols, “The 1980s called. They don’t want their Cruise Missiles Back”, The National Interest, 3 November 2015. At: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-1980s-called-they-don’t-need-their-cruise-missiles-back-1423. See also, Tom Nichols, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2013).
[v] For an elaboration of these tendencies, see Thomas G. Mahnken, “United States Strategic Culture”, Report written for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. 13 December 2006.
[vi] See, for instance, Fritz W. Ermarth, “Russia’s Strategic Culture: Past, Present, And… In Transition?”, Report Prepared for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 31 October 2006.
Dr. Christine M. Leah is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Grand Strategy Program at Yale University. Previously, she was a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow in Nuclear Security at MIT, a visiting fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, a summer research fellow at RAND, and a research intern at IISS-Asia, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, IISS-London, the French Ministry of Defense, and the UMP office of Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy. She is the author of Australia and the Bomb, and has published in Comparative Strategy, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Asian Security, the Australian Journal of International Affairs, The National Interest, the Diplomat, War is Boring, and with RSIS and RAND.