Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review Is Too Timid for 2022
.By Rod Lyon
Nuclear weapons are serious capabilities, and declaratory policies are serious commitments. So readers who have followed the U.S. government’s nuclear posture product line since President Bill Clinton’s first review in 1994 have learned to expect both elegant wordsmithing and substantial elements of continuity in a policy that has long been broadly bipartisan. Moreover, it’s impossible to divorce thinking about nuclear weapons from the level of threat in the international security environment. Darker security environments naturally reinforce policy conservatism—and the current security environment is as gloomy as it has been in many a year.
It’s no surprise, then, that President Joe Biden’s recently released nuclear posture review reflects more continuity than change in relation to its predecessors. It probably disappoints the progressive side of the Democratic Party, which had been lobbying Biden to follow his instincts in favour of further nuclear restraint. On the other hand, continuity also disappoints those who had hoped for a more robust nuclear response in a rapidly darkening security environment.
Personally, I’d have liked to see a review that wrestled rather more energetically with the challenges of the future. Unlike its predecessors, this NPR anticipates the imminent arrival of a tripolar nuclear world. It briefly sketches the problems of that world but makes no effort to solve them. Granted, there aren’t easy answers. Truels—three-cornered duels—are, like the classical three-body problem, not amenable to simple solutions. And both nuclear deterrence and assurance will struggle more in a tripolar world, because the credibility of threats must decrease in a world where a third player would be the unintended beneficiary.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/11/11/bidens_nuclear_posture_review_is_too_timid_for_2022_864311.html
