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Losing Perspective: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security Strategy
.By Michaela Dodge
November 10, 2025
Dr. Michaela Dodge
Dr. Michaela Dodge is a Research Scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy. She is the recipient of the 2025 U.S. Strategic Command’s annual Gen. Larry Welch Writing Award, the author of numerous articles and U.S.-Czech Missile Defense Cooperation: Alliance Politics in Action.
In June 2025, the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard posted a video inspired by her recent visit to Hiroshima, Japan, one of the two cities destroyed by U.S. nuclear weapons during World War II.[1] Gabbard’s comments are an excellent example of a U.S. high-level government official lacking understanding regarding the role and purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy. It is a textbook case of how not to send deterrent messages to U.S. adversaries and simultaneously undermining U.S. allied assurance.
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The problem is not unique to Gabbard. Since the end of the Cold War, under the delusion of the “end of history,” the United States has gradually lost the nuclear competency thought to be obsolete and irrelevant to contemporary national security problems. The prevailing worldview assumed “that Washington could depend on international organizations to help it confront major challenges and that ‘global governance’ would emerge with the help of American leadership. …That view presumed that since other countries were progressing inexorably toward liberal democracy, they would share many of Washington’s goals and would play by Washington’s rules.”[2] U.S. leaders believed that if the United States unilaterally reduced its nuclear weapons, other countries would follow.[3] Contemporary armament efforts and activities of revisionist powers, particular Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, show that this optimism was wholly misplaced.
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https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/11/11/losing_perspective_nuclear_weapons_and_us_national_security_strategy_1146574.html
