China

While foreign policy ‘realists’ urge detente with China and Russia, only strength ensures peace. The U.S. faces the most daunting security landscape in 45 years. That’s no coincidence. Earlier this year Russia launched the bloodiest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, and this summer China publicly displayed plans to strangle or swallow the… Read More

By and large, we do not believe that there are individuals with great ruling talent who “thirst and burn” to shatter the existing order for the sake of dominating others — individuals who have desires that make them a fundamentally different type of human being: animals of prey, a profoundly different human type from the rest of us. …Is Lincoln’s warning grounded in a timeless truth? Is it a truth alive today?
…The world has faced such a threat several times in the past 100 years but misunderstood it, underestimated it, and let it grow horribly out of control. We need only think of Stalin, Mao, and, of course, Hitler. Can we learn from this terrible history?

Specifically, are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping just such individuals? They sit atop oligarchies. However, they now largely control the levers of power and use that power in a brutal and unified manner. Most of all, in word and deed, they seek to shatter the existing order and bring the world around them under their domination….

But little national-security analysis focuses on deterring an adversary’s most important power — its leader and leadership. Why not focus on the tyrant and the immediate circle around him? Isolate him and use some of the unique information and cyber power of our time to create suspicion, division, and contempt (the great acid that dissolves authority). In short, analyze the tyrant’s sources of power narrowly — money, respect, fear, key subordinates — and systematically strip them away.

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U.S. policy makers have lost sight of the crucial link between arms control and deterrence.

U.S. nuclear deterrence policy and U.S. nuclear arms-control policy have become dangerously disconnected.

Longstanding deterrence policy requires that the U.S. have sufficient capacity to target what potential enemy leaders value most. Arms control is supposed to augment deterrence by limiting, and if possible reducing, the threats while allowing the U.S. to deploy a force that deters an attack on America or our allies. The policies were tightly linked throughout the closing decades of the Cold War, providing the U.S. and its allies with a credible deterrent … Read More

Washington might study Cold War-era practices that had a major effect on Soviet policy making. Russia conducted its first test of the Sarmat, an intercontinental ballistic missile that carries a heavy nuclear payload, on April 20. Vladimir Putin and his advisers have issued nuclear warnings throughout the war in Ukraine, threatening the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization… Read More