Deterrence

The United States are not prepared for a cold war with China over Taiwan, yet to avoid it, America needs to start acting as if they were already upon them, and learn from the last one.

Threatening the US-Saudi partnership over of Saudi Arabian crimes would risk more American lives, cause greater conflict, and increase injustice and human suffering.

Some America First Republicans are nearly indistinguishable from the standard fare retreaters we were served from the “Blame America First” leftists of the Cold War.

Xi Jinping is watching the Ukrainian invasion closely and is strategizing his long-term interactions with the democratic world based on the West’s response.

In our day it is difficult for some, perhaps many, to recall that the West’s Cold War policy of nuclear deterrence—anchored in traditional just war moral principles of just cause, right intention, proportionality, and discrimination—helped avert war rather than increase the prospects of nuclear conflagration.

Either we deter Russian aggression, which means that we convince Putin that we will not tolerate his first-strike nuclear threats and be intimidated, or we passively acquiesce to nuclear blackmail and Russian butchery of a nation that was promised its integrity and sovereignty five years after the Cold War ended.

Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement to place his nation’s nuclear deterrent forces on a state of heightened alert invites those of us in the free world—and surely the United States—to revisit the just war assumptions that served as a deterrence during the Cold War.

With Ukraine languishing outside the safety of the NATO alliance, the consensus seems to be that there is little the alliance can do as Putin enforces his latter-day Brezhnev Doctrine. That consensus view is wrong.

“Strategic ambiguity” does not accurately describe the US policy on Taiwan that has been executed by successive Republican and Democratic administrations over the past 40-some years. A better description would be “strategic tacitness.”