Deterrence

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.

After a tumultuous start to the post-World War II era and before the Cold War fully commenced, the board of supervisors of Christianity and Crisis issued a joint statement in December 1946 that tried to explain a Christian approach to international issues.

“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.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month unveiled plans for a $740-billion defense-spending bill for fiscal year 2022. That’s nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars—in long form: $740,000,000,000. That looks like a lot of money. But looks can be deceiving.

Three decades after the Cold War’s end, do we still need a nuclear arsenal today? Edward Ifft thinks not and in Christianity Today urges his fellow Christians to believe likewise. Peter Feaver, William Inboden, and Michael Singh disagree.

Matthew Kroenig’s The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy provides an immensely important and forceful rebuttal to those nuclear scholars who have gained influence among average American citizens as well as within the walls of the Pentagon where nuclear strategy is conceived and carried out. In doing so, the central theme in Logic also exposes the vacuity of the moral “arguments” mainline Christian “thought leaders” have pushed in the name of US disarmament advocacy.