Deterrence is built over decades, but can crumble in an instant. And that instant is now.

Rebeccah Heinrich’s lecture at Christianity & National Security 2023. Rebeccah Heinrichs discusses nuclear deterrence, the law of armed conflict, and…

Putin has failed to meet his objectives, but Ukraine has a difficult rebuilding process ahead, even with expected international support.

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.”