Politico has the bad news: “Biden goes ‘full steam ahead’ on Trump’s nuclear expansion despite campaign rhetoric”. An article by Lara Seligman, Bryan Bender, and Connor O’Brien quotes Biden as telling the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a speech given just before the close of the Obama administration in January 2017, the following:
If future budgets reverse the choices we’ve made, and pour additional money into a nuclear buildup, it harkens back to the Cold War and will do nothing to increase the day-to-day security of the United States or our allies.”
Well, clearly, that was so 2017. And now Biden is harkening back to the Cold War era with a vengeance. The administration is intent on ponying up a cool $43.2 billion this fiscal year on nuclear weapons, not quite the $44.2 billion the Trump administration spent last year.
It appears that Biden has capitulated entirely to the “enemies list” prepared by the Trump administration, continuing “get tough” (i.e., completely unreasonable) policies against such non-threats as Venezuela and Iran and North Korea, not to mention (of course) China, aka “the Big Enchilada”. According to Jeremy Schapiro,1 writing in Politico, the Pentagon’s long-time dream of a new Cold War against China is already a done deal in Biden Land:
China is the clear, even obsessive focus of Biden’s foreign policy. It is, in the new administration’s view, the global and ideological challenge of the next generation, the clear successor to the Cold War and the War on Terror as the organizing principle of American foreign policy. Meeting that generational challenge requires subordinating every other foreign policy issue to a global conflict with a peer competitor. White House meetings with titles like “China and Latin America,” “China and 5G,” and “China and Climate” follow that script.
Despite the furor caused by the rise of ISIS, and the tragedy of Benghazi, which ended the Obama administration’s brief dream of positioning itself as the “peace administration”, it’s been obvious for a long time that the Bush administration’s fraudulent “War on Terror” wasn’t the multi-generational cash cow of the Pentagon’s dreams. Somehow, “boots on the ground” led to nothing but chaos and blood, rather than “victory”. Who knew that naked force couldn’t solve all problems?
Cold wars are so much safer than hot ones! Who wants to sweat his butt off in Iraq or Afghanistan, for Christ’s sake, listening to a bunch of Muslims jabber in some weird language you can’t understand, when you could be sitting in air-conditioned office in Virginia, doling out multi-billion dollar contracts to mega-corporations who, in a few years’ time, are going to hire you at some fat salary to sit on the other side of the desk you’re sitting at now? That’s a real soldier’s life! A modern soldier’s life.
Well, that would be “endurable” for us non-military types, if you don’t mind pouring some $750 billion a year down a rat hole, except for the endless macho muscle-flexing and bullying needed to create all the “danger” required to justify this staggering waste. No country is a threat to the United States. Our compulsive tendency to isolate and browbeat “rogue nations” into behaving themselves simply guarantees that they won’t behave themselves, which is, of course, the real point.
We don’t need to “improve” our nuclear arsenal, other than to ensure that the existing weapons remain stable. And, of course, we don’t need nearly so many of the ones we’ve got. The U.S. currently has about 6,500 nuclear weapons, while China has about 270. Nothing is more obvious than that we should be retiring our existing warheads rather than creating new, and “better” ones, which is exactly what the Biden administration is doing. The obvious goal is to goad the Chinese into adding to their new arsenal, which will then be portrayed as an outrageous “threat”, which will then “require” even better and more fearsome ones, in an endless cycle of threats, provocation, and waste.
The simple fact is, nothing worth a nuclear war, and therefore these weapons will never be used, except by accident. Biden has swallowed the old “the stronger we are the safer we are” canard, and it is an ugly duckling indeed. For the stronger we are, the more threatening our behavior becomes, and, thus, the more likely an accident.
There is a sliver of good news—there is some opposition to Biden’s embrace of the Pentagon’s plans from liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill. The bad news is, the entirety of the Republican Party will congratulate the president on his capitulation and rise as one to denounce him if he even hints at modifying his current stupidity, particularly since it is now de rigueur among Republicans to insist, at a minimum, that China’s Wuhan lab brewed the covid 19 virus, and (probably) intentionally did so as a bioweapon and (also “probably”) deliberately released it to infect “us”. Furthermore, most Democrats are too fond of defense spending to give a damn about its actual foreign policy implications, as long as plenty of the cash comes to their district, something I’ve complained about endlessly in the past
Afterwords
It’s icing on the cake (I guess) that the most unnecessary—and, of course, the most provocative—member of our projected new arsenal is a sea-launched cruise missile carrying a low-yield nuclear warhead—you know, for those little jobs! Why, it’s barely a nuke at all! We “need” this because Russia has one, and if someone else has something, well, we need it too!
We’re building this to “deter” Russia, which in 2019 spent about $65 billion on its military, less than one-tenth of the U.S. budget. Furthermore, we supposedly need this weapon to “protect” Europe, despite the fact that the European Union makes Russia look like a pipsqueak, Consider the following: EU population, 447,710,000; Russia’s population, 146,200,00. EU GDP, $16.2 trillion; Russia’s GDP, $4.33 trillion. EU defense spending (2019), $220 billion; Russia’s defense spending (2019), $65 billion. Further furthermore, by “getting tough” with Russia, we naturally push them into the arms of China, just the opposite of the policy we successfully pursued to, you know, end and win the Cold War! That was our big mistake! Winning! We won’t make it again!
I am a “shocking” dove when it comes to China, no matter how repulsive its internal policies waxen. I will even go on record to say that the freedom of Taiwan, like that of Ukraine, is not worth a nuclear war. Both countries were parts of the traditional Chinese and Russian empires for centuries, despite significant twentieth-century vicissitudes, particularly in the case of Taiwan.3 This is, of course, an open rejection of the “guiding myth” of post-WWII U.S. foreign policy, the supposed lesson of Munich, that “appeasement” never works.
In fact, the U.S. has successfully followed a policy of appeasement many times. The U.S. wisely acquiesced in the Soviet Union’s brutal domination of eastern Europe immediately after World War II, and did nothing to aid anti-Soviet uprisings in East Germany and Hungary in the 1950s and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. Eisenhower was happy to get out of the Korean War leaving North Korea in the hands of the communists, and refused to reinforce the French in Vietnam.4 Our abandonment of South Vietnam during the Ford administration, while both deeply humiliating and tragic for the Vietnamese (though the conduct of the war was plenty tragic as well) was a geopolitical plus for the United States: no “dominos” fell, and Vietnam, like every other communist economy, quickly became a basket case/money pit, costing the Soviets 40 billion rubles a year, making “International Communism” weaker rather than stronger. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, President Carter cut off U.S. grain shipments to the U.S.S.R. When Ronald Reagan was elected, he resumed them, trading and negotiating with the Soviets even while resisting their attempted conquest of Afghanistan, but only through proxies. In the non-communist world, the list of actual rather than “cultural” genocides we have “allowed” to happen—either because we couldn’t prevent them or because we thought it was in our interest to let them occur—is, if anything, even more extensive.5
For wise words on China, see Daniel Drezner’s excellent article in Reason last year, “There Is No China Crisis”. Unfortunately, U.S. hostility to China has increased exponentially in the past year, now that Biden is in and Trump is out, and the difficulty of following Dan’s wise words (I hope he still agrees with them) has increased exponentially as well.
1. Shapiro, almost a parody of Blobland (Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Brookings, State Department), recently infuriated Dan Drezner by claiming, more or less, that think tanks are bullshit—which is, I admit, a bit like a sinner thinking that if he confesses his sins he gets to keep on committing them, because if Jeremy has any plans of retiring from his current gig as research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, I haven’t heard about them. But Dan seems to lack all sense of humor when it comes to the tanks. You take that back or I’m telling Mom!
2. The idea that we could somehow use this “mini-nuke” without triggering a full-scale nuclear exchange is ludicrous. Harold Brown, secretary of defense under Jimmy Carter, wrote in “defense” of the chemical weapons programs he insisted on funding that even though every war game “showed” that use by the Soviets of such weapons would inevitably result in an all-out nuclear exchange, involving weapons thousands of times more deadly (deadly because effective, which chemical weapons are not)—well, the Soviets had them, so we had to have them too! A “mini-nuke” of any sort, of course, would surely be ten times more lethal, and a thousand times more “provocative”, than nerve gas. But who cares? More toys for little boys! More toys for little boys! More toys for little boys!
3. Taiwan was annexed to China in the late 17th century, seized by Japan in the early 20th, and has been independent under U.S. aegis ever since the triumph of the Chinese communists on the mainland since 1949.
4. I’ve read in one source that Ike wanted to back the French, but only if the British would as well, and Churchill refused. In real time, however, the explanation given to the American people was that Vietnam was “no place for American boys”.
5. I talk about and around this topicin the course of a stunningly long-winded review of Samantha Power’s memoir, The Education of an Idealist.
