Friday News Roundup — December 22, 2023
Holiday greetings to you all from Washington, D.C., where the holiday recess is somewhat dampened by the looming crush of January deadlines and unfinished business. Still, with a febrile mood in Washington, getting out of town never hurt. With the year winding down in politics and business, we hope that you have very happy holidays and a pleasant start to the new year, with safe travels for those headed home and bountiful tables for those hosting.
Before we leave you for the holidays, Dan Mahaffee shares some parting thoughts as he leaves CSPC full time. James Kitfield writes on the prospects for strategic arms control during an era of growing tensions.
As a reminder, we will resume on January 12, 2024.
Until Next Time, Not Farewell
By Dan Mahaffee
It’s difficult to know where to start when reflecting on nearly a decade-and-a-half of engaging work with CSPC, but it is always best to start with gratitude. As I embark upon the next phase of my career, I am thankful for the insightful conversations, strategic thinking, and deep wisdom I have found from those of you I have come to know as contacts, colleagues, confidants — and most importantly friends. I am also thankful for the opportunity we’ve had to make a real impact on so many important issues, and I’ll share some thoughts on those, of course.
Thank yous are easier than goodbyes, although this is not really goodbye. With the new year, my role at CSPC will be changing from the day-to-day Senior Vice President, Director of Policy to join among our Senior Fellows. I will be moving to the Chicago area, back to where I grew up, to not only be closer with family but also take a leadership role in our philanthropic work. I am looking forward to joining the ranks of our esteemed fellows, and I am excited for what the team at CSPC is positioned to do. I am proud of the work we have done and grateful that I can continue to stay engaged in my new role.
I plan to provide the occasional contribution to the roundup moving forward, and I know it will continue to provide incisive analysis and updates, along with news you or I might miss. I am particularly proud of building this roundup into a regular product. It has come a long way from the conversation I had with Michael Stetcher where I described the concept of the roundup, and his simple reply was “what’s stopping you?” From that moment on I have used the platform to share my thoughts with you, while also enjoying other insights including Joshua’s literary picks and transatlantic insights; Veera’s and Hidetoshi’s updates from Finland and Japan; Robert’s insights on trade; Erica’s updates on Capitol Hill; Ethan’s and James’s defense and geopolitical coverage; and so many of our perspicacious interns’ contributions.
Now looking back over the arc of the roundup from its soft-launch before the 2018 midterms to today, it is remarkable how it maps my thoughts as I reflect on what we’ve accomplished and what remains to be done.
Mapping the rising competition between the United States and China has been the most transformative geopolitical development of my time, and it comes with the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerating and clarifying great power competition, even while events in the Middle East and Afghanistan suggest the real limits of American power — or our failure to coherently wield the elements of power together.
The competition with China, however, goes beyond the Cold War calculus of military power and diplomatic maneuvering, as the outcome of the economic competition with China is far more critical to our future than it was with the Soviet Union. Setting aside the military and diplomatic questions, how are we doing in the economic pillar of this competition? We have seen progress in the economic security arena, as policymakers have focused attention on tools like export controls and greater protection of intellectual property. We have seen promising but mixed results from efforts like the CHIPS Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and other infrastructure measures to secure supply chains and build resilience in critical infrastructure, but efforts suffer too from bureaucratic bottlenecks and the added complexity of political priorities mixed with market incentives. On trade, I fear we have gone backwards with little political appetite to enter into trade agreements (despite repeated acknowledgement of the importance of trade policy) and counterproductive, self-harming decisions regarding engagement on digital trade and data policy.
Looking forward, we risk going too far if our economic security controls restrict our dynamism instead of keeping technology safe. What good are protections for our innovations if we are not making innovations in the first place? R&D, workforce, and competitiveness are just as critical to winning this technology competition as are efforts to keep our technology out of the wrong hands. In terms of our nascent efforts to build industrial policy, I fear that political deadlock and unpredictability will torpedo the best-intended efforts. If we continue making these policies, it will be important to provide consistent funding and the necessary government staff for handling investment screening, export controls, R&D grantmaking, and other existing and proposed economic security tools.
The dysfunction of our politics is not only a danger to the policymaking I describe, as it also corrodes our citizens’ perception of our institutions and both friends’ and adversaries’ perceptions of American reliability. Dysfunction in outcome has also accompanied a breakdown in decorum. Sadly the outrageous and salacious behavior of a few often draws media attention, overshadowing the scores of Members of Congress and hundreds of staffers working earnestly for their constituents out of a sense of public service and patriotism. The incentives of political celebrity, however, promote partisanship over product — and I fear the feedback loop where political deadlock halts needed reforms and incentivizes the political kayfabe at the expense of practical governing.
How we address this global competition while fixing our political system and addressing domestic challenges is a tall order, and I am proud to have been part of the effort to tackle these weighty questions — and look forward to continuing to participate in the conversation and continue to lend my support and expertise as best I can. One of the most important lessons that my late mentor Dr. David Abshire left with me was that “trust is the coin of the realm.” I have trust and confidence in the future of the Center and so many of the people honestly working for our country over their party, but we have much to do to rebuild trust within Washington and within this country in order to succeed in the competition ahead.
Dan Mahaffee is CSPC’s Senior Vice President and Director of Programs. Nuclear Arms Control
Ninety Seconds to Midnight
By James Kitfield
The past year has seen the worst tensions among nuclear powers in a generation. After recklessly threatening Western powers with nuclear weapons if they dared intervene in Moscow’s illegal war against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally suspended his nation’s participation in the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the United States. As President Joe Biden has noted, the prospect of Armageddon has darkened the counsels of the major powers for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In a recent report, the Defense Department also warned that China has greatly exceeded past projections of the size of its nuclear arsenal, fielding more than 500 nuclear warheads in a major expansion and on pace to produce more than 1,000 warheads by 2030, and 1,500 by 2035. Already the head of U.S. Strategic Command has acknowledged that the command is “furiously” rewriting its deterrence theory to account for a “tripolar” world of three nuclear weapons peers. Meanwhile, during a recent test a U.S. Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile failed after launch, drawing attention to an aging U.S. nuclear arsenal, and calling into question the country’s long-delayed strategic modernization effort and nuclear deterrent.
Current tensions along the U.S.-Russia-China axis have prompted many experts and historians to draw parallels with the Cold War. Unfortunately, these rising tensions come at a time when the carefully constructed Cold War architecture of nuclear arms control and verification treaties, deconfliction agreements and open communications channels is near collapse. As military provocations and brinkmanship increase dramatically, the current era of major power competition starts to bear an alarming resemblance to the darkest early years of the Cold War, when missteps and miscalculations created potentially existential crises like the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis, all of which pushed the major nuclear powers to the brink.
Little wonder that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reset its “Doomsday Clock” in 2023 to just 90 seconds to midnight, moving the world closer to “doom’s doorstep” than at any time since the clock’s inception in 1947.
Rebuilding Strategic Stability
In recent years, the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress (CSPC) has convened a group of notable arms control experts and Russia and China hands to recall some of the muscle memory from the construction of a nuclear arms control regime that kept the Cold War from going hot for decades. We also recently brought together key lawmakers and leaders from the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) to discuss these worrying trends, and the path towards greater strategic stability.
Arms control experts credit the Biden administration for taking early steps to try and stabilize a roiling geopolitical landscape. Confronted in early 2021 with the imminent sunset of the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction) Treaty — the last treaty limiting the size of the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, which possess 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons –Biden and Putin extended the treaty for the maximum of five years. The extension gave U.S. and Russian negotiators critical time and breathing room to begin discussing a host of thorny issues that must be addressed in a follow-on agreement, and in broader strategic stability discussions.
That positive momentum has understandably stalled as a result of Putin’s reckless and illegal invasion of a sovereign Ukraine, but the need for a continued dialogue between the world’s nuclear weapons superpowers has arguably never been greater.
In November 2022, Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping also met on the sidelines of a G-20 Summit. Though their lengthy discussion yielded no substantive breakthroughs on sensitive issues such as Taiwan, arms control, human rights or trade, Biden rightly stressed the need for more regular strategic stability conversations and more “guardrails” to help Washington and Beijing manage an increasingly adversarial and acrimonious relationship between the world’s status quo and rising superpowers.
Certainly new guardrails and action are urgently needed to avoid adding a runaway nuclear arms race to an already volatile geopolitical competition. As part of its nuclear weapons modernization, Russia has introduced six new nuclear weapons delivery systems, including a long-range hypersonic glide vehicle. China has also successfully tested its own hypersonic missile, and remains on track to dramatically increase its nuclear weapons arsenal by decade’s end. For its part the United States is also modernizing its nuclear triad of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, nuclear-capable aircraft, and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and is developing hypersonic delivery systems.
The world is currently living through a period of great instability as it copes with the aftershocks of the worst global pandemic since 1918, one of the worst economic shocks since the Great Depression, the most dangerous and destructive war in Europe since World War II, the worst attack on our Middle East ally Israel since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the worst tensions in major power relations since the early days of the Cold War. These crises come at a time when the treaties and multilateral institutions that are the foundation of the international order and strategic stability are visibly weakening, and in danger of collapse. In the past such periods of deep economic distress and geopolitical tensions have given rise to dark political forces, and are ripe for confrontation among nation-states. History will not judge kindly leaders who stood complacent while a runaway nuclear arms race was added to that already volatile mix.
James Kitfield is a CSPC Senior Fellow.
The views of authors are their own and not that of CSPC.