In The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin recounts the traditional Greek proverb that “the fox is aware of many issues, however the hedgehog is aware of one massive factor.” Berlin’s essay was apparently written as one thing of a throwaway, nevertheless it stays a helpful lens by way of which to know the grand strategists of U.S. international coverage, particularly through the early Chilly Warfare.
America’s Chilly Warrior: Paul Nitze and Nationwide Safety From Roosevelt to Reagan, James Graham Wilson, Cornell College Press, 336 pp., $32.95, July 2024
The architects of American international coverage throughout these years have been a few of our best foxes. George Kennan was a generational mental who simply occurred to be a international service officer. George Marshall’s army and operational genius have been matched by his political acumen, because the organizer of the American army victory in WWII and the political and financial rehabilitator of Europe.
After which there’s Paul Nitze: one other Chilly Warfare international coverage titan who ran the State Division’s Coverage Planning Workers below Truman and was an important voice on protection and arms management coverage for many years, but a dedicated hedgehog.
In his very good America’s Chilly Warrior: Paul Nitze and Nationwide Safety from Roosevelt to Reagan, State Division historian James Graham Wilson portrays Nitze as persistently animated by a single, “steadfast conviction that the US wanted to own overriding power.” He was a number one apostle for growing typical protection spending through the Truman and Eisenhower years, and as he transitioned to concentrate on nuclear coverage through the Seventies and Eighties, he was a tireless advocate for ramping up U.S. nuclear capabilities.
On this new period of competitors with China and Russia, Nitze’s profession and concepts are extra related than ever. They spotlight each the promise and pitfalls of a relentless striving for army superiority. His imaginative and prescient of a strong world protection community and deterrent, specified by NSC-68 in 1950, evokes U.S. protection coverage within the Indo-Pacific and Europe immediately, whether or not policymakers notice it or not.
However his story additionally warns us that we’re presently within the harmful “early Chilly Warfare” cycle of unfettered protection buildup and competitors with China, much like the Fifties. It ought to hasten interested by learn how to rein in army competitors and set up extra protection and arms management guardrails now, earlier than all of it will get out of hand.
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On this black-and-white photograph, Nitze has his palms folded in entrance of him as he sits at a desk subsequent to President John F. Kennedy. - Nitze at a press convention with U.S. President John F. Kennedy on Aug. 30, 1960.
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Ronald Reagan gestures with each palms as he stands subsequent to Nitze and Rostow below an ornately framed portray. All three males put on darkish fits. - On this black and white photograph, U.S. President Ronald Reagan talks with Nitze, then the chief negotiator on intermediate vary ballistic missiles in Europe, and Eugene Rostow, the director of the Arms Management and Disarmament Company, earlier than a briefing by them in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1982. Through the briefing, they stated that “little or no progress” had been made on nuclear weapons discount negotiations with the Soviets.
Like lots of his Smart Males contemporaries, Paul Nitze was a convert from the world of Wall Road within the Thirties, answering the decision of public service through the Roosevelt administration, and staying on to assist remake the post-war world below Truman. However what units Nitze aside was his longevity in Washington. He remained an necessary authorities participant by way of the Eighties.
But Nitze by no means fairly broke into the highest ranks. He lacked the suppleness of thoughts of a Kennan or Dean Acheson, who initially warned Kennan that “[Nitze]’s not a long-range thinker.” Nitze struggled, generally awkwardly, to win the presidential ear. Throughout Nitze’s first appointment with Eisenhower on the White Home, “he opened the incorrect door and located Ike in his underwear.” He by no means cracked Kennedy or Johnson’s inside ring and was out of the loop on Vietnam coverage. It was solely below Reagan that Nitze actually discovered a presidential patron, who leaned closely on Nitze for his experience on arms management and nuclear points. By then, Nitze had distinguished himself as maybe the foremost skilled on nuclear coverage in Washington.
All through the whole thing of this spectacular run inside authorities, Nitze displayed hedgehog-like fidelity in his perception that “US power introduced stability; US weak spot introduced instability.” It was, in keeping with Wilson’s biography, the prism by way of which Nitze seen nearly every part.
What led to Japan’s resolution to assault the US in 1941? Lack of sturdy American capabilities within the Pacific. What was incorrect with Eisenhower’s “New Look” coverage? A discount in protection spending within the pursuit of a extra economical reliance on huge nuclear retaliation. What brought about Khrushchev to again down over the Berlin Disaster of 1961 and Cuban Missile Disaster of 1962? U.S. typical and nuclear superiority. What brought about the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in 1979? Russian superiority in first strike nuclear functionality on the time, which permitted and incentivized Moscow to take extra danger.
You get the purpose. Nitze was all the time pushing up, up, up on spending: typical forces, nuclear forces, extra sophisticated missile supply methods and cell items to evade USSR concentrating on. Even when it meant larger taxes or finances cuts. As Nitze coldly put it, “the avoidance of nuclear warfare is rather more necessary than growing welfare funds.”
The commander of the Guantanamo Bay naval base factors Nitze towards the gate that separates the bottom from Fidel Castro’s Cuba on Feb. 13, 1964.Keystone/Getty Photographs
Nitze was proper, and prescient, in urging the US to construct up a reputable army deterrent and a community of army property around the globe on the onset of the Chilly Warfare. This imaginative and prescient was greatest articulated in NSC-68, which he crafted whereas head of the State Division’s Coverage Planning Workers in 1950 and serves because the founding doc of U.S. technique through the Chilly Warfare. Nitze used NSC-68 to advertise a drastic improve typical army capabilities “to a degree beforehand unprecedented in peacetime.”
It additionally referred to as on the US to wage a decidedly world battle, backing allies around the globe to thwart Soviet aggression and dealing to reinforce their very own protection capabilities. Whereas all this may occasionally appear intuitive on reflection, in its context NSC-68 was revolutionary. Nitze appropriately anticipated that the US couldn’t withdraw from the world, ramp down its protection capabilities throughout peacetime, and depend on surging its latent military-industrial capability solely on the time of acute want, the technique it had employed earlier than each WWI and WWII.
The place he was clearly incorrect was in his concentrate on the nuclear steadiness because the singular determinant of Soviet habits. In line with Sergey Radchenko’s glorious new guide on Soviet decision-making, To Run the World, the end result of the Cuban Missile Disaster can’t be defined just by American nuclear preponderance. The U.S. promise to take away its nuclear missiles in Turkey enabled Khruschev’s “blinking” through the disaster. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was fueled by a way of insecurity—reasonably than superiority—as Moscow risked shedding a shopper state. It’s exhausting to think about Brezhnev taking a unique resolution if, say, the US had extra nuclear missiles.
Maybe the bigger error was one-dimensional strategic pondering centered on army issues above all. Nitze’s life’s work and story may very well be boiled right down to a fixation on weapons, protection spending, and ratios of nuclear throw-weight. He downplayed the significance of U.S. promotion of human rights, dismissing it as “hypocritical and pointless.” In a way, he missed the boat on simply how a lot of the Chilly Warfare lay outdoors of the priesthood of nuclear weapons coverage or army issues.
Nitze sits in an workplace with a big map of world on wall behind him in 1964. JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Getty Photographs
As the US enters a brand new contest with Beijing and Moscow, it appears we’re all part-Nitze now. The necessity for a ahead American presence and the hazards of retrenchment are simply as legitimate as they have been throughout Nitze’s time. We’ve discovered this the exhausting manner in Ukraine, the place a scarcity of army industrial capability in each the US and Europe has hamstrung our help for Kyiv.
The Biden administration has constructed a formidable “latticework” of protection alliances within the Indo-Pacific to discourage China, very a lot within the spirit of NSC-68. Pentagon budgets are knocking on the door of $1 trillion yearly—despite the fact that the US already spends extra on protection than the subsequent 10 nations mixed. Because the New York Occasions lately reported, the Biden administration is now updating its nuclear technique to deal with the twin risk of each China and Russia, and warned in June that the US would construct up nuclear forces to face this risk, if wanted. It could all make Nitze blush.
However because the Chilly Warfare demonstrated, the search for army superiority can change into a self-fulfilling hazard. Vietnam offers an apparent instance of overzealous and self-defeating army flexing. Nitze’s personal profession even represents this cautionary arc: He spent the Fifties by way of Seventies advocating for nuclear preponderance, however then through the Eighties served because the essential U.S. negotiator as Reagan sought to restrict and even cut back nuclear stockpiles. We had so blindly built-up nuclear weapons that we reached level of existential hazard, after which needed to pull all of it again from the brink.
This needs to be a sobering lesson for U.S. policymakers immediately. Proper now, U.S. coverage is in its “early Chilly Warfare” part: an upward escalatory spiral in opposition to each China and Russia and no brakes in sight. The one arms management treaty left between the US and Russia, New START, expires in 2026; China is embarking on an unprecedented nuclear buildup and is estimated to achieve 1,500 weapons by 2035. Tensions reached such a low after Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022 that China shut off all military-to-military dialogue with Washington. Since then the Biden administration has admirably—and efficiently—labored to reopen some protection channels with Beijing, however mutual belief is missing and extra formal army agreements seem fairly distant.
This isn’t sustainable. Chilly Warfare historical past, and Paul Nitze’s personal, tells us that the pendulum will inevitably swing again the opposite manner: We’ll discover ourselves both in a disaster, or in such an untenably harmful scenario that we’ll be pressured into arms management negotiations. We’re nonetheless caught within the tense equal of the Fifties and early Sixties Chilly Warfare. Whereas Russia and China could also be unwilling and tough interlocutors in the intervening time, to keep away from repeating historical past, the US ought to put each effort into constructing army and arms management guardrails, reasonably than solely ramping up the stress. Higher to halt the cycle now than look ahead to a Cuban Missile-style disaster.
What’s extra, a Nitze-like concentrate on army deterrence because the treatment and rationalization for every part dangers lacking the primary recreation. Sure, protection is necessary. However immediately’s competitors with China is being waged primarily economically and technologically, simply because the Chilly Warfare was fought as an ideological and diplomatic battle and was misplaced by the Soviet Union as their economic system didn’t hold tempo. Had the Soviets coerced and deterred the US a bit extra, would the end result of the Chilly Warfare have modified? The reply is probably going no; the Soviet system was rotten, and inherent Western financial, technological, and ideological strengths gained the day.
As Nitze’s story demonstrates, a hedgehog-like fixation on establishing army supremacy above all else could in the end show as a lot a distraction (and a hazard) as an asset—one which we’ll should redress someday sooner or later.
