Keeping the Cold War with China from Turning Hot

As a hot summer of Iran debate heats up the nation’s capital, one may be at least slightly reassured that President Donald Trump has exercised some measure of restraint—albeit belatedly. Yet, the President’s reasoning, that the proposed strikes would have cost an estimated 150 casualties, implies a misunderstanding regarding the uncertain nature of war and its inherent risks.Putting aside for now the tortured story that brought us to this precarious point since withdrawing from the Iran nuclear accord, Trump’s assumption that America’s military and intelligence leaders can estimate with great precision when an armed conflict will end or how it will end implies a shocking lack of humility. To be fair, that’s a depressingly common trait amongst the Washington “blob.” More than half a century of problematic calculations on this score absolutely underline the case for restraint. By the way, this mostly unfortunate history also implies that our forefathers were both wiser and much more circumspect regarding the use of force, since they unambiguously placed the war powers squarely with the legislature, rather than the executive.What is even more troubling, however, is that while such hawkish “shenanigans” in the Middle East are not likely to change anytime soon, the same tendencies are at work in today’s great power rivalries, but the impact could be catastrophic, particularly as one considers the consequences for the nuclear strategy calculus. It is well known that the edifice of arms control, which did a reasonable job of mitigating great power rivalry in the past, has been crumbling now for more than a decade. A couple of recent articles in the Chinese military press focusing on tactical nuclear weaponry offer a glimpse of the perilous world to come, if these trends are not reversed in the near term.

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