Nuclear Issues

This week in Say More, Project Syndicate talks with Joseph S. Nye, Jr., an emeritus professor at Harvard Kennedy School, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, and the author, most recently, of A Life in the American Century.

Belfer Center experts on the U.S.-China relationship and Middle East issues shared thoughts on the significance of the unexpected Iran-Saudi Arabia agreement brokered by China. 

As the best documented major crisis in history, in substantial part because Kennedy secretly taped the deliberations in which he and his closest advisers were weighing choices they knew could lead to a catastrophic war, the Cuban missile crisis has become the canonical case study in nuclear statecraft. Over the decades since, key lessons from the crisis have been adapted and applied by the successors of Kennedy and Khrushchev to inform fateful choices.

Joseph Nye writes that even at this early stage, there are at least eight lessons— some old, some new— that the world is learning (or relearning) from the war in Ukraine.

Polls in the United States and nine allied countries in Europe and Asia show that public support for a nuclear test is very low. If the Trump administration conducts a test, then it shouldn't expect backing from Americans or its closest U.S. partners.

It seems unlikely that Russia will again possess the resources to balance U.S. power in the same way that the Soviet Union did during the four decades after World War II. But declining powers merit as much diplomatic attention as rising ones do. Joseph S. Nye worries that the United States lacks a strategy to prevent Russia from becoming an international spoiler.

President Trump’s unconventional foreign policy appeared in disarray amid a series of setbacks around the globe and mounting signs that the president and his advisors were on the verge of losing several risky policy bets.