Former US State and Defense Department Officials Discuss Prospects for Nuclear War

• Former US State and Defense Department Officials Discuss Prospects for Nuclear War
  by J. L’Heureau, https://www.wsws.org/
  On December 3, Foreign Affairs, published by the US. Council on Foreign Relations, and Scientific American hosted a panel discussion entitled “Do Nuclear Weapons Matter?” Gideon Rose, the editor for Foreign Affairs and one of the three participating panelists, explained that the panel’s purpose, over two-and-a-half decades since the end of the Cold War, was to discuss the contemporary significance of nuclear weapons.
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  The three panelists all have deep ties to the US State and Defense Departments. Rose himself was a staff member of the National Security Council under the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s. As the editor of Foreign Affairs since 2010, he has overseen and taken a direct part in the debate over US foreign policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
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  The second panelist, Elbridge Colby, served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 2017-2018. He is one of the principal architects of the latest US National Defense Strategy, which advocates a shift of US imperialism’s focus away from the “war on terror” and towards “great power competition,” i.e., war with Russia and China.
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  Colby is the author of an article published recently in Foreign Affairs titled “If you want peace, prepare for nuclear war,” a modern adaptation of the Latin phrase, si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war). In it he argues for the US adopting a strategy to fight a “limited” nuclear war.
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  The third panelist, Nina Tannenwald, served in the US State Department under the Obama administration.
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  In introducing the panel discussion, the event’s moderator, Curtis Brainard, Managing Editor of Scientific American, stressed that they all could agree that “a lot has changed in the last 10 years, and that the specter of nuclear conflict…has come back to center stage.” He posed the question, “After so many years of détente, what happened?”
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  A large portion of the forum centered on the rapidly deteriorating relationship between the US and Russia on one hand, and the US and China on the other. Tannenwald argued that one of the principal reasons the world is experiencing a new “qualitative arms race” is Russia’s “bringing us back to the old geopolitics.”
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  Colby, while agreeing that “Russia is the more pointed reason that nuclear weapons have reemerged in the international security environment,” argued that China was the cause for “the more fundamental, structural shift” in U.S. foreign and nuclear policy.
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