Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to say a few words about strategic stability through the prism of the Ukraine war and the future of arms control engagement.  As usual, please remember that I speak here only for myself.  With that caveat, however, I hope our discussion will be interesting.

I was asked to address whether the concept of strategic stability has changed in recent years, and what it might look like in 2025.  By way of full disclosure, therefore, I should start by confessing that I already have something of a dog in this theoretical fight. 

But let me back up for a second.  For those of us in the nuclear weapons world, the most common definition of “strategic stability” is quite nuclear-specific.  As the former Defense Department representative to the New START strategic arms negotiations once described it, this narrow definition of strategic stability means “the absence of incentives to use nuclear weapons first (crisis stability) and the absence of incentives to build up a nuclear force (arms race stability).”  Through this lens, in effect, things are strategically stable if you’re not lobbing nuclear weapons at each other or rushing to out-build the other guy.

I’ve been arguing for years, however, that we’d be well advised to adopt a more capacious definition of “strategic stability.”  In a chapter I wrote for an edited volume back in 2013, I contended that we needed to look beyond just traditional nuclear-centric issues such as first strike stability.  Instead, we need to conceive of strategic stability as a broader concept that describes a situation between nuclear-armed adversaries in which they feel no incentives to attack each other (or each other’s allies) by any means, not merely with nuclear weapons.  As I put it in that chapter, strategic stability should be seen as

“loosely analogous to a military ‘Nash Equilibrium’ between the principal players in the international environment (i.e., the ‘great powers’) as it pertains to the possibility of their using force against each other. [I] define[] strategic stability as being a situation in which no power has any significant incentive to try to adjust its relative standing vis-à-vis any other power by unilateral means involving the direct application of armed force against it.  General war, in other words, is precluded as a means of settling differences or advancing any particular power’s substantive agenda. The environment is thus strategically stable if no player feels itself able to alter its position

by the direct use of military force against another player without this resulting in a less optimal outcome than the alternative of a continued military stalemate and the pursuit of national objectives by at least somewhat less aggressive means.” 

While traditional accounts describe strategic stability as an inherent good, moreover, I also argued that strategic stability through that broader lens is not necessarily a good thing, mainly because of the degree to which it privileges the geopolitical status quo.  At the very least, I observed, strategic stability will have different benefits or costs “depend[ing] upon who one is in the constellation of players.” 

If you’re a status quo power facing revisionist challengers, in other words, strategic stability, in this definition, is presumably your friend.  As we are discovering both with Russia and with China, however, if you’re a revisionist power whose geopolitical ambitions run to changing the global balance of power – by force if necessary – strategic stability is undesirable and needs to be prevented or undermined, at least until you try to stabilize things again around a new status quo that represents the way you want the world to work.

I think that approach to thinking about strategic stability holds up pretty well more than a decade later, and that the current world illustrates the problems of thinking about strategic stability from a purely nuclear perspective. Indeed, you might even argue that “stability” in the strategic nuclear realm between the United States and Russia has actually contributed to instability in the broader sense. 

In what I refer to as the phenomenon of an “offensive nuclear umbrella,” Vladimir Putin has been trying to take advantage of the “mutually assured destruction” nature of our strategic nuclear relationship with Russia and weaponize Western fears of nuclear escalation by using nuclear saber-rattling to deter us from doing anything to stop his aggression against his neighbors, and even to deter us from reacting to what British officials have described as a “concerted campaign” of Russian-sponsored arson, sabotage, and other mischief in NATO countries.  At the same time, with China presently sprinting toward at least strategic nuclear parity with the United States, Beijing would seem to be preparing to play the same game as Xi Jinping readies the People’s Liberation Army to conquer the free people of Taiwan, a vibrant democracy with whom the United States has a security relationship enshrined in U.S. law. 

So this all may be “strategically stable” in the purely first-strike sense, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t feel particularly stable in any common-sense usage of the term.  Nor, I suspect, is this a reliably strategically stable situation even in the first-strike sense over time, given that the most likely scenario for a strategic nuclear exchange is not a “bolt from the blue” first strike anyway, but rather escalation from just the sort of regional conflicts that such localized revisionist aggression tends to create. 

If sub-strategic dynamics continue to worsen – including the growing East-West mismatch in theater-range nuclear forces that incentivizes destabilizing coercive nuclear bargaining at the regional level under that “offensive umbrella” of a strategic standoff – I thus worry that the odds of an escalation-driven strategic exchange will increase as well.  Hence my continued interest in thinking about strategic stability from a “Nash equilibrium”-inspired perspective through a broader geopolitical aperture than just that of nuclear first-strike stability. 

So what might we do about these challenges?  And how should we try to approach questions of stability and arms control in the Euro-Atlantic area if and when some kind of at least semi-serious “resolution” of the Ukraine conflict were to occur?

Those are certainly not easy questions to answer.  For a starting point, however, I would point you back to the emphasis placed – in my “Nash”-inspired approach to strategic stability – upon incentives. 

As a general matter, any notion of strategic stability relies hugely upon incentives.  In any definition – including in the narrow, first-strike sense – the achievement and maintenance strategic stability does not (or at least should not!) depend upon the parties having any kind of good faith commitment to peaceful coexistence or even to the rule of law at all.  Rather, it relies fundamentally upon a steely-eyed calculation of raw interest that, in theory, should be compelling even to a wholly ruthless would-be aggressor.  My conception of strategic stability is no exception to this general rule.

What I think we need to focus on, however, is a conception of the interest calculations underlying stability that is broader than just the game-theoretical implications of a strategic-level nuclear balance, though of course that’s relevant too.  We in the West – not just in the United States, but particularly in the states of Western Europe – have spent most of the last three decades nobly committed to a grand project of institution-building intended to socialize all states into a peaceable world of harmonious relationships.  Encouraged, it would seem, by a sort of bowdlerized constructivism that imagined that we could reliably manage or eliminate geopolitical antagonisms by the open-armed weaving of ever-thickening socio-economic and political connective tissue between states and peoples, we forgot to also be as attentive as we clearly needed to be to more concrete incentive structures related to “hard power” capabilities and stern-willed deterrence.

I submit that we all need both to re-learn some older lessons about confronting would-be troublemakers with concrete incentives to moderate their behavior.  And I think it’s clear, too, that we need to do this across a much broader range of domains and issue areas than by pretending that simply maintaining strategic first-strike stability always produces real and enduring stability in this challenging world of revisionist threats. 

Through this lens, I certainly admit, the path back to real strategic stability is a fraught one.  It passes through a lot of hard work, and through being willing to accept more cost and risk than we became accustomed to in the happy days of the early post-Cold War era when we naïvely imagined that serious strategic competition with dangerous great power adversaries had been put behind us forever. 

In his memoirs, Richard Nixon declared that Russian leaders “believe in Lenin’s precept: Probe with bayonets.  If you encounter mush, proceed.  If you encounter steel, withdraw.”  If we want to return to more real stability – and indeed to return to a security environment in which Russia and China both feel real incentives to negotiate some kind of arms control restraint – we need both more nuclear and other military muscularity, and more capacity to add further muscularity if circumstances require, than we presently have.  We also need to find within ourselves the steel to do more to ensure that when the adversary pushes forward, he gets his fingers burned. 

If we in the West do not remember this and act more resolutely upon such insights, the world will continue to be teach us ugly lessons about what strategic instability looks like.

—Christopher Ford