For nearly 80 years, guidelines and principles called the “rule of law” have helped maintain global stability and allowed nations to prosper. However, this structure is now at risk, said security analysts gathered at the United States Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, Nebraska, in August 2024.
More than 800 people attended the conference, now in its 15th year. Attendees included personnel from military, academia, industry and other organizations representing 15 countries. Nuclear buildup efforts conducted by Iran, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia, and increasing collaboration among those nations, creates a complex geopolitical environment, according to symposium panelists.
“We now find ourselves in nothing short of a new nuclear age, an unprecedented mix of multiple revisionist nuclear challengers who are uninterested in arms control and risk reduction efforts, each rapidly modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals and openly threatening to employ nuclear weapons to achieve their aims,” said Dr. Vipin Narang, former acting assistant secretary of defense for space policy for the U.S. Defense Department. “Any one of the nuclear challenges we face would be daunting by itself, but the signs today of growing collaboration and evidence of collusion between them is unprecedented, forcing us to think in new and careful ways about challenges such as escalation management and deterring opportunistic aggression in this new nuclear age.”
Narang said the U.S. and its Allies and Partners must continue — and increase — the modern nuclear deterrent. “Our current nuclear force posture and plan modernization program is necessary but may well be insufficient in the coming years,” he said.
Russia is a “serial treaty violator” said Marshall Billingslea, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank. He noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin violated the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 agreement under which Ukraine would give up its nuclear arsenal — the world’s third largest at the time — in exchange for guarantees from Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. from threatening or using military force against Ukraine. Russia has depleted its stocks of conventional weapons since its invasion of Ukraine, Billingslea said, leading to a greater dependence on its nuclear weapons.
“Russia is now fielding antiquated and mothballed weapons systems in Ukraine and is turning to North Korea and Iran for weapons,” he said.
Russia’s actions, plus the PRC’s refusal to hold good-faith negotiations on nuclear weapons required by Article VI of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, may require the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons to the Indo-Pacific and expand nuclear weapons in Europe. The U.S. and its Allies and Partners should also launch “an aggressive diplomatic pressure campaign against China to embarrass them and to pressure them to honor their Article VI obligations and to come to the negotiating table,” he said.
Eurasia could become the next large-scale theater of war, said Barry Pavel, vice president and director of the RAND National Security Research Division.
“This very well could be a global conflict, but we’re still in silos, planning for an INDOPACOM [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] war and potentially a European war, and I don’t think that’s going to get us where we need to go,” he said. He called for the U.S. and its Allies and Partners to better coordinate strategies and plans to counter security threats in the region.
“We want to get to a position where our adversaries are pausing and they’re worried about what we might do,” he said. “We don’t always want to be the ones responding to what they’re doing.”
The U.S. and its Allies and Partners should also develop plans to counter the PRC’s potential economic coercion scenarios, “so that when China coerces Korea or Lithuania or the Czech Republic, we have a set of Allies who will step in and fill that vacuum in terms of economic activity, in terms of trade, in terms of whatever the nature of the coercion is,” he said.
One way to strengthen the rule of law is to counter false messaging, said Mallory Stewart, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability at the U.S. State Department.
“There’s been a trend for Russia and others to accuse the U.S. government of supporting only those rules that sort of advantage us, only those principles and norms that give us an edge” Stewart said. “What we’re talking about is international law, international law freely agreed upon, decided and built with both Russia and China and the vast majority of the international community.
“When we talk about those rules and norms that keep us safe, that provide us those decades of security, that have established economic power and humanitarian successes, we’re talking about an institution of laws and norms that every country participated in the creation of and really has valued in many ways for many, many years.”
These laws and rules continue to provide security, stability and transparency, she said.
“We need to remind Russia and China and all of those governments that may have walked away from appreciating the value of international law and norms why it’s in their own interest. If you adhere to the international legal system, adhere to the norms of responsible behaviors across the board … we all have greater success and security.”