Hello everyone, and thanks for this chance to visit.  My name is Chris Ford, and I’m the director of Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies, which is located in the Washington DC area but offers Zoom and online-based graduate certificates, master’s degrees, and professional doctorate degrees tailored for national security professionals. 

But though now I’m a full-time professor and also – perhaps most relevant for purposes, a Nonresident Senior Associate in the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies – I’m not a career academic, instead having spent most of my professional life in government service.  I began many years ago as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, but spent most of my civilian career as a senior staffer on a number of different Senate committees and as a political appointee in two different presidential administrations.  Most recently, I served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation and as acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, after spending a year running the WMD directorate on the National Security Council staff.

The graduate school I now run has a terrific relationship with several elements of America’s armed services, including the Air Force Institute of Technology, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, and the Strategic Command – from whom we get a great many students – but this is my first time visiting here.  As a longstanding WMD policy guy, I have visited the Nevada National Security Site – which old guys like me still think of as the Nevada nuclear test site, of course – but this is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of being here.

I thought perhaps it would be interesting to talk a little bit with you Air Force warfighters about some of the modern challenges of deterrence we face with our Russian and Chinese strategic adversaries.  In some respects, these contemporary deterrence challenges are reminiscent of those we faced during the Cold War, and in other respects they’re quite novel.  But they’re worth exploring because they are in any event not like the deterrence challenges we got accustomed to addressing during the three decades after the end of the Cold War. 

To meet these new challenges, I fear, will be an “all hands on deck” undertaking for U.S. national security leaders, taxing them in ways that will require us to draw not just on the “strategic” capabilities we’ve maintained to support “core deterrence” missions – that is, our nuclear “Triad” of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), strategic bombers, and Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) – but upon a whole range of U.S. capabilities across multiple warfighting domains in both the strategic and the  tactical context.  Crucially, I’d say, these contemporary challenges also require us to draw heavily upon the literal and figurative “connective tissue” of command and control networks and integrated strategy and doctrine that ties all these elements of power together and permits U.S. leaders to employ them in mutually reinforcing ways to shape the environment and deter (or if needed, defeat) our adversaries.  So while I will be talking a lot today about nuclear weapons, it’s really a broader conversation, for conventional warfighters like you and defense policy scholars like me are both critical parts of this conversation.

A New, More Problematic Era

So let’s look at the deterrence fix we’ve gotten ourselves into.  To put things a little simply – but not, I think, inaccurately – the United States really didn’t worry too much about deterrence for the first decades after the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War at the opening of the 1990s.  We then enjoyed unmatched wealth, prosperity, and military strength, and a relative position of power in the world leagues that was beyond that of any imaginable challenger. 

No longer feeling any real strategic threat from the Russians – at least not when the friendly Boris Yeltsin ran the Kremlin – not yet feeling a strategic threat from China, and in any event having at that point conventional military capabilities almost shockingly beyond those of anyone else, why would we worry much about deterrence?  What state in its right mind would pick a fight with us under any circumstances? 

In those years, we were thus perfectly comfortable slashing our nuclear arsenal to a fraction of its Cold War size without strategic consequence, and we did so.  Some of our leaders even entertained the idea of working our stockpile down to an eventual “zero.”  President Obama, for instance, rather famously encouraged belief in the ultimate destination of nuclear weapons abolition.  On the way there, both he and his Vice President, Joe Biden – who was later to become president himself, of course, and who at least initially hoped to continue that disarmament journey – openly sought to bring about a world in which the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons would be to deter the use of other nuclear weapons: a world in which, consequently, perhaps all of them could finally be negotiated away, together, in one fell swoop. 

I don’t mean to question such leaders’ idealistic sincerity, but there was also a sort crassly self-interested realpolitik logic to that approach.  As the preeminent conventional military power, after all, who would benefit more than we would from nobody else having the asymmetrically empowering tool of nuclear weaponry?  After all, those decades were ones in which U.S. leaders’ primary worries were over the threats presented by international terrorism and rogue regimes’ pursuit of WMD.  We didn’t worry about symmetric threats from near-peer powers because we had no peer; we only really fretted about the “weapons of the weak” that lesser players might try to mobilize against our own preeminent conventional military might.  (My own time in uniform was during those years, and I have to admit it was primarily – from my vantage point as a young U.S. Navy intelligence officer – a pretty happy world for Uncle Sam.)

In that context, therefore, it’s not hard to see why we didn’t spend much time thinking about deterrence.  And we acted upon this strategic nonchalance.  We slashed the size of our nuclear arsenal, and hard-wired our nuclear weapons production infrastructure at a level that left us all but incapable of producing new weapons, or producing more of them at any meaningful scale.  Moreover, the rich intellectual ecosystem of deterrent thinking, theorizing, and debate that had developed during the Cold War to inform America’s leaders on issues of great power competition and deterrence also atrophied.  Academics, think tank scholars, and public intellectuals generally moved on to other, seeming more relevant topics, leaving nuclear weapons policy issues seeming rather pointless, somewhat retrograde, and even a little bit disreputable.  And we were fine with all this for a while because the world looked – in strategic terms – notably non-threatening. 

And yet here we are today, facing not just one but two resolutely revisionist nuclear near-peer powers, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, who now brag about their “no-limits” partnership against us.  This raises unprecedented questions for deterrence in ways we are decidedly unaccustomed to facing. 

My main point today, however, is that this story is not just one about the revived salience of strategic nuclear deterrence, though with China apparently sprinting toward strategic parity – confronting us with the problem of how to use one nuclear force posture to deter two nuclear peers simultaneously – such a revival is definitely upon us.  It is also a story of the complex ways in which adversary threats also confront us with theater-level deterrence challenges that our strategic capabilities do not equip us very well to address.

Indeed, to some extent that’s exactly the point, for as I’ll explain further, it has been our adversaries’ objective in many respects to confront us with theater-level deterrence dilemmas for which we are poorly prepared.  They want to ensure that in the event that we find their aggression too much to counter with what remains of our conventional power alone, or in the event that they choose to engage in limited nuclear escalation in theater, our relative lack of nuclear options short of a potentially catastrophic leap to strategic attack would induce us to back down.  In the language of Cold War deterrence theory, they seek “escalation dominance,” and to this end both Russia and China have built for themselves an “escalation ladder” that has rather more “rungs” on it than does our own.  This undermines deterrence, because to the degree that they suspect that this mismatch would lead us to back down in crisis or conflict, this will tend to encourage them to engage in aggression to support their territorially revisionist ambitions.  Such a mismatch is precisely how deterrence could fail.

Revisionist Enthusiasm

But before I talk about the challenges of adversary coercive bargaining and what deterrence theorists call “escalation management,” let me say a few words about the mindset of our strategic adversaries, for mindset and worldview – what one thinks about how the world works, how one sees oneself in the world, and what one feels oneself to be trying to accomplish in that world – has great relevance to deterrence.  Worldview and strategic culture helps shape both what it is they’re trying to achieve and how determined they are to achieve it, so we need to understand these things if we are to deter them.

            The Russian Federation

A number of years ago, in 2019 when I was still at the State Department, I gave a speech at a think tank in Tel Aviv that talked about Russia’s rather striking– and deeply disturbing – fixation upon narratives of grievance.  I stressed the degree to which, under Putin in particular, modern Russian political iconography is both filled with notions of having a special status and historical mission in the world and suffused with bitterness toward what are assumed to be malevolently hostile outsiders who have conspired to corrupt Russia’s unique essence and keep the country down, or even to destroy it.  

That speech seems a long time ago now, but none of what I described then has abated in the intervening years.  Indeed, with Putin’s full-scale expansion of his war of invasion and annexation against Ukraine in 2022 – and with his current pervasive militarization of Russian society, as he turns his country increasingly into a sort of garrison state – things have only gotten worse.

As I discussed more detail in an article in the Journal of Policy and Strategy in 2025, Russia has developed a “myth of exceptionalism”  for itself that revolves around the idea of having a recurring “salvational role” in the international community that Russia has won through defiant resistance and stoic martyrdom against endless waves of foreign enemies determined to subjugate and humiliate it.  These are themes one can see repeatedly in Russian political discourse vis-à-vis the outside world going back to the Soviets’ romanticization of heroic suffering to rid the world of Nazism during the Second World War, but they are powerful ones in Putin-era discourse as well, as his regime seeks to attach its cart to the powerful horse of such collective memory and emotional energy.

There are surely many streams that contribute to the rushing current of this quasi-apocalyptic Russian mindset, but I think one of the more evocative ones is the work of an early 20th Century White Russian émigré writer and intellectual named Ivan Ilyin.  Ilyin is not just an obscurely embittered and long-dead exile, however, for Putin himself has openly embraced and encouraged a revival of interest in his work.  Putin, in fact, has given copies of Ivan Ilyin’s work as assigned reading for his regional governors, and he has cited and invoked Ilyin in quite a few of his speeches. 

Ilyin saw Russia’s salvation lying in a sort of Christianized fascism.  He viewed Russia is a distinct civilization having a unique essence and spirit that is constantly under threat from evil foreign forces, both physically and ideologically, and whose struggle against them partakes of a sort of holy justice through the prism of Right-wing Russian Orthodox theology.  The violence of righteous struggle against such evil forces was, for Ilyin, a kind of holy war – a “process of purification” in which the strong, virtuous warrior should be willing to engage in unrighteous brutality as he “receives grace in the sacrament and ... strength for his actions.” Such holy violence, Ilyin wrote, “confirms the purpose of his service and cleanses his soul. And his sword itself becomes a fiery prayer.” 

The evil foreign forces threatening Russia were ones against which Russians must always be vigilant, and in response to them, Ilyin also felt, it was necessary to organize politics along authoritarian lines not accountable to democratic or legal check.  This is, obviously, a very convenient ideology for a dictator like Putin, for finger-pointing at alleged outside threats – and their supposed co-conspirators conniving disloyally against Russia from within – can be used to justify all manner of brutal control at home. 

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t assume that the Putin regime doesn’t actually believe a lot of this dark narrative.  It can be nothing but deeply disturbing that Putin openly avers that Ivan Ilyin speaks to the needs of Russia today.

As I pointed out in my speech in 2019 and my 2025 article, this grim vision is highly relevant to Russian foreign policy behavior, for the regime’s dark and somewhat paranoid vision of the world is also bound up with a sort of imperial nostalgia, a longing to recover the status and sense of historical self-importance that Russia felt during the tsarist period and during its decades of Soviet global reach.  The modern Russian regime thus promotes a kind of global restoration narrative, in which its self-assertive authoritarianism provides the vehicle for national or even civilizational resurrection. 

This narrative is thus not just about a desire for power and status in the world.  It is stranger, deeper, and darker than that, for it entertains grand visions of world-historical, civilizational, and religious mission.  As I have pointed out elsewhere, it combines:

• a sense of identity obsessed by endless cycles of existential foreign threat;

• a feeling of mission and a taste for martyrdom in resisting or even saving humanity from such evils;

• a mystical conception of civilizational purity that must be preserved against malign external forces and values, including by the maintenance of strongman rule at home (which in turn sustains itself by pointing to such threats); and 

• a nostalgia for lost glory that can be regained through heroic effort and a willingness to take dramatic risks.  

This is clearly a worrisome combination, especially in a nuclear-armed great power.  And all of this, moreover, is both encouraged and fueled by a Russian Orthodox Church establishment that has been thoroughly co-opted and corrupted by the ruling regime, being transformed into a sort of cheerleader for Putinist aggression.  Not for nothing, for instance, have that Church’s leaders termed Putin’s war against Ukraine a “holy war.”

You can see how this worldview might powerfully affect deterrence questions, both by giving Russia an interest in aggression that goes notably beyond some mere opportunistic and transactional acquisitiveness, and by making the Kremlin perhaps abnormally risk-tolerant.  If we wish to deter this adversary, we will need formidable capabilities indeed.

            The People’s Republic of China

But what about China?  I’ve written a great deal about Chinese strategic culture since my first paper on the topic in 2006, but Beijing, too, has a worldview that I think inclines it toward a degree of confrontation with us.  Simply put, it feels American power and status in the world to stand in the way of China fulfilling its dream of “national rejuvenation” by restoring Beijing’s position of geopolitical centrality.

To be sure, in the Chinese case there is certainly much less of the grim, semi-apocalyptic messianism of Russia’s neo-imperial enthusiasm, and no theme that is actually religious.  But there is nonetheless plenty of grievance, for China feels itself to have a historical destiny as the center of the human world, and it has nursed a longstanding sense of afront against the West for having ended that perceived Sinocentric dominance and thereby inflicted upon China what Chinese nationalists call their “Century of Humiliation.” 

China, after all, has long called itself the “Middle Kingdom,” and this is less a geographic claim than it is a civilizationalone, signifying that China is the star around which the rest of humanity was expected to orbit, and towards which all should turn in awestruck deference.  When 19th Century geopolitics gave the lie to this assumed centrality and saw foreign powers bullying China into making various concessions to European and then Japanese interests, China’s sense of grievance was acute, being felt in direct proportion to the degree of the empire’s ancient pride and arrogance.

Today, after decades of what Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping called “biding its time and hiding its capabilities” while preparing eventually to assert itself, China now apparently feels ready and willing to start making overt claims upon the world that are increasingly commensurate with its expectation of how China deserves to be treated in the natural, historical, and axiomatically Sinocentric nature of things.  This Chinese vision isn’t as dark and violence-valorizing as modern Russian nationalist ideology, but in its own way Beijing is just as intrinsically opposed to the United States and as dedicated to breaking our power and role in the world as is the Kremlin.  At least since the visit to the United States paid by the seminal nationalist writer Liang Qichao in 1903, many Chinese nationalists have felt that as long as the United States remains a major center of power in the Indo-Pacific, China won’t be able to fulfil its destiny of returning to geopolitical centrality.

In sum, the Russian and Chinese visions of the world – or at least, to be fair, those visions espoused by the current ruling regimes in both countries for neither government gives ordinary people a meaningful voice in governance – are both deeply and intrinsically anti-Western, and hence anti-American, in ways that go beyond merely the kind of “normal” contestation over resources and power one might expect from traditional realpolitik.  Their ambitions are about those things, of course, but they are not just about them.  Their ambitions are also, and perhaps primarily, about positional status: the objective is not so much absolute gain or loss as it is relative power – which is to say, power relative to us.  These visions are thus not amenable to genuinely “win-win” solution sets, but instead inherently require our diminution; they are not visions of success and security but of victory.

So that’s what I would offer by way of putting a “strategic culture” gloss on the deterrence challenges we face today.

Escalation Management and Coercive Bargaining

But what does this have to do with nuclear weapons?  Well, as both Russia and China have been equipping themselves to fulfil these visions, they have taken remarkably similar pathways in terms of nuclear force posture development, even if the rhetoric in which each wraps its programs differs greatly from the other. 

Both countries have developed and deployed a formidable array of theater-class nuclear weapons of varying ranges and sizes, including a sizeable number of dual-capable systems which could be optionally employed to deliver either conventional munitions or nuclear warheads.  Unfortunately, we today have nothing of the sort ourselves, with what little remains of our old Cold War arsenal of sub-strategic systems today confined to a modest number of mere gravity bombs.  This has led to a situation of destabilizing theater-class overmatch in favor of our adversaries.

As to why they have wanted to have such capabilities and what they would do with them, I think both countries are preparing to confront us, in crisis or in conflict, with that terrible “suicide or surrender” choice to which I alluded earlier.  Having more “rungs” on the “escalation ladder,” are coming to believe they can deter us from acting to stop whatever it is they wish to do to their neighbors to achieve their strategic ends.  Coercive bargaining with nuclear weapons is thus a key element of their theory of victory, and their advantage in theater nuclear capabilities thus represents one of the factors most likely to lead to a failure of deterrence.

China, as usual, is more subtle about this, and still tries to wrap its rapid expansion of both theater and strategic capabilities in peaceful-sounding rhetoric that encourages us to pay attention to what they claim more than what they are actually doing.  The closest I’ve ever seen official Chinese sources get to admitting that they have long contemplated incorporating coercive bargaining with nuclear weapons into their national security strategy vis-à-vis the United States appeared in a 2004 book called The Science of Second Artillery Operations, a doctrinal publication for China’s nuclear weapons arm.

Chapter 10 of that book talks about how, in a conflict with “a strong military power possessing nuclear-armed missiles and an absolute advantage in high-tech conventional weapons” – that is, of course, a conflict with us – China might need to “lower the nuclear threshold” and use “strong, forcible nuclear coercion.”  Revealing the hollowness of the longstanding Chinese diplomatic pretense that Beijing has an ironclad “no first use” nuclear weapons policy, moreover, The Science of Second Artillery Operations also pointedly observed that in extreme circumstances “when threatening to use nuclear weapons is unable to stop enemy military activities,” it may be that “switching to nuclear attack” could be “advantageous to our side.” 

That’s reasonably clear, I would think.  But nobody has articulated a clearer philosophy of coercive bargaining more than the Russians.  With characteristically brutish and unapologetic élan, they speak clearly about the ways in which such capabilities support strategies of coercive bargaining.  In this respect, I recommend to all of you a really interesting little book published a few years ago by Stanford University Press, written by the Israeli scholar Dmitry Adamsky and entitled The Russian Way of Deterrence.

According to Adamsky, since Russia’s campaign to modernize its armed forces kicked into high gear after Putin’s attack on the country of Georgia in 2008, Russian thinking on what might be called “strategic deterrence” has evolved considerably.  Since then, Russian military writings have talked a great deal about what is termed “next generation warfare,” which involves “an amalgamation of hard and nonkinetic tools across various domains, namely the coordinated application of military, diplomatic, and economic means.” 

Over time, Adamsky recounts, the Russians also expanded their deterrence theory “to … domains beyond the nuclear, ranging from the conventional to the informational (cyber) realms and beyond the military sphere per se,” in an effort to bring about “merger of these tools into one system” that would improve Russia’s ability to coerce its adversaries in a wide range of circumstances.  Representing a sort of unified field theory of coercive bargaining through the use of what we in the West would call escalation dominance, the idea was “to merge all the emerging tools of coercive influence into one unified system.”

Therein lies a key distinction, and it’s important to avoid misreading Russian use of the term “deterrence.”  We in the West have long tended to think of “deterrence” as being fundamentally defensive.  We regard it as the business of deterrence to dissuade the adversary from contemplating aggression, and it is thus in some sense about inducing a sort of passivity: we aim to keep him from doing something that he is not currently doing – namely, attacking.  And we have also long sought to extend this defensive “nuclear umbrella” to our allies.

I pointed out more than a decade ago, however, that Putin has been writing a playbook for the employment of an “offensive nuclear umbrella” – that is, using nuclear threats not to deter aggression but rather to deter intervention that might stop Russian aggression – and Adamsky’s scholarship reveals that such Russian instincts have a fascinating degree of doctrinal depth.

As he has chronicled, however, the Russians have a much more dynamic, active, and holistic conception of “deterrence” than our own defensive one.  For them, the kind of defensive objective we envision is only one facet of deterrence; deterrence writ large is a philosophy of generalized coercive bargaining that can be used for all sorts of purposes – including offensive ones.

“In Russian parlance, it stands for employing threats, sometimes accompanied by limited use of force, to maintain the status quo, change it, shape the strategic environment within which the interaction occurs, prevent escalation, or de-escalate.  Russian discourse uses the term to describe activities toward and during military conflict, and the usage of the term spans all phases of war.” 

In Russian writings, it is said that you generate “deterring potential” through constant but relatively low-intensity engagement with the adversary” that allows you to probe his reactions, assess his capabilities and his thinking, keep him off balance and perhaps distracted from whatever it is that you may really seek to achieve, and lay the groundwork for a more pointed application of coercive force either against your true objective or simply on an opportunistic basis against whatever weaknesses such ongoing friction and disruptive probing has revealed.  “In sum,” Adamsky writes, the creation of “persistent operational friction creates a deterring potential, maintains it (i.e., [through] regular recharging), and exploits it to coerce an adversary at the moment of truth.” 

It would be quite wrong, of course, to view this philosophy of ongoing coercive engagement as being entirely or even primarily about nuclear weapons.  In fact, on its own terms, it aspires to be truly holistic, and to integrate all forms of potential coercive pressures into an integrated whole.   But it would also be wrong to see this coercive theory as not including nuclear weaponry, for it clearly does.  This is a conception of full-spectrum and nuclear-inclusive coercion, evincing no clear delineation between “offensive” and “defensive” activities, and functioning across the whole spectrum of measures from “soft” tools to “hard” ones, at every operational level.  Nuclear weapons aren’t particularly “special” in this regard, but their inclusion is indeed integral to the concept.

And here we see the fundamental logic behind Russia’s extensive and diverse range of sub-strategic nuclear systems, which together constitute a sort of “Swiss Army knife” arsenal aiming to make a specific nuclear tool available for every imaginable occasion – and in remarkable numbers to boot.  (Having never bothered to fulfil their promises to dismantle most such systems in the early 1990s and having thereafter also violated the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Russia is estimated to have at least 2,000 or so theater-class nuclear weapons.)  This is a toolkit designed and optimized for coercive bargaining, and we need to understand this purpose. 

Conclusion

Understanding all this, I would argue, throws a stark light upon the grave, deterrence-undermining nature of the theater nuclear overmatch we presently face in both Europe and East Asia.  And this helps highlight why I’ve been arguing for some time now that in order to preserve deterrence in the face of these Russian and Chinese developments, we need a greater number and a much greater range of theater-class nuclear capabilities ourselves – as well as to get much better at integrating such diverse nuclear tools into broad strategies of escalation management of our own devising. 

This is something we understood much more about during the Cold War, but we allowed ourselves to get sloppy and lazy, and to downplay or even forget the role that manipulating escalation risk inherently plays in ensuring the defensive deterrence we prize and in countering the offensive use of deterrence by our adversaries.  America can do a lot more to meet this challenge, and it must.  And all of us – including conventional warfighters such as yourselves and even academics like those of us at the School of Defense and Strategic Studies, whose job it is to provide policy and strategy educations to national security professionals – have a role to play in helping meet this challenge.



Thanks for having me here. 

—Christopher Ford