Good morning, everyone. I would like to start by thanking the Atlantic Council and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs for inviting me to be a part of this event. Our topic here is the importance of U.S. alliance relationships, their role in the global nonproliferation regime, and the urgency of shoring up both, and while the views I’ll express here are purely my own, I’m glad of the chance to share them.

Let me begin, however, by pointing out the obvious. It is, I would argue, very clear that the United States’ alliance relationships – both in Europe, centered upon the NATO Alliance, and in the Indo-Pacific through multiple bilateral alliances – are extremely important to U.S. national security, and to international peace and security more broadly.  

Indeed, I would contend that alliance relationships are perhaps more important to America today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The United States, after all, does not now stand astride the world as a global “hyperpower” in the way that it did a generation ago, and we cannot alone meet all the challenges we face from revisionist great power competitors who seek to diminish, destabilize, and supplant us – and whose increasingly aggressive agendas are proving ever more dangerous to the free and open international order upon which global peace and prosperity have depended for a very long time. To succeed against these challenges, it is necessary to work with others, and this requires careful attention to our alliances and partnerships.

Our alliance relationships have been critical bulwarks of international peace and security for many decades. Established most fundamentally to deter aggression, the United States’ alliances have so far succeeded brilliantly in this task. Anchored in U.S. military power – in both our conventional strength and in the “extended” nuclear deterrence guarantees we have long offered military allies – these alliances faced down threats from the Soviet Empire in both Europe and Asia throughout the Cold War; they continue to deter belligerence by a resurgent Russia in more recent years; and they have protected East Asia from intimidation and aggression from the People’s Republic of China and from North Korea all the while.  

And U.S. alliances have done even more for international peace and security than just deter aggression by militarized authoritarian states. America’s alliances have also proven to be the world’s most effective and successful nonproliferation tools. They have not merely deterred would-be aggressors, but they have also provided reassurance to those who might otherwise fear being the victims of such aggression – thus reducing the incentives that such threatened states would otherwise have felt to pursue the development of nuclear weaponry.  

It is actually quite striking how many of the countries the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) once identified as being most likely to develop nuclear weapons in the postwar era ended up not doing so as a result of their relationships with the United States. Specifically, as I pointed out in a speech I gave in my previous job, the growth and institutionalization of America’s postwar alliance networks and other security relationships helped both persuade these countries that they did not need nuclear weaponry – because their existential security needs could be met through collective security, backed by U.S. conventional military power and nuclear weapons – and give Washington leverage over them that we used to insist that several nascent nuclear weapons development efforts be terminated.

In fact, I’d be willing to wager that U.S. alliance and security relationships are actually responsible for shutting down more previously active nuclear weapons development programs even than was the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) itself. As declassified memoranda from the late 1960s have documented, even the Soviets eventually came to appreciate the nonproliferation benefit of U.S. alliances during the negotiation of the NPT, agreeing to accept an understanding of that Treaty that would permit NATO to continue with its arrangements for coordinating deployment of U.S.-controlled nuclear weapons as a means not only to deter the Warsaw Pact but also to prevent access by additional NATO allies to such devices. All in all, between deterring World War III and preventing a long-anticipated “cascade” of nuclear weaponization, we clearly have enormously compelling reasons to be grateful to U.S. alliance relationships.  

Yet it is a commonplace assertion, in the Euro-Atlantic policy community in particular, that the United States’ alliances are today under unprecedented strain. Unfortunately, there is much truth in that assertion, and indeed much work that needs to be done to make our alliances and partnerships as strong, effective, and resilient as we need them to be – including in their nuclear dimensions, as urged in your recent report at the Chicago Council.  

Nevertheless, it’s important to understand why that is the case, for just as diagnosis can point towards potential cure, so misdiagnosis can stand in the way of important restorative work. The crucial point with which I’d like to leave your audience today is that despite convenient narratives one sometimes hears in Western Europe and in Washington today that purport to lay the blame for present-day alliance challenges upon the previous inhabitant of the White House, the challenges presently confronting our alliance relationships are ones that have been building for a long time.

Indeed, these are problems that the Trump Administration itself recognized and took important steps to address, working to strengthen the effectiveness of America’s alliances in deterring aggression by Russia and China and shore up the ally-reassuring guarantees of U.S. “extended” deterrence. It’s worth remembering this.

U.S. diplomats certainly did press hard during the last four years for America’s NATO Allies to spend more on defense, and for all allies to pay a greater proportion of the costs incurred by the United States in stationing troops on their soil for the common defense. But while the Trump Administration sometimes approached such questions with unnecessary abrasiveness, it bears remembering that NATO’s two-percent defense spending targets were ones to which those allies had themselves agreed in 2014, and U.S. officials – including in the Obama Administration – have been complaining about most Allies’ failure to live up to these promises ever since.  

The Trump Administration also took important steps to shore up the ability of U.S. alliance relationships to deter aggression – which is, after all, their fundamental purpose – and in particular in just the area of U.S. nuclear guarantees that the Chicago Council’s recent report emphasizes. In the face of accelerating conventional and nuclear threats to our alliance partners from both Russia and China, for instance, the Trump Administration announced plans to re-acquire the sort of submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile (SLCM) capability that had been abandoned in 2010 by the Obama Administration to the consternation of our East Asian allies, who regarded this as weakening the U.S. “extended” nuclear deterrence upon which they rely for their national security.  

The Trump Administration also deployed a modified, lower-yield nuclear warhead aboard U.S. ballistic missile submarines in order to provide a potential riposte to Russian nuclear postures that have increasingly emphasizing the threat and use of theater nuclear weapons, and to which the West has hitherto had little or no counter in recent years. This deterrent step, it is worth pointing out, was not only one that buttressed the U.S. “extended” nuclear deterrence upon which NATO depends – and emphasized by the Chicago Council in its recent report. It was also one that was impliedly quite deferential to European sensibilities, inasmuch as it helped provide an answer to these regional threats but did so without additional U.S. nuclear deployments on European soil, which key allies have made clear they do not want. The Trump Administration also took a similarly modulated step to both shore up deterrence and avoid ruffling European political feathers after Russia’s continuing violations of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty led to that instrument’s collapse, whereupon American officials began moving forward not with nuclear-armed INF-class responsive capabilities but instead with purely conventionally-armed systems.

In terms of conventional military deterrence, moreover, it’s certainly true that President Trump announced plans to draw down U.S. troop levels in Germany. It is also the case, however, that the Trump Administration announced plans to increase rotational troop levels in Eastern Europe – this being facilitated by U.S. diplomatic breakthroughs such as the signing in 2020 of an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Poland. Such deployments, after all, are closer to where they would be needed in a crisis with Russia, and the Trump Administration moved to shore up defense and security ties along NATO’s eastern frontier. Throughout the Trump years, therefore, there remained a powerful commitment to our country’s alliances that too many commentators today ignore: a commitment to these alliances’ cardinal objective of deterring aggression in concrete and effective hard-power terms.  

The more important question for the future of our alliances is thus why such steps proved necessary, and why more work is still needed to buttress alliance guarantees. The difficulties facing U.S. collective security and “extended” nuclear deterrence guarantees to our allies grow out of political and strategic trends that long predate the 45th president of the United States, and that stem from the toxic coincidence of Russian and Chinse revisionism with a sort of anti-strategic and anti-nuclear myopia in some quarters of the Euro-Atlantic policy community.

Today, the most fundamental challenges confronting U.S. alliance relationships come from the very strategic competitors against whom such relationships were built in the first place. China, for instance, is rapidly building up its nuclear weapons arsenal and contemptuously rejects any engagement in arms control – and it has, moreover, embarked upon a project to hugely expand its production of weapons-usable plutonium that if diverted to weapons purposes would allow Beijing to expand the size of its arsenal even more dramatically. With China coupling an increasingly destabilizing upward trajectory in nuclear and its conventional military power with an ever more aggressive and bellicose diplomatic and military posture against its regional neighbors, this naturally places stress upon U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific that became unaccustomed to such challenges in the comparatively placid years since the end of the Cold War.

Russian behavior, too, presents grave challenges for our alliances. To begin with, the Kremlin is also building up its nuclear arsenal in destabilizing ways, including by developing new strategic delivery systems some of which are not covered by New START restrictions, including recklessly dangerous ones that involve flying a nuclear reactor through the air as a delivery vehicle, and a nuclear-powered underwater drone for creating radioactive tsunamis to destroy coastal cities. This Russian buildup also involves continued expansion of Moscow’s arsenal of Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons (NSNW) that directly threaten U.S. allies in NATO and in the Indo-Pacific – an expansion that includes not just the nuclear weapons that Moscow retained in breach of its promises in the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) of the 1990s, but also those that it developed in violation of the INF Treaty.  

Nor is this buildup merely nuclear. Russia has also worked very hard to expand its conventional military capabilities, making it increasingly capable – once again – of long-range power projection, now with a large arsenal of precision-guided non-nuclear munitions, as well as dual-use delivery systems, and increasingly practiced in expeditionary operations. With large-scale wargames on NATO’s borders that have included simulations of nuclear weapons use against Western states, and a return to aggressive Cold War-style aerial and naval provocations, the Kremlin has been posturing itself with increasing menace against the countries of Europe. This naturally places stress upon America’s alliances, the core business of which is to reassure participants that their security will be protected irrespective of such provocative malice.

Unfortunately, Russian behavior also does not provide confidence that arms control agreements could stabilize the situation and help rein in such threats, given Moscow’s woeful history of violating arms control agreements whenever it apparently thinks it can get away with doing so. Furthermore, the nature of Russian arms control noncompliance in recent years illustrates the degree to which the problem here is far worse than simply that the Kremlin is an opportunistic scofflaw.

More fundamentally, under Vladimir Putin, the Russian regime has adopted a strategy of geopolitical revisionism that is deliberately and by its nature antithetical to the fundamental structure of the post-Cold War arms control regime in Europe. It’s worth exploring just what a dangerous and disruptive sea change this represents.

Whereas for years arms control between the United States and the USSR aimed to manage risks and ameliorate the most dangerous aspects of superpower rivalry in the nuclear age, arms control shifted its focus in the early post-Cold War era. Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, arms control diplomacy came to focus instead upon those steps deemed most essential to perpetuating the easing of Cold War tensions and ensuring humankind’s progress along an assumed trajectory of growing amity culminating in nuclear disarmament: (1) effectuating prohibitions upon non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction (e.g., the Chemical Weapons Convention); (2) ensuring the extension and effective implementation of the NPT in order to prevent new entrants into the nuclear weapons business; and (3) negotiating agreements intended to bring about nuclear weapons reductions with the objective of eventual disarmament (e.g., START, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty).

In the European theater, this meta-agenda of broadening and deepening the post-Cold War peace had several pillars, all of which related to the task of locking in place a post-Soviet dispensation in which East-West rivalry, competition, and military threat were to be consigned to the past and the countries of Europe – it was assumed – would ever more successfully democratize, liberalize, and learn to work constructively with each other for the common good. This was to be, in short, the sort of peaceable “New World Order” envisioned by U.S. President George H.W. Bush after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the decades-long military standoff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  

 One of the European pillars of the post-Cold War peace was the INF Treaty itself, which had helped lead the way in leveraging eased superpower tensions into the elimination of an entire class of nuclear delivery systems. A second was the Open Skies Treaty (OST), an agreement that had first been proposed by President Eisenhower, but upon which East-West agreement proved impossible until the end of the Cold War. The principal objective of OST was to build confidence between former Cold War adversaries by providing an ongoing way for all participants to demonstrate – by means of a regime of what were in effect, ongoing, reciprocal “anytime, anywhere” intelligence overflights – that they had no hostile intent and nothing to hide from each other.  

A third pillar of the post-Cold War peace was a transparency regime for conventional force deployments, grounded in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty and the Vienna Document process – another arms limitation effort that had been pursued for many years (initially under the auspices of “Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction” talks commencing in 1973) but on which agreement proved elusive in the rivalrous circumstances of the time until Cold War tensions eased. Through this system, 30 regional participants committed to negotiated geographic troop limits and provided each other with alarm-mitigating notification of large deployments and military exercises.  

With these three pillars, therefore, the international community attempted, through negotiated arms control measures, to fix in place and ensure the perpetuation of the post-Cold War environment in Europe of democratization, political autonomy, and democratization. European arms control, therefore, was made possible by eased Cold War tensions, sought to fix in place the peaceable relationships of the time, and depended for its survival upon parties’ commitment to continuing those peaceable relationships.

The problem for America’s alliance relationships today, however, is that Russia has clearly decided – at least from the very outset of the Putin regime, as was unmistakably signaled in the manifesto published by Vladimir Putin upon his arrival in the Kremlin in December 1999 – to direct its global strategy at destroying the very post-Cold War dispensation that it was the objective of these various Euro-centric arms control agreements to preserve. Russia’s recent history of status-seeking by means of belligerent provocations is as well-known as it is egregious, and includes not merely such things as the use of banned chemical weapons on NATO soil but also the invasion and occupation of parts of neighboring countries – specifically, Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 – thus reviving military aggression as a tool for changing European borders for the first time since the end of the Second World War.

 Not surprisingly, these developments have placed huge strain upon U.S. alliances. They have also dramatically undercut the prospects that arms control can provide an answer to all this instability and danger. It is not precisely just that Russia has turned hostile to any particular arms control agreement, or that it has necessarily turned entirely against the arms control enterprise per se. But the Kremlin has clearly adopted as its strategic objective the disintegration of all arms control European regimes that revolve around trying to perpetuate the peaceable, non-competitive post-Cold War environment that saw Moscow shorn of its regional empire and its role as the “other” global superpower balanced against the Americans and their NATO allies. Putting it bluntly, Putin wishes to reacquire the status and geopolitical currency he associates with that lost Empire, the collapse of which he has described as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century. To do this, however, he needed to re-litigate and extirpate the post-Cold War dispensation, and this meant demolishing post-Cold War arms control.

 Accordingly, Russia has methodically undermined each pillar of the post-Cold War European system. It tested, produced, and finally deployed multiple battalions of missiles in violation of the INF Treaty, finally leading the United States, after years of ineffectual diplomatic finger-wagging, to withdraw from that treaty in exasperation. Moscow also declared that it was “suspending” operation of the CFE Treaty, and has ceased to bother complying with its provisions, or those of the Vienna Document. It congenitally violated Open Skies as well – apparently never actually complying fully with that treaty at any point since OST came into force in 2002 – denying some Treaty-permitted overflights over its military bastion of Kaliningrad and using unlawful overflight denials to support its invasion and proxy occupation of parts of Georgia. Russia also manipulated OST access provisions to try to support its false narrative that Russian-occupied Crimea is no longer legally part of Ukraine, while also apparently using its own OST overflights to collect targeting data for precision-guided conventional attack, in flagrant derogation from the Treaty’s confidence-building purposes and requirements that overflight imagery be used exclusively for its peaceful, confidence-building purposes.

All of this, therefore, strains America’s alliance networks. It also presents nonproliferation challenges, inasmuch as nonproliferation principles have been collateral damage in modern Russia’s quest for provocation-based geopolitical “relevance.” Notably, Vladimir Putin’s invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine in 2014 stands in shocking violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Moscow joined other powers in promising “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” as part of the deal whereby Kiev agreed to relinquish the thousands of nuclear weapons left on its territory upon the collapse of the USSR.  

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, therefore, represents a double calamity for international peace and security. It is not merely the “poster child” for Russia’s effort to destabilize and re-litigate the post-Cold War peace, but also a body blow to the idea that countries can safely relinquish their nuclear arsenals in return for international security guarantees. Russia’s strategic agenda of undermining the post-Cold War dispensation, therefore, represents an existential challenge not merely to the U.S. alliance system, but also to the global nonproliferation regime.

All of this would thus present a grave challenge even for an alliance network that was strong, resolute, bold, and visionary in its support for collective security. Unfortunately, however, the other problem for our alliances – and one, again, that long predates the 2016 U.S. presidential elections – is the broad erosion of any kind of serious “strategic mindset” in important quarters of the Euro-Atlantic policy community since the end of the Cold War, particularly with regard to nuclear deterrence.

In portions of the North Atlantic Alliance – and in particular, some of NATO’s more westerly portions, which lack Cold War memories of Soviet occupation, which have spent most of living memory under the strategic “umbrella” of security guarantees grounded in U.S. nuclear and conventional military might, and which joined U.S. leaders in taking something of a “holiday”  from serious strategic thinking after the collapse of the USSR – many in the Euro-Atlantic political class still seems to think they retain the luxury of living in the sort of environment to which Western elites became accustomed during the geopolitically benign years of the early post-Cold War era. Rather than concede that strategic circumstances have changed, thus creating the need for different and more hard-nosed answers to security challenges, the temptation apparently remains strong simply to double down on recipes and formulas that seemed to work in the environment of the 1990s, in the hope that by merely by trying harder at the same thing, these approaches can be made to work in the present, very different one.

Desperate efforts to cling to the anti-nuclear teleology of the 1990s, for instance, fall into this category of maladaptive ahistorical reflex. Faced with the strategic challenges of recent years, a remarkable number of European civil society and political leaders seem to feel that the answer to these problems is to accelerate the West’s disarmament vis-a-vis the authoritarian revisionists of the East by promoting adherence to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Even where countries remain committed to the Alliance, moreover, support and funding for “dual-capable aircraft” (DCA) capabilities associated with NATO’s “nuclear sharing” concept is wavering – creating the dangerously paradoxical situation of an alliance that today depends increasingly upon nuclear weaponry even as distaste for nuclear deterrence arrangements becomes the norm.

Nor is the United States itself immune to the strategic sedative of nostalgia for the more benign early post-Cold War era. The U.S. political Left, for instance, continues to flirt with the adoption of a “sole purpose” or a “No First Use” (NFU) nuclear weapons policy that would expressly eschew the use of nuclear weapons to deter or respond to exactly the sort of overwhelming conventional military threat with which strategists in both Moscow and Beijing have spent the last generation preparing to confront America’s allies. Prominent Democrats in Washington have even recently proposed U.S. nuclear reductions – such as the elimination of the land-based ballistic missile leg of the traditional American nuclear “Triad” – that would be undertaken unilaterally, without corresponding reductions from Russia or any assurance that China would not take advantage of such an opportunity to build to numerical parity (or superiority) vis-à-vis the United States as a result.

There is, therefore, something of a grim “perfect storm” in this conjuncture of renewed and expanded nuclear and conventional threats to U.S. alliance partners with a growing anti-nuclear neuralgia among Euro-Atlantic policy elites. From a nonproliferation perspective, these dynamics are additionally disheartening, inasmuch as erosion of Euro-Atlantic commitment to nuclear deterrence in the face of growing regional threats from authoritarian revisionism is likely to reopen long-dormant questions about whether the U.S. alliance relationship is actually still up to the challenge of meeting security needs in ways that obviate any need to for indigenous nuclear weaponization in various countries.

As I have described, however, this tempest grows out of problems that have been many years in the making. I would agree with the Biden Administration’s claims that the U.S. alliance network badly needs restorative recommitment, for it does. But President Biden’s team will quite dangerously miss the mark if they think that the “alliance problem” they need to fix requires them merely not being Donald Trump – or even that these problems are ones that the United States can solve by itself, no matter what it does.

In truth, it will be a more difficult “fix” than that, and will require much more seriousness about these alliances from our allies themselves. These challenges will not be met by diplomatic apologetics, substantive concessions, and embarrassed post-Trump mea culpas from Washington. They will be solved only if, and to the degree that, the United States and its allies are both able to rediscover in themselves a sense of hard-nosed, strategic seriousness about meeting the threats they face from Russia and from China, especially but not exclusively in the realm of nuclear posture and deterrent commitments. 

Without some such strategic refocus and recommitment to fundamental values of collective security and its nuclear aspects, the erosion of America’s alliances and their nonproliferation benefits is likely to continue.  

Thank you.

-- Christopher Ford