The risk of nuclear war under Trump
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Thursday, May 7, 2026 16:28
VIEWED: 18293
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https://newrepublic.com/article/146955/rising-risk-nuclear-war-trump
When it comes to foreign policy, especially on Russia, the Trump administration is a cacophony of discordant voices. While the president seeks friendly relations with President Vladimir Putin and mutes points of disagreement, prominent members of his administration are pushing for a radical re-orientation of America’s global strategy: a return to the Cold War framework in which Russia and China are treated as major threats to U.S. security.
In his introduction to a policy document called the Nuclear Policy Review, released on Friday, Secretary of Defense James Mattis warned that Russia is adopting “military strategies and capabilities that rely on nuclear escalation for their success.” He added, “These developments, coupled with Russia’s invasion of Crimea and nuclear threats against our allies, mark Moscow’s unabashed return to Great Power competition.”
The phrase “Great Power competition” echoes the administration’s recently released National Defense Strategy, which argues, “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” In plain English, this means that America should focus on defending itself against Russia and China, rather than fighting interminable wars in the Middle East. As Thomas Wright, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, noted in The Atlantic last week, this new policy reflects “a bipartisan consensus ... between mainstream Democratic and Republican foreign-policy experts that [President Barack Obama] had under-reacted to Russian and Chinese assertiveness.”
But if Mattis and the broader American foreign policy establishment see Russia and China as the main threats, Trump is more concerned with terrorism, North Korea, and illegal immigration (which he sees through a national-security prism).
“It has become abundantly clear that President Trump does not buy his own administration’s strategic shift toward great power competition,” Wright wrote. “Compare the new strategic doctrine to three of President Trump’s recent speeches—one that launched the National Security Strategy, his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, and yesterday’s State of the Union. In each, there was at most a single, obligatory, passing reference to rivals like Russia and China, with little elaboration.” Wright persuasively argues that America has “two competing national security doctrines—Trump’s and that of his national security team. They are now operating in parallel universes.”
The risk of these dual doctrines is not just incoherence. It’s that they reinforce each other in dangerous ways, making a major international conflict much more likely.
Trump’s America First policy alienates traditional allies like South Korea, Japan, and Germany, who don’t know if a U.S. president who openly disdains alliance systems can be trusted. Such countries now have an incentive to pursue foreign policy agendas outside America’s orbit. This emboldens regional powers like Russia and China, who see the Trump era as a chance to expand their influence in the world. The America First policy, in that sense, isn’t the opposite of a Great Powers competition policy, but creates the preconditions for such a world.
America First and Great Power competition find common ground on the terrifying issue of nuclear weapons. Hawks like Mattis are pushing for America to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons to intimidate Russia and China, a policy Trump has bought into on nationalist grounds. “A new nuclear policy issued by the Trump administration on Friday, which vows to counter a rush by the Russians to modernize their forces even while staying within the treaty limits, is touching off a new kind of nuclear arms race,” The New York Times reported on Monday. “The Pentagon envisions a new age in which nuclear weapons are back in a big way—its strategy bristles with plans for new low-yield nuclear weapons that advocates say are needed to match Russian advances and critics warn will be too tempt
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Quote:You have noticed politicians can't think ahead to the enviable consequences of decisions.
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
This silence might make short-term political sense, but heightens the risk that the Trump administration’s two-faced foreign policy will lead the U.S. into a great and disastrous war.
Nuking Japan was not suppose to lead to a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, but it did as an enviable consequence. Stalin knew that he would be next on the list to feel the mighty nuclear wrath of America and he responded. Look where that left the world in 2018. The justification for nuking Japan was to end the war, but the truth is that conventional firebombing would have worked equally as well.
www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/08/06/commentary/japan-surrender-wor
ld-war-ii/
Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, in his 2005 book “Racing the Enemy,” provides compelling evidence that the Pacific War ended due to the entry of the Soviets, not the atomic bombings. Having tasted defeat at the hands of the Soviets twice in the late 1930s in Manchurian border clashes, the generals knew that the new front meant further resistance was futile.
Sheldon Garon, a professor of history at Princeton University, takes issue with Hasegawa’s contention that the military was insouciant about Japanese suffering and ready to fight to the last civilian. Recently, Garon gave a talk in Tokyo about an ongoing book project focusing on how the war was lost for Germany and Japan.
He argues that the U.S. was surprised by Japan’s sudden surrender, noting that by Aug. 19, 1945, America would have had three more atomic bombs ready and had six more in production — it did not anticipate a swift end.
According to Garon, the Japanese military was deeply concerned by worsening conditions in Japan because they were undermining the war effort. Authorities, for example, planned the evacuation of a few hundred thousand school children to spare them the urban conflagrations, but were not prepared for the mass exodus of adults who bailed because they knew the military could not protect them. Roads out of Tokyo were clogged with these refugees: 8.5 million fled Japanese cities in the final five months of war, paralyzing transport networks.
This rural-escape survival strategy meant demoralized workers were abandoning factories, compounding existing shortages of war-related production.
According to Garon, these acts of sabotage also meant that an orderly society was no longer obeying orders, responding to accumulating signs of impending defeat. Alas, many of these unlucky refugees fled to smaller cities, and thus were subject to more bombings as America moved onto second-tier targets. The U.S. dropped leaflets warning of impending strikes, and then delivered, stoking fear and undermining faith in the government.
Officials were also demoralized by Germany’s surrender, and the horrific fight to the end that Adolf Hitler insisted on, subjecting his people and cities to a relentless pounding.
Garon observes that the Germans fought like samurai, sacrificing all even when they knew it was for a losing cause. While much is made of Japanese authorities training women and children to resist U.S. invaders with bamboo staves, Garon notes that none ever did so. In contrast, Germany took desperate measures, resorting to full mobilization and deploying these untrained conscripts to battlefields where many died or were injured.
Japan’s diplomats in Europe were shocked by the devastation of Germany and conveyed their concerns about Hitler’s “fighting to the finish” strategy. They advised against emulating the Germans, and thus implicitly counseled surrender for the national interest. But finding an exit with dignity proved elusive.
Garon attributes Japan’s delayed surrender to military intransigence and diplomatic incompetence, a dithering that subjected Japan to needless devastation.
Finally, it was the Soviet entry into the war and the atomic bombings that precipitated a hasty surrender. But it was overdue becaus
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Better start Duck And Cover videos in schools again.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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The Pentagon pretends that the new nukes will just fill a gap under the deterrent fence so that “Russia understands that any use of nuclear weapons, however limited, is unacceptable,” but what the Pentagon is really after is a credible nuclear war-fighting capability. This is the old fantasy that the Pentagon can safely fight a ‘limited’ nuclear war in some distant part of the world without risking major damage to America.
It’s a fantasy that has been killed many times, but it never stays dead for long. It just seems wrong and unnatural to the military mind that you should have these hugely powerful and expensive weapons and never be allowed to use them in any circumstances — that they exist entirely and exclusively to deter the other side from using its own nuclear weapons.
In every military generation there are frustrated generals who spin theories about how they might safely fight a ‘limited’ nuclear war. The first time their ideas gained a temporary foothold in American strategic thinking was in the late 1950s, and they have resurfaced at least twice since then.
Here they come again.
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Obama was heading in this direction already. His nuclear posture was to be in a position of a successful first strike, which is why he moved missiles right up to the Russian border. That's what caused the Russians to develop their dead-man devices... nuclear missiles that would be launched without the command of any living soldier.
All you could bitch about endlessly was RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA! You didn't want ANY rapprochement between the USA and Russia; you assumed a posture of unrelenting hostility and were all A-OK with Obama setting up an aggressive nuclear cordon on their border and destabilizing nations to their west.
Now that you got what you wanted, you're suddenly fearful.
Sheesh.
You're all insane, did you know that? 
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876
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Quote:And with all his strength, Trump will take us the rest of the way, to where Obama fell short.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Obama was heading in this direction already.
I was reading last week about John von Neumann, the expert on shockwave physics, designer of the implosion trigger for the Nagasaki atom bomb. When he was dying from brain cancer his hospital room was under heavy guard because of all the atom bomb, missile and computer secrets he knew. The generals would visit him to listen to his jokes and stories.
"Von Neumann's sense of invulnerability, or simply the desire to live, was struggling with unalterable facts. He seemed to have a great fear of death until the last... No achievements and no amount of influence could save him now, as they always had in the past. Johnny von Neumann, who knew how to live so fully, did not know how to die."
Maybe the generals should have mercifully taken von Neumann to the Nevada atom bomb test site and given him the hot death this genius had designed for others? Von Neumann goes kaBOOM!
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Von_Neumann.html
http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2018/01/book-review-john-von-ne
umann-by-norman.html
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Now that you got what you wanted, you're suddenly fearful.
Yeah, (read this in a Valley Girl accent) we all like TOTALLY want to go to war with Russia. That would be *SWEET*.
NO, YOU DUMB GOATHERDER ...NO ONE WANTS A WAR, with Russia or anyone else...well, traditionally Rethugs like wars they can brag about, but we haven't had one in a while.
Ok, lemme fix it.
NO ONE *SANE* WANTS A WAR...
WE ALL WOULD REALLY REALLY REALLY LIKE RUSSIA TO MIND IT'S OWN FUCKING BUSINESS, but Russia ain't up for that. "Mother Russia" likes mind games.. and sabotage... because it's dick has frozen off and that's all it has left.
If you have other strategies to keep from being bullied by other nations other than sanctions (which clearly don't work) I'm sure gov't would be thrilled to hear it.
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Quote:Well, YOU might not want war, and I sure don't want war, but Hillary was all for it, and THUGR and GSTRING and SECOND just can't seem tp allow even simple "contact" with Russia because... well, RUSSIA!!! Oh and BTW- OBAMA did a pretty good job of starting wars and knocking over nations during his tenure, too.
NO, YOU DUMB GOATHERDER ... NO ONE WANTS A WAR, with Russia or anyone else...
Quote:Which is why I said that GSTRING and THUGR and SECOND are insane. I guess we agree on that!
NO ONE *SANE* WANTS A WAR...
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
America is an oligarchy
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876
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Quote:Signym, you are talking about "nuclear" war, right? A lot more war than "conventional" war, right?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, YOU might not want war, and I sure don't want war, but Hillary was all for it, and THUGR and GSTRING and SECOND just can't seem tp allow even simple "contact" with Russia because... well, RUSSIA!!! Oh and BTW- OBAMA did a pretty good job of starting wars and knocking over nations during his tenure, too.Quote:Which is why I said that GSTRING and THUGR and SECOND are insane. I guess we agree on that!
NO ONE *SANE* WANTS A WAR...
You go to extremes with your notion that Democrats will nuke the world. Bringing out the nukes and shaking them in Russia's face is Republican territory, not Democrats. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” said Goldwater, the Republican Senator who wanted to nuke N Vietnam. You voted for Trump, the Republican who wants nukes small enough to use on N Korea.
https://niskanencenter.org/blog/on-the-saying-that-extremism-in-defens
e-of-liberty-is-no-vice/
Senator Barry Goldwater, running for the Republican Party nomination, gave an interview in which he discussed the use of low-yield atomic bombs in North Vietnam to defoliate forests and destroy bridges, roads, and railroad lines bringing supplies from communist China. During the storm of criticism that followed, Goldwater tried to back away from these drastic actions, claiming that he did not mean to advocate the use of atomic bombs but was “repeating a suggestion made by competent military people.” Goldwater sounds like Trump, but with more moderation. Trump discussed Fire and Fury like the world has never seen against N Korea. No surprise that Trump’s military wants a small-size nuclear weapon, perfect for North Korea, added to the Federal Budget.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/goldwater-suggests-using-atomic-we
apons
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Obama was heading in this direction already. His nuclear posture was to be in a position of a successful first strike, which is why he moved missiles right up to the Russian border. That's what caused the Russians to develop their dead-man devices... nuclear missiles that would be launched without the command of any living soldier.
All you could bitch about endlessly was RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA! You didn't want ANY rapprochement between the USA and Russia; you assumed a posture of unrelenting hostility and were all A-OK with Obama setting up an aggressive nuclear cordon on their border and destabilizing nations to their west.
Now that you got what you wanted, you're suddenly fearful.
Sheesh.
You're all insane, did you know that?
The endless fantasy brain that lives inside SIGNYM's skull. Making stuff up 24 hours a day... Please cite where ANYONE said they, "were all A-OK with Obama setting up an aggressive nuclear cordon on their border and destabilizing nations to their west."
Go on, fetch! Validate your rambling accusations just once. Can't? You just made sh*t up so you can whine? Check.
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