James Wirtz
The year 2027 has been designated as a “year of maximum danger,” especially for the inhabitants of the island of Taiwan. This is not the first time, however, that a critical benchmark has emerged for American strategists and planners. Amid the shocks of the early Cold War, National Security Council Report-68 (NSC-68), drafted in April 1950 by a committee led by Paul H. Nitze, also identified a year of maximum danger, 1954.1 Nitze, who was the Director of Dean Acheson’s State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, estimated that this was the year that the Soviet Union would possess the capability to launch a disarming nuclear strike against U.S. forces, tempting the Kremlin “to strike swiftly and with stealth.” “In time,” noted Nitze, “the atomic capability of the U.S.S.R. can be expected to grow to a point where, given surprise and no more effective opposition than we have now programmed, the possibility of a decisive initial attack cannot be excluded.”2 History does not repeat itself, but the reader might be forgiven for thinking that it does seem to rhyme.
Nitze’s time horizon was a bit longer than ours today and the nuclear threat he foresaw was more extreme than the circumstances generally associated with a People’s Liberation Army assault on Taiwan. His response to the looming threat of the 1950s, however, also was significantly different than today’s call to better prepare to engage in hostilities about three years hence. Nitze suggested that the United States should not focus on prevailing in a coming war; instead, he called for preventing the outbreak of war in the first place by making a significant effort to bolster the West’s deterrent posture.3 This raises two relevant questions. If there is little enthusiasm today about engaging in a naval showdown in the Taiwan Strait, why not concentrate on altering Beijing’s perception of the military and political setting so that the prospect of hostilities appears unattractive? Why do we not do everything in our power to bolster our maritime deterrent to spare the world a potentially catastrophic conflict in the western Pacific?
No comments:
Post a Comment