Avoiding the McNamara Trap With China

Francis P. Sempa

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Observers of U.S.-China relations frequently invoke the “Thucydides Trap” to explain China as the rising power challenging the United States as the world’s preeminent power. These observers hope that U.S. and Chinese diplomacy will avoid any kinetic consequences of the Thucydides Trap. But a recent Pentagon report provides evidence that China’s military build-up, especially its nuclear weapons build-up, threatens to repeat another historical “trap” for the United States — let’s call it the McNamara Trap.

The McNamara Trap — named for the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — refers to the twin ideas that nuclear superiority is meaningless and strategic defenses only undermine “strategic stability.” The underlying rationale for those ideas was McNamara’s strategic doctrine called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which posited that the United States only required enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems to survive a first-strike attack by (then) the Soviet Union in order to effect strategic stability and deter a Soviet attack. At the time McNamara implemented MAD — in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the United States enjoyed nuclear superiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was American nuclear (and conventional) superiority that likely enabled the crisis to end peacefully, though the secret trade of our missiles in Turkey for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba obviously contributed to the Soviet decision to remove the missiles.

McNamara, however, took the wrong lesson from the crisis in Cuba. As Patrick Glynn , “the missile crisis inspired … McNamara to begin a radical revision of U.S. nuclear strategy, designed to remove U.S. policy even farther from the traditional logic of military power and bring it even closer into line with the vision embodied in arms control theory.” The decision was made to surrender our nuclear superiority and forego building and deploying strategic defenses. Glynn described it as McNamara “arguing in favor of strengthening the Soviet strategic arsenal.” And it also involved, wrote Glynn, “a deliberate decision to permit, even encourage, an increase in U.S. vulnerability to a Soviet second strike, in the supposed interest of assuring mutual stability.”