Enemy drones over Romania. Wayward missiles in Poland. Sabotage in Germany. Every week brings some new Russian provocation as President Vladimir Putin steps up his efforts to divide Europe and undermine support for Ukraine. As Western militaries scramble to respond, the prospect of the war spilling over into NATO territory rises.
The problem of escalating instability, unfortunately, is not confined to Europe’s eastern frontier. The danger of war between America’s autocratic adversaries and our democratic allies is rising around the world for one simple, troubling reason: The enemies of liberal democracy increasingly think America is weak and fickle.
That perception is based in no small part on the current administration’s inexplicable abandonment of the strategy that kept the peace in much of the world during the Cold War: deterrence.
The basic approach to defense that emerged from the cataclysm of World War II was simple: If you strike us, we will respond so overwhelmingly that your country will be decimated, so you’d better not start anything. With the development of nuclear weapons, this concept was neatly captured by the unfortunate phrase “mutually assured destruction.”
Although principally associated with the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, deterrence also underlay our longtime strategy for avoiding a conventional conflict with a near-peer adversary like China or Russia. Rather than mutually assured destruction, this kind of deterrence works by America’s maintaining a sufficiently strong conventional force that any potential adversary will realize the futility of attacking us or our allies.
The challenge to this strategy at its inception in the 1950s was that aggressors rarely attack their potential victims all at once, but rather one at a time, usually proclaiming their ambitions are limited. Hitler started with the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia and only then went on to Poland, Belgium and France. Mr. Putin has started with Ukraine.
To counter this problem and the very real threat of Soviet expansionism after World War II, NATO’s Article 5 established the principle that an attack on one member state would be considered an attack on all — and such an attack would be met with a combined response from the European countries and the United States.
A similar deterrent is buttressed by our worldwide structure of alliances. Forward bases, mutual defense pacts, intelligence sharing and economic cooperation together have provided an enormous asymmetric advantage over China and Russia, neither of which has many friends, let alone allies.
Deterrence worked: Although the United States has been involved in regional conflicts over the past decades, there has been no direct military confrontation between the major powers on the scale of the two world wars.
But two of this strategy’s essential elements — capacity and will — are now in short supply. The potential adversary has to believe that the United States and its allies have the weapons and forces to hold them at risk, and, just as important, that we have the will to use that force when necessary. The effectiveness of deterrence depends entirely on what the adversary believes; if either our capacity or our will is in doubt, deterrence fails and catastrophe becomes more likely.
The grave danger we now face is that the current administration has undermined both prongs of deterrence strategy in different theaters — a lack of will in Ukraine and a lack of capacity in Iran.
By essentially abandoning Ukraine, we have gutted the “will” prong. The Europeans have stepped up, but our absence has sent the unmistakable signal to President Xi Jinping of China and to Mr. Putin that we don’t have the stomach for a prolonged conflict. This is the opposite of deterrence; it is closer to an invitation.
Moreover, just as Mr. Putin is probing Eastern Europe, the Pentagon is reducing active American troop levels in Germany and pulling back on rotational deployments to Eastern Europe. This sends a clear signal that we are indifferent to Russian aggression beyond Ukraine: again, precisely the wrong message at precisely the wrong time.
Iran has offered Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi a tutorial in our tactics and the limitations of our military power. After seven months of on-again, off-again bombing and an economic blockade, virtually none of the strategic goals announced at the beginning of the war have been achieved, while our stock of munitions has been severely degraded and our regional bases have been exposed as vulnerable.
Similarly, our 52 days of attacks on the Houthis in Yemen last year seem to have done little to diminish their capacity to put shipping in the Red Sea at risk. Iran and the Houthis are much lesser powers than China or Russia, and Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi will judge accordingly their chances against our air defenses, offensive capability and economic power in any future conflict.
It won’t be easy to regain what we have lost, but there are several places to start. One is to re-engage in the defense of Ukraine, including by vigorous enforcement of the just-passed Russia sanctions bill. Another is to reverse the misguided withdrawal of our forces in Eastern Europe, thus sending the message to Mr. Putin that Article 5 is alive and well. And finally, we should quit undermining our allies if we want them there when we need them.
Deterrence works only if it’s credible, and the actions of the administration over the past two years — in spite of all the bluster about lethality and testosterone — have severely compromised that credibility, and with it, the safety and security of our country.
Angus King is an independent U.S. senator from Maine who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence; Mark Hertling is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General and a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.
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