With France in crisis, Europe faces cost of defending against Putin — and Trump

(Originally published Dec. 6 in “What in the World“) The United Kingdom’s chief of the defense staff warns that the world is on the brink of what he termed a new and dangerous “third nuclear age,” in which nuclear threats proliferate with fewer checks against their use.

Adm. Tony Radakin’s warning, at a speech to Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, echoes similar concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the withdrawal from treaties limiting their production and deployment, and the breakdown in crucial diplomatic communications between the nations that hold them.

• Russia dropped out of the New START treaty and has been threatening to deploy a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine or possibly even Europe in response to escalating Western military aid to Ukraine.
• China has pulled out nuclear arms-control talks with the United States and has instead been expanding its nuclear arsenal, moving beyond deterrence in hopes of matching the “mutually assured destruction” capability that Russia and the United States both have.
• The U.S. has been modernizing its own nuclear arsenal, including a new nuclear warhead, the W93, to sit atop submarine-based nuclear missiles and deployed the 50-kiloton B61-12 air-dropped gravity bomb at U.S. bases in Europe. The Pentagon is also building a new, 360 kiloton nuclear gravity bomb to replace older B61-7s from the 1980s and 1990s with a more accurate alternative, as well as the massive, civilization-ending, 1.2 megaton B83-1s.
• Then there’s North Korea, which has been perfecting ways to deliver a nuclear warhead to targets in the continental United States with help from Russia.
• And of course Iran, which after Israel knocked out its air-defense batteries in October, has apparently concluded its best insurance is to rush forward development of its own nuclear deterrent and accelerated production of enriched uranium.

And, whereas in the Cold War the threat of Armageddon motivated nuclear powers to keep the conversation open, newer weapons make the likelihood they’ll be used more likely. As William Langewiesche writes in The New York Times:

The emphasis now is on smaller, more precise nuclear weapons meant to limit radioactive fallout and civilian deaths—just the sorts of warheads that countries might be tempted to use during a conventional battle and that also … arouse worldwide concerns that particularly the United States may achieve a practical first-strike capability. Whether justified or not, these concerns are destabilizing. They make adversaries distrustful. They undermine the conversation. They compress the spiral.

Anyone hopeful that these smaller nuclear weapons could be used without triggering the launch of more, larger ones, Langewiesche warns, is deluded. The Pentagon ran just such a in 1983 in a war game it dubbed Proud Prophet:

That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

Of course, anyone who remembers the movie from the same year “WarGames,” starring Matthew Broderick, remembers that the U.S. military supercomputer draws the same conclusion.

What makes this 40-year-old Cold War flashback suddenly so disturbingly relevant again is that, not only are nuclear weapons proliferating and becoming more tempting to use, but the political leaders controlling them. Today’s global leaders hail from more extreme ends of their nations’ political spectrum, are guided by polemical views of the world, and lead sharply, some say impossibly, polarized constituencies. They are, in a nutshell (emphasis on “nut”), highly volatile.

As easy as it is to point at the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President, a similar situation is playing out in France. In the most recent French presidential elections, half of voters opted either for the hard right or the hard left. The center has lost control. With economic growth flat and the government running perennially unsustainable deficits to support an aging population, neither side was willing to tolerate spending cuts or tax hikes. So, the parties representing these two political extremes just created an unholy alliance to topple France’s government and throw the nation into a political—and economic—crisis. Calls are mounting for Pres. Emmanuel Macron to resign. Macron has refused.

Macron cannot call for new elections until next summer, and a budget compromise seems impossible. Macron is therefore likely to have to appoint a caretaker prime minister who can then impose emergency measures for spending and taxation—essentially rolling over the last budget.

Yet, as The Economist writes, “in one way or another, much of Europe is caught in the same wretched trap… Europe’s economies are not growing fast enough to finance the demands upon them.”

Defending against Russia—and Trump’s threat to leave Europe to Russia’s devices—certainly is one of them. Last year, European Union members boosted military spending by 10% to a record €279 billion ($293 billion). And yet only eight of the 23 EU nations that are also members of NATO are yet spending the 2% of GDP they are supposed to. (France, incidentally, is one of them, spending 2.1% of GDP on defense in 2023.) To help bring the numbers up, EU members are discussing the creation of a €500 billion ($529 billion) fund to buy weapons jointly.