US nuke policy reviving 'great power competition'

The United States has unveiled its Nuclear Posture Review, based on which President Donald Trump’s administration will end the Obama-era strategy of downsizing the US nuclear arsenal and will take a more aggressive stance toward Russia. The following is a synopsis of an interview Press TV has conducted with Alexander Mercouris, the editor-in-chief of theduran.com, and Frederick Peterson, a US congressional defense policy adviser, about how Washington’s new nuclear policy can affect global security.

Frederick Peterson maintains that Washington has no choice at the moment but to upgrade its nuclear weapons in a bid to counter Russia’s increasing influence in the world.  

“Our nuclear inventory and our conventional military inventory has suffered from negligence over a decade. The years of [President Barack] Obama saw consistently cutting budgets for the military, for the air forces, for the ground forces, and for the geostrategic nuclear forces,” Peterson said.

“What is needed,” he continued, “is modernization of weapons to reflect the new and changing potential battlefields where those weapons may have to be engaged. It would be irresponsible to ignore ten years of negligence of this inventory and the diminishing capabilities of conventional as well as the nuclear weapons in the face of a world that remains highly volatile and requires the United States to take a leadership role in standing up for higher values and also self-defense and defense of our allies.”

However, the other panelist Alexander Mercouris warned that the new nuclear strategy could lead to more confrontation between the US and its rivals, namely Russia and China, and would take the world back to the Cold War era’s arms race.

“If you read this document very carefully, what becomes very clear is that the unipolar moment has passed. There is a chapter in it which talks about return of great power competition and that is why the United States is so focused now on the challenge that it sees from Russia and China,” Mercouris noted.

But, what is completely lacking in the document is the understanding that it is the US’s own strategy over the last twenty years that is reviving the great power competition, he added. 

“Instead of responding to that by modifying its policies, by asking itself what have we been doing that is bringing about these challenges, the United States is doubling that by increasing its nuclear forces even further,” the analyst reiterated. 

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