A Dystopian Take on Rising Authoritarianism and Resistance

Emerging technologies possess the potential to transform military competition and the international system in an uncertain, potentially destabilizing fashion. Are there ways to capture the benefits of these new technologies without unleashing catastrophic dangers? What insights and lessons can we glean from history—particularly from the Cold War experience the United States had with nuclear weapons—to help us navigate the challenges of today and tomorrow’s new technologies? This essay examines the concept of strategic stability, and in particular, the important ideas from the foundational thinker of the nuclear age, Thomas Schelling. For decades, strategic stability has been offered as both the prized goal and the great accomplishment of America’s nuclear statecraft, with Schelling acknowledged as the idea’s father. Examined closely, however, questions, tensions, and even contradictions appear, both in Schelling’s work and in the use of strategic stability to describe America’s nuclear strategy and statecraft.

Emerging technologies developed since the end of the Cold War—and their proliferation to new actors—call into question the prospects for strategic stability in the twenty-first century. Strategic stability exists when rivals are mutually deterred and lack any rational incentive to escalate to nuclear use during conflict. Yet, as this issue’s Roundtable examines, emerging technologies—with their new knowledge and tools with the potential for enhancing military capabilities—are impacting stability in such ways that the assumptions of rationality and deterrence no longer hold. First, these emerging technologies may be able to achieve effects once reserved to nuclear weapons, creating incentives for preemption. Second, these technologies are proliferating horizontally across more states, complicating mutual deterrence. Third, such technologies affect the psychology of decision-makers during crises, undermining rationality. Just as these phenomena may undermine stability, however, adversaries may yet be able to use the very same technologies to restore the strategic balance, although how is not yet fully apparent.

Mara Karlin and Mathew Burrows review “The Insiders’ Game,” a book exploring how democratic elites—including legislators, military leaders, and civilian officials—constrain presidential decision-making in war.