Responding to China's and Russia's Nuclear Escalation
However, 35 years since the end of the Cold War, Russia and China are expanding and modernizing their non-strategic nuclear arsenals and increasingly relying on nuclear coercion to achieve their aims. Russia has violated virtually all nuclear arms control treaties and possesses a large advantage in the number of deployed non-strategic nuclear weapons. Meanwhile China is the fastest growing nuclear power on the planet, fielding nuclear capable anti-ship and land-attack missiles, which has eroded America’s deterrent.
But a world war is approaching. The international order is bifurcating into ideological spheres again, with one sphere consisting of the U.S. and countries attempting to preserve gains of freedom and prosperity from the last 35 years, and another sphere consisting of countries that consider those gains to have come at their expense or endanger their domestic control.