Janne E. Nolan

Mortgaging Security for Economic Gain: U.S. Arms Policy in an Insecure World

Similar to other consumer sectors of the global economy, the transfer of advanced conventional weapons and military technologies has entered the globalization process, a process that has qualitatively and quantitatively altered the composition and structure of U.S. national security policymaking. By injecting the decisionmaking process governing arms transfers into the global market place, U.S. policy makers must now reconcile maintaining economic competitiveness within the global system without jeopardizing U.S. national security interests. By subordinating national security interests to global economic imperatives, U.S. decisionmakers are at risk of mortgaging the political, societal, and security welfare of its citizenry for profit.

The INF Treaty

The U.S.-Soviet agreement to eliminate intermediate-range (500–5,000 kilometers) nuclear weapons, known as the INF Treaty, was signed on December 8, 1987, and ratified by the Senate on May 27, 1988. The agreement was the culmination of a protracted domestic and international debate about the role of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe and, more generally, about the basic legitimacy of U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements.

The Bureaucracy of Deterrence

To remake U.S. nuclear weapons policy, the next president will need to overcome entrenched interests. How arduous a task will this be? Ask Bill Clinton.

What Comes Next

Wars do not end when the last shot is fired. War planning has failed to demonstrate an understanding that victory requires consolidation and the emergence of a more healthy society. The most prominent recent example is the Second Iraq War, but the failure reaches back to the American Civil War. This essay is less concerned with the moral obligation to reconstruct after war than the practical necessity of jus post bellum. In order to learn how to achieve such a consolidation of military victory, a shift in mindset is required from both civil and military policy-makers and planners. A change in practice is required at the very beginning of planning for war. “Whole of government” has been an empty phrase, but experience dictates that an unprecedented degree of domestic and international cooperation is required.