The New York Times - USA (2020-07-31)

THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2020 Y A25

N

UCLEAR arms controlis at a

crossroads — not because we

are approaching the deadline on

an extension of the 2010 New

Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, but be-

cause China’s nuclear expansion threat-

ens to upend decades of relative nuclear

stability between the United States and

Russia.

The United States and Russia have

been reducing their strategic nuclear ar-

senals since the end of the Cold War. The

1991 Start Treaty allowed each side 6,000

deployable strategic nuclear warheads;

the 2010 treaty, known as New Start, low-

ered that limit to 1,550 operationally de-

ployed strategic nuclear warheads.

But stability at these lower force levels

will be challenged by China’s nuclear am-

bitions. China is clearly moving away

from the small, limited nuclear force of its

past. It is fielding modern land- and sea-

based strategic systems, and plans to in-

troduce an air-launched ballistic missile

delivered by heavy bombers, achieving its

own strategic nuclear triad.

The Defense Intelligence Agency esti-

mates that China will at least double its

nuclear arsenal over the next decade and

is building the production capacity to ex-

pand it further. Given China’s secrecy

about its nuclear forces, and its manifestly

aggressive strategic intentions, this nu-

clear expansion may go even further, well

beyond Beijing’s old “minimum deter-

rence” doctrine.

Still, it is in China’s interest to reverse

its dangerous nuclear buildup, lest it set

off a nuclear arms race involving the

United States and Russia, and perhaps en-

courage other nuclear powers to increase

their forces to keep pace.

Meanwhile, the United States is replac-

ing its aging nuclear weapons systems.

Our intention is to remain within the New

Start limits of 700 strategic missiles and

bombers and 1,550 deployed strategic

warheads.

But as Chinese nuclear forces grow in

size and sophistication, the United States

will have no choice but to reassess and ad-

just its own nuclear force requirements. In

the past, the United States classified Chi-

na’s small nuclear arsenal as a subset of

U.S. nuclear force requirements, which

have been largely driven by the Soviet and

then Russian threat.

But this will not remain the case if U.S.

nuclear forces remain at historically low

levels and China’s continue to expand with

no discernible constraint. And the less we

know about what China is doing and why,

the more the United States must rely on

worst-case scenarios to size its nuclear

forces accordingly.

China’s nuclear expansion and its refus-

al to engage in meaningful dialogue will

affect stability on multiple levels. In-

creased U.S. nuclear force requirements

to ensure credible deterrence against

China would affect the United States-Rus-

sia strategic nuclear balance and threaten

to undermine the prospects for further ne-

gotiated reductions. We should assume

that Russia will also assess the implica-

tions of China’s expansion.

The American special envoy for arms

control, Marshall Billingslea, made these

points to his Russian counterpart during a

meeting in June in Vienna. Russia should

see its own self-interest in helping to bring

China into discussions on arms control.

These talks need not focus on making

China part of an extended New Start

agreement. But renewing the treaty for

the United States and Russia without con-

ditions for bringing China into a broader

arms control process carries risks for fu-

ture security, even if today it seems the

easiest course to take. All the great pow-

ers must be invested in such a process.

We ask China to recognize its obliga-

tions under the Nuclear Nonproliferation

Treaty to negotiate in good faith on lim-

iting and reducing nuclear arms and,

more generally, to take steps toward

greater transparency. Transparency is

important to foster greater trust and less-

en the chance of miscalculation during a

crisis. That first step is joining the United

States and Russia at the table in Vienna.

Those of us charged with ensuring the

defense of the United States call on Con-

gress and our allies to help make the case

to Russia and China that it is in the inter-

ests of all nations to broaden the current

arms control framework to verifiably limit

the nuclear weapons of all three major

powers to secure a more stable and pros-

perous future. 0

China’s Troubling Nuclear Buildup

James Anderson

JAMES ANDERSON is the acting under

secretary of defense for policy.

An expansion means the

U.S. and Russia have to

reassess their arsenals.

WU HONG/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

A

FTER Mitt Romneylost the 2012

presidential race, the Republi-

can National Committee chair-

man, Reince Priebus, commis-

sioned an internal party study to examine

why the party had won the popular vote

only once since 1988.

The results of that so-called autopsy

were fairly obvious: The party needed to

appeal to more people of color, reach out to

younger voters, become more welcoming

to women. Those conclusions were

presented as not only a political necessity

but also a moral mandate if the Republi-

can Party were to be a governing party in

a rapidly changing America.

Then Donald Trump emerged and the

party threw all those conclusions out the

window with an almost audible sigh of re-

lief: Thank God we can win without pre-

tending we really care about this stuff.

That reaction was sadly predictable.

I spent decades working to elect Repub-

licans, including Mr. Romney and four

other presidential candidates, and I am

here to bear reluctant witness that Mr.

Trump didn’t hijack the Republican Party.

He is the logical conclusion of what the

party became over the past 50 or so years,

a natural product of the seeds of race-bait-

ing, self-deception and anger that now

dominate it.

I saw the warning signs but ignored

them and chose to believe what I wanted

to believe: The party wasn’t just a white

grievance party; there was still a big tent;

the others guys were worse. Many of us in

the party saw this dark side and told our-

selves it was a recessive gene. It turned

out to be the dominant gene.

What is most telling is that the Republi-

can Party actively embraced, supported,

defended and now enthusiastically identi-

fies with a man who eagerly exploits the

nation’s racial tensions. In our system, po-

litical parties should serve a circuit

breaker function. The Republican Party

never pulled the switch.

Racism is the original sin of the modern

Republican Party. While many Republi-

cans today like to mourn the absence of an

intellectual voice like William Buckley, it is

often overlooked that Mr. Buckley began

his career as a racist defending segrega-

tion.

In the Richard Nixon White House, Pat

Buchanan and Kevin Phillips wrote a re-

election campaign memo headed “Divid-

ing the Democrats” in which they outlined

what would come to be known as the

Southern Strategy. It assumes there is lit-

tle Republicans can do to attract Black

Americans and details a two-pronged

strategy: Utilize Black support of Demo-

crats to alienate white voters while trying

to decrease that support by sowing dis-

sension within the Democratic Party.

That strategy has worked so well that it

was copied by the Russians in their 2016

efforts to help elect Mr. Trump.

In the 2000 George W. Bush campaign,

on which I worked, we acknowledged the

failures of Republicans to attract signifi-

cant nonwhite support. When Mr. Bush

called himself a “compassionate conser-

vative,” some on the right attacked him,

calling it an admission that conservatism

had not been compassionate. That was

true; it had not been. Many of us believed

we could steer the party to that “kinder,

gentler” place his father described. We

were wrong.

Reading Mr. Bush’s 2000 acceptance

speech at the Republican National Con-

vention now is like stumbling across a doc-

ument from a lost civilization, with its calls

for humility, service and compassion. That

message couldn’t attract 20 percent in a

Republican presidential primary today. If

there really was a battle for the soul of the

Republican Party, we lost.

There is a collective blame to be shared

by those of us who have created the mod-

ern Republican Party that has so egre-

giously betrayed the principles it claimed

to represent.

How did this happen? How do you

abandon deeply held beliefs about charac-

ter, personal responsibility, foreign policy

and the national debt in a matter of

months? You don’t. The obvious answer is

those beliefs weren’t deeply held. What

others and I thought were bedrock values

turned out to be mere marketing slogans

easily replaced. I feel like the guy working

for Bernie Madoff who thought they were

actually beating the market.

Mr. Trump has served a useful purpose

by exposing the deep flaws of a major po-

litical party. He has made it impossible to

ignore the long-developing fault lines of

the Republican Party. A party rooted in de-

cency and values does not embrace the

anger that Mr. Trump peddles as patrio-

tism.

This collapse of a party as a moral gov-

erning force is unlike anything we have

seen in modern American politics. The

closest parallel is the demise of the Com-

munist Party in the Soviet Union, when

the dissonance between what the party

said it stood for and what citizens actually

experienced was so great that it was un-

sustainable.

This election should signal a day of

reckoning for the party and all who claim

it as a political identity. Will it? I’ve given

up hope that there are any lines of decency

or normalcy that once crossed would

move Republican leaders to act as if they

took their oath of office more seriously

than their allegiance to party. Only fear

will motivate the party to change — the

cold fear only defeat can bring.

That defeat is looming. Will it bring des-

perately needed change to the Republican

Party? I’d like to say I’m hopeful. But that

would be a lie and there have been too

many lies for too long. 0

We Created the G.O.P. Demise

Stuart Stevens

STUART STEVENS is a Republican political

consultant and the author of the forth-

coming book “It Was All a Lie: How the

Republican Party Became Donald

Trump,” from which this essay is

adapted.

Trump is a natural

product of the seeds of

race-baiting and anger.

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

IN JUNE 2017 , I ran into John Lewis outside

of Atlanta, where he was campaigning

for his former intern Jon Ossoff in the

special election for Georgia’s Sixth Con-

gressional District. I asked him some-

thing I asked everyone in those days,

when the horror of this administration

was still fresh: How confident was he

that America would recover from Donald

Trump?

“We will get there,” Lewis said. “We

will survive. We will survive.”

During the civil rights movement, he

said, there were people “who said that

we wouldn’t get a Civil Rights Act when

we were marching from Selma. We

wouldn’t get a Voting Rights Act. We

wouldn’t get a Fair Housing Act. But we

never gave up, we never gave in. We kept

the faith.”

There was something saintly about

Lewis, whose funeral was held on Thurs-

day. What’s striking in accounts of his

youthful encounters with snarling, mur-

derous white supremacy is not just his

courage, but also his calm and other-

worldly clarity.

The historian Taylor Branch described

a 1961 debate within part of the civil

rights movement about whether to keep

up demonstrations in Nashville in the

face of escalating white violence. “When-

ever asked a question, he ignored the

fine points of whatever theory was being

put forward and said simply, ‘We’re

gonna march tonight,’ ” Branch wrote of

Lewis.

A prominent white clergyman named

Will D. Campbell lost his temper, accus-

ing Lewis of the sin of pride. “Lewis

smiled warmly at Campbell, as though

taking pity on him,” wrote Branch. “ ‘OK,

I’m a sinner,’ he replied softy. ‘We’re

gonna march.’ ”

Lewis’s persistence won, the march

went on and he was arrested for the

fourth of at least 45 times.

Lewis, the best of this country, had

seen the worst of it and still had faith.

“Ordinary people with extraordinary vi-

sion can redeem the soul of America by

getting in what I call good trouble, neces-

sary trouble,” he wrote in an essay for

The Times to publish on the day of his fu-

neral.

Lately I’ve struggled to hold on to

hope of redemption. On the night Trump

was elected, I felt as if the ground was

crumbling beneath my feet, and yet look-

ing back I was naïve about how bad

things could get.

Mass death from a pandemic running

unchecked, without even the pretense

that the federal government will help us.

A Congress that’s allowing emergency

aid to the unemployed to lapse during an

economic crisis as bad or worse than the

Great Depression. Unidentified men in

camouflage beating protesters in the

streets. Public education near collapse.

A president musing about postponing

the election, and his thuggish secretary

of state backing him by suggesting that’s

a live possibility.

My life is far easier than that of most

people in this country, but since March of

this despicable year I’ve felt dread from

the moment I open my eyes in the morn-

ing until I fall asleep at night. Sometimes

in the evening my son cries and says he

hates being a child in the time of coro-

navirus, and I try not to cry too.

If this president makes good on his

threats to undermine an election he’s

likely to lose, many of us will be called to

pour into the streets and face the brutal-

ity of Trump’s goons. This thought makes

me feel ground down and frightened, not

brave and defiant. In middle age I’ve

started to envy those like Lewis who are

able to believe in God.

But something I take from reading

about the lives of civil rights heroes is

that confidence didn’t always precede

action. Sometimes it was action’s result.

Branch wrote of how, the first time Lewis

was arrested, “a lifetime of absorbed ta-

boos against any kind of trouble with the

law quickened into terror.” But on the

ride to jail, “dread gave way to an exhila-

ration unlike any he had ever known.”

Lewis would later describe it as a

sense of liberation, of crossing over. He

and his fellow activists showed that hope

is as much a practice as a feeling.

At Lewis’s funeral, Barack Obama eu-

logized him from Martin Luther King Jr.’s

former pulpit. Our last real president

was blunt about the parallels between

the current regime and the villains of the

civil rights era: “George Wallace may be

gone, but we can witness our federal gov-

ernment sending agents to use tear gas

and batons against peaceful demonstra-

tors,” he said.

Lewis, said Obama, “devoted his time

on this earth fighting the very attacks on

democracy, and what’s best in America,

that we’re seeing circulate right now.”

Lewis’s movement defeated men like

Wallace in one generation, then saw a

man like Wallace replace the first Black

president in the next. “In spite of it all, we

must be hopeful, we must be optimistic,

we must never get lost in a sea of de-

spair,” Lewis told me three years ago. He

wasn’t just describing a disposition. He

was describing a discipline. 0

MICHELLE GOLDBERG

Lewis Believed

We Would

Survive Trump

The civil rights leader told

America to keep the faith.

It’s not easy.

THE UNITED STATES just endured its worst
economic quarter in recorded history. If
this trend had continued for an entire year,
American economic output would have
been down by about a third.
So I’m hoping Joe Biden and his team
are reading up on Franklin Roosevelt and
the New Deal. The New Dealers suc-
ceeded in a moment like this. Their experi-
ence offers some powerful lessons for Bi-
den as he campaigns and if he wins:
Offer big change that feels familiar. Eco-
nomic and health calamities are experi-
enced by most people as if they were natu-
ral disasters and complete societal break-
downs. People feel intense waves of fear
about the future. They want a leader, like
F.D.R., who demonstrates optimistic fear-
lessness.
They want one who, once in office,
produces an intense burst of activity that
is both new but also offers people security
and safety. During the New Deal, Social
Security gave seniors secure retirements.
The Works Progress Administration gave
8.5 million Americans secure jobs.
Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan is a
perfect encapsulation of this mood of si-
multaneously longing for the safety of the
past while moving to a brighter future.
Broadcast pragmatism, not ideology.
New Dealers were willing to try anything
that met the specific emergencies of the
moment. There was a strong anti-ideolog-
ical bias in the administration and a wan-
ton willingness to experiment. For exam-
ple, Roosevelt’s first instinct was to cut
government spending in order to reduce
the deficit, until he flipped, realizing that it
wouldn’t work in a depression.
“I really do not know what the basic
principle of the New Deal is,” one of his top
advisers admitted. That pragmatism re-
assured the American people, who didn’t
want a revolution; they wanted a recov-
ery.
Even in a crisis of capitalism, embrace
capitalism. Historian Richard Pells notes
that flagship progressive magazines like
The Nation and The New Republic did not
endorse F.D.R. in 1932, but rather his so-
cialist opponent, Norman Thomas. As the
New Deal succeeded, many progressive
intellectuals mobilized a barrage of criti-
cism against it. By 1934 they were pro-
ducing books with titles like “The Coming

American Revolution” and calling for the
creation of a new political party of the left.
They understood Roosevelt was a liber-
al capitalist, not a socialist. “I want to save
our system, the capitalist system,” he said
at one point. “My desire [is] to obviate
revolution,” he said at another. He was
seeking to save capitalism from the capi-
talists, who had concentrated too much
power in themselves. He was trying to re-
form capitalism to preserve it.
Get capitalism moving. The Reconstruc-
tion Finance Corporation, run by Jesse
Jones, a Hoover administration holdover,
gave bankers incentives to take the capi-
tal that had been sitting in their vaults and
get it out into the community. The Federal
Housing Administration backed mort-
gages. As Louis Hyman of Cornell notes,
the F.H.A. induced more private lending in
a few months than the Public Works Ad-
ministration spent during the entire dec-
ade. The New Deal was more clever and
diverse than just tax-and-spend liberal-
ism.
Embrace expertise. Huey Long, Father
Coughlin and Francis Townsend were
leading a populist revolt that threatened
to bring an era of bottom-up authoritari-
anism. F.D.R. tried to co-opt them a bit, but
mostly he just outperformed them with
talent. He staffed his administration with
a very bright and unabashedly “brains
trust” array of lawyers, professors, econo-
mists and social workers.
Look for imbalances. Capitalist econo-
mies get out of whack from time to time.
The New Deal brought balance. It made it
easier for workers to unionize and deal on
more equal terms with business. Wall
Street was too powerful. The New Deal
reined it in.
Devolve power to Congress. Historian Ira
Katznelson argues that too much atten-
tion is paid to F.D.R., when the real action
was in Congress. If you want to unleash a
torrent of action you have to let individual
members of Congress drive their own ini-
tiatives, not concentrate power in the
White House or House speaker’s office.
The New Deal didn’t produce an instant
economic turnaround. But it did show that
democratic capitalism could still function.
His enemies called Roosevelt a socialist or
a populist, but in reality it was Roosevelt
who defeated socialism and populism. In
America at least, they were spent forces
by 1939.
F.D.R. also demonstrated that the most
effective leaders in crisis are often at the
center of their party, not at left or right
vanguard. Abraham Lincoln took enor-
mous heat from abolitionists. But he’s the
one who defeated slavery. Theodore
Roosevelt had a conservative disposition
and lagged behind many Progressives.
But he’s the one who led Progressive re-
forms. F.D.R. was able to pass so much leg-
islation precisely because he was so shift-
ing and pragmatic and did not turn every-
thing into a polarized war.
We’re not going to have another Roose-
velt. But in a time of crisis, in an ideolog-
ical age, he showed it’s possible to get a lot
done if you turn down the ideological tem-
perature, if you evade the culture war, if
you are willing to be positive and openly
experimental.
That’s the New Dealers’ big lesson for
Biden & Company. 0

DAVID BROOKS

The Future

Of American

Liberalism

What Biden can

learn from F.D.R.

BD