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(Crosspost from CredibleDefense)
Absent a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and assuming Putin or his appointed successor remain in power in Russia in the medium-long term, it seems unlikely that sanctions on Russia will be lifted any time soon, not least because Europe's transition to LNG over piped gas will be well underway by then and economic pressure for a relations-reset will be relatively muted. Under this "North Korea" scenario, Russia is envisaged to remain a hostile actor to the West and to Europe especially, in the domains such as nuclear sabre-rattling, cyberwarfare, political influence, funding of terrorism, and so on.
What should the West's response be to this new threat on its doorstep? One obvious possibility would be to accelerate and strengthen the NATO missile defense program. While the kinetics of a 99%+ intercept rate remain extremely challenging, a limited missile defense shield capable of reliably intercepting a small number of targets is vastly more technologically viable now than in Reagan's era. Indeed, the fundamentals of such capabilities are arguably already in place, with Aegis Ashore batteries in Romania and Poland (soon to become operational), THAAD batteries are active in Turkey, and Patriot systems in Germany, Spain, Greece, Poland, Romania, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia. While there has been persistent concern among NATO powers that a missile defense system would risk antagonising Russia, the changing geopolitical environment means that many European governments may be politically and financially willing to commit to accelerating the shield.
What of developments in hypersonics and decoy tech? While these do pose challenges, in the case of Russia at least, the Ukraine war suggests that many of their vaunted capabilities may be mere vaporware, or at least perform well below claimed performance measures. Moreover, other technological developments in fields like AI have the potential to make reliable interception more feasible.
What would the point of all this be? In addition to providing NATO with a better way to prevent nuclear bullying by Russia of its neighbours, and to defend against rogue international actors, we might reasonably hope to present Russia with a painful dilemma much like that faced by the Soviet Union in the light of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: either commit to an arms race that it can ill afford, or risk its nuclear capabilities being de-fanged by a more technologically-advanced West. If anything, Russia's current position is worse than that of the Soviet Union in this regard, given its relatively weaker scientific and industrial base and etiolated conventional forces. And whereas Reagan's SDI was mostly pie-in-the-sky thinking in the 1980s, contemporary missile defense boasts impressive and growing capabilities.
Of course, absent any miracle breakthroughs, it remains unlikely that any missile defense shield in the near- or medium-term would be able to withstand a massed nuclear strike involving hundreds or even thousands of warheads. However, the old principles of mutually assured destruction mean that this is not the most pressing nuclear threat that is faced by the West today. Instead, we face the risk of an increasingly isolated, weakened, and aggressive Russia using nuclear weapons in a more restricted capacity to gain battlefield advantages or to coerce its neighbours. Even a limited shield would be useful in combating these threats, and may help contribute in the longer-term to the downfall of Russia's current regime.
How would China behave in this scenario? I can't imagine them sitting still and letting the US-led block alone transcend the constraints of MAD, but at the same time it doesn't seem to me like their R&D capabilities are quite on the level to keep up and join the newly forming circle of "have nukes, but can't be nuked" powers. Perhaps the right play for a US that has decided that the destruction of Russia is an overwhelming priority would then be to offer China unlimited participation in any interception technology it develops and deploys in return for its acquiescence, but I don't know if there is political appetite for such a bold trade.
On that matter, we really shouldn't forget that game theory demands precommitting to nuke your opponent before he makes himself unnukable. I'm increasingly finding myself wishing that we could just get one nuke each on DC and Moscow followed by a miraculous detente, to skim off some of the hubristic cream on top and make people on both sides realise how much they have postured themselves into feeling compelled to wager for
skubUkraine.One of the things I've thought about is that Russia and US would probably refrain from launching all their nuclear missiles at each other precisely for the reason that this would then leave China as the dominant power of the planet, essentially able to assert its wishes at will. (Assuming that this doesn't lead to nuclear winter or other complete global apocalypse, of course, but my understanding is that even a full-scale nuclear match would not do this, considering that the most sensible target for nukes would be just lobbing a lot of them at the other country's nuclear stockpiles so as to maximize the chances you'll succeed in destroying them, and the rest would be spent on other strategic military locations.)
I don't know if Russia would be that concerned about China in a context where it would consider a full-blown nuclear exchange with the US; opinions to the contrary to me generally seem to be based on a wrong model of Russia and/or China (which lead to inferences like "China wants to dominate/conquer Taiwan, which is clearly not of China, so it will want to dominate/conquer other things which are not of China" or "Russia is a right-wing fascist country, therefore they would resent being pushed around by Asians"). My read of Russian attitudes is that they would in reality far prefer a Chinese-dominated unipolar world, with all that entails, to the current one, both because they find smug Anglo overlords more loathsome than smug Beijing ones (perhaps in part because of the greater cultural distance of the latter: legible smugness is more obnoxious) and because the Chinese would actually meddle less.
Is there a scenario in which a Russian-U.S. nuclear war is not essentially suicide for whichever country starts it, if not both? Unless it were somehow possible to completely avoid same-scale retaliation, it seems like "What will China do?" would be the least of their immediate and even medium-long-term problems. Large-scale nuclear war, as I think of it, is essentially, a murder-suicide in which any notion of "next" is not part of the game plan.
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