In The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin recounts the ancient Greek proverb that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin’s essay was apparently written as something of a throwaway, but it remains a useful lens through which to understand the grand strategists of U.S. foreign policy, especially during the early Cold War.
America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security From Roosevelt to Reagan, James Graham Wilson, Cornell University Press, 336 pp., $32.95, July 2024
The architects of American foreign policy during those years were some of our greatest foxes. George Kennan was a generational intellectual who just happened to be a foreign service officer. George Marshall’s military and operational genius were matched by his political acumen, as the organizer of the American military victory in WWII and the political and economic rehabilitator of Europe.
And then there’s Paul Nitze: another Cold War foreign policy titan who ran the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under Truman and was an essential voice on defense and arms control policy for decades, yet a committed hedgehog.
In his superb America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan, State Department historian James Graham Wilson portrays Nitze as consistently animated by a single, “steadfast conviction that the United States needed to possess overriding strength.” He was a leading apostle for increasing conventional defense spending during the Truman and Eisenhower years, and as he transitioned to focus on nuclear policy during the 1970s and 1980s, he was a tireless advocate for ramping up U.S. nuclear capabilities.
In this new era of competition with China and Russia, Nitze’s career and ideas are more relevant than ever. They highlight both the promise and pitfalls of a relentless striving for military superiority. His vision of a robust global defense network and deterrent, laid out in NSC-68 in 1950, inspires U.S. defense policy in the Indo-Pacific and Europe today, whether policymakers realize it or not.
But his story also warns us that we’re currently in the dangerous “early Cold War” cycle of unfettered defense buildup and competition with China, similar to the 1950s. It should hasten thinking about how to rein in military competition and establish more defense and arms control guardrails now, before it all gets out of hand.
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In this black-and-white photo, Nitze has his hands folded in front of him as he sits at a table next to President John F. Kennedy. - Nitze at a press conference with U.S. President John F. Kennedy on Aug. 30, 1960.
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Ronald Reagan gestures with both hands as he stands next to Nitze and Rostow under an ornately framed painting. All three men wear dark suits. - In this black and white photo, U.S. President Ronald Reagan talks with Nitze, then the chief negotiator on intermediate range ballistic missiles in Europe, and Eugene Rostow, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, before a briefing by them in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1982. During the briefing, they said that “very little progress” had been made on nuclear weapons reduction negotiations with the Soviets.
Like many of his Wise Men contemporaries, Paul Nitze was a convert from the world of Wall Street in the 1930s, answering the call of public service during the Roosevelt administration, and staying on to help remake the post-war world under Truman. But what sets Nitze apart was his longevity in Washington. He remained an important government player through the 1980s.
Yet Nitze never quite broke into the top ranks. He lacked the suppleness of mind of a Kennan or Dean Acheson, who initially warned Kennan that “[Nitze]’s not a long-range thinker.” Nitze struggled, sometimes awkwardly, to win the presidential ear. During Nitze’s first appointment with Eisenhower at the White House, “he opened the wrong door and found Ike in his underwear.” He never cracked Kennedy or Johnson’s inner ring and was out of the loop on Vietnam policy. It was only under Reagan that Nitze truly found a presidential patron, who leaned heavily on Nitze for his expertise on arms control and nuclear issues. By then, Nitze had distinguished himself as perhaps the foremost expert on nuclear policy in Washington.
Throughout the entirety of this impressive run inside government, Nitze displayed hedgehog-like constancy in his belief that “US strength brought stability; US weakness brought instability.” It was, according to Wilson’s biography, the prism through which Nitze viewed almost everything.
What led to Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941? Lack of strong American capabilities in the Pacific. What was wrong with Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy? A reduction in defense spending in the pursuit of a more economical reliance on massive nuclear retaliation. What caused Khrushchev to back down over the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962? U.S. conventional and nuclear superiority. What caused the Soviets to invade Afghanistan in 1979? Russian superiority in first strike nuclear capability at the time, which permitted and incentivized Moscow to take more risk.
You get the point. Nitze was always pushing up, up, up on spending: conventional forces, nuclear forces, more complicated missile delivery systems and mobile units to evade USSR targeting. Even if it meant higher taxes or budget cuts. As Nitze coldly put it, “the avoidance of nuclear war is much more important than increasing welfare payments.”
The commander of the Guantanamo Bay naval base points Nitze toward the gate that separates the base from Fidel Castro’s Cuba on Feb. 13, 1964.Keystone/Getty Images
Nitze was right, and prescient, in urging the United States to build up a credible military deterrent and a network of military assets around the world at the onset of the Cold War. This vision was best articulated in NSC-68, which he crafted while head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 1950 and serves as the founding document of U.S. strategy during the Cold War. Nitze used NSC-68 to promote a drastic increase conventional military capabilities “to a level previously unprecedented in peacetime.”
It also called on the United States to wage a decidedly global struggle, backing allies around the world to thwart Soviet aggression and working to enhance their own defense capabilities. While all this may seem intuitive in retrospect, in its context NSC-68 was revolutionary. Nitze correctly anticipated that the United States couldn’t withdraw from the world, ramp down its defense capabilities during peacetime, and rely on surging its latent military-industrial capacity solely at the time of acute need, the strategy it had employed before both WWI and WWII.
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Where he was clearly wrong was in his focus on the nuclear balance as the singular determinant of Soviet behavior. According to Sergey Radchenko’s excellent new book on Soviet decision-making, To Run the World, the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis can’t be explained simply by American nuclear preponderance. The U.S. promise to remove its nuclear missiles in Turkey enabled Khruschev’s “blinking” during the crisis. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was fueled by a sense of insecurity—rather than superiority—as Moscow risked losing a client state. It’s hard to imagine Brezhnev taking a different decision if, say, the United States had more nuclear missiles.
Perhaps the larger error was one-dimensional strategic thinking focused on military concerns above all. Nitze’s life’s work and story could be boiled down to a fixation on weapons, defense spending, and ratios of nuclear throw-weight. He downplayed the importance of U.S. promotion of human rights, dismissing it as “hypocritical and pointless.” In a sense, he missed the boat on just how much of the Cold War lay outside of the priesthood of nuclear weapons policy or military matters.
Nitze sits in an office with a large map of world on wall behind him in 1964. JHU Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Getty Images
As the United States enters a new contest with Beijing and Moscow, it seems we’re all part-Nitze now. The need for a forward American presence and the dangers of retrenchment are just as valid as they were during Nitze’s time. We’ve learned this the hard way in Ukraine, where a lack of military industrial capacity in both the United States and Europe has hamstrung our support for Kyiv.
The Biden administration has built an impressive “latticework” of defense alliances in the Indo-Pacific to deter China, very much in the spirit of NSC-68. Pentagon budgets are knocking at the door of $1 trillion annually—even though the United States already spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined. As the New York Times recently reported, the Biden administration is now updating its nuclear strategy to address the dual threat of both China and Russia, and warned in June that the United States would build up nuclear forces to face this threat, if needed. It would all make Nitze blush.
But as the Cold War demonstrated, the quest for military superiority can become a self-fulfilling danger. Vietnam provides an obvious example of overzealous and self-defeating military flexing. Nitze’s own career even represents this cautionary arc: He spent the 1950s through 1970s advocating for nuclear preponderance, but then during the 1980s served as the critical U.S. negotiator as Reagan sought to limit and even reduce nuclear stockpiles. We had so blindly built-up nuclear weapons that we reached point of existential danger, and then had to pull it all back from the brink.
This should be a sobering lesson for U.S. policymakers today. Right now, U.S. policy is in its “early Cold War” phase: an upward escalatory spiral against both China and Russia and no brakes in sight. The only arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, New START, expires in 2026; China is embarking on an unprecedented nuclear buildup and is estimated to reach 1,500 weapons by 2035. Tensions reached such a low after Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022 that China shut off all military-to-military dialogue with Washington. Since then the Biden administration has admirably—and successfully—worked to reopen some defense channels with Beijing, but mutual trust is lacking and more formal military agreements appear quite distant.
This isn’t sustainable. Cold War history, and Paul Nitze’s own, tells us that the pendulum will inevitably swing back the other way: We’ll find ourselves either in a crisis, or in such an untenably dangerous situation that we’ll be forced into arms control negotiations. We’re still caught in the tense equivalent of the 1950s and early 1960s Cold War. While Russia and China may be unwilling and difficult interlocutors at the moment, to avoid repeating history, the United States should put every effort into building military and arms control guardrails, rather than only ramping up the pressure. Better to halt the cycle now than wait for a Cuban Missile-style crisis.
What’s more, a Nitze-like focus on military deterrence as the cure and explanation for everything risks missing the main game. Yes, defense is important. But today’s competition with China is being waged primarily economically and technologically, just as the Cold War was fought as an ideological and diplomatic struggle and was lost by the Soviet Union as their economy failed to keep pace. Had the Soviets coerced and deterred the United States a bit more, would the outcome of the Cold War have changed? The answer is likely no; the Soviet system was rotten, and inherent Western economic, technological, and ideological strengths won the day.
As Nitze’s story demonstrates, a hedgehog-like fixation on establishing military supremacy above all else may ultimately prove as much a distraction (and a danger) as an asset—one that we’ll have to redress sometime in the future.
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