Biden's Middle East trip: Following in Trump's footsteps
WATCH: Biden looks poised to betray his campaign promise to sideline Saudi Arabia. Does this really serve America's interests?
Responsible Statecraft
Responsible Statecraft is a publication of analysis, opinion, and news that seeks to promote a positive vision of U.S. foreign policy based on humility, diplomatic engagement, and military restraint. RS also critiques the ideas — and the ideologies and interests behind them — that have mired the United States in counterproductive and endless wars and made the world less secure.
Top image credit: Shutterstock/leolintang
What would happen if a Russian nuke detonated over your city
February 19, 2025
The war in Ukraine has served as a reminder to the general public that both Russia and the U.S. have massive nuclear weapons arsenals and that they continue to pose an existential threat to human civilization, and perhaps even to our very survival on the planet.
But do we actually know why? As a nuclear scientist and weapons expert I think it would be helpful to briefly contemplate, as a survival enhancing exercise, the effects of a single nuclear detonation on Washington, Kyiv or Moscow.
Keep in mind that a single Russian Sarmat or SS-18 intercontinental missile carries ten 800-kiloton bombs, and the Russian intercontinental missile arsenal can launch about 400 of those bombs within minutes of a launch command. Let’s focus here on the effects of a single 800-kiloton nuclear detonation at a height of about one mile above an American city.
The detonation of this nuclear weapon would release the near explosive equivalent of a million tons of TNT within a 100 millionths of a second and within a volume of roughly a cubic foot. Because so much energy is released so quickly and in such a small volume, the temperature inside the explosion will reach roughly 100 million degrees celsius, about five times that of the center of the sun.
Within a millionths of a second, the explosive energy heats the surrounding air to a million degrees, creating a “fireball” of superheated air with an inner pressure of tens of millions of pounds per square inch. This fireball initially expands at about one million miles per hour, and within a second becomes a bubble of hot air of about one mile in diameter.
As this superheated air-bubble expands to its maximum diameter, its edges push against the surrounding air, producing a compressed blast wave of enormous power and extent.
The light and heat from the fireball are so intense at this point that a detonation over Detroit or Kiev at night, out of line-of-sight due to the earth’s curvature, could still be seen as a flash of light low in the sky from Washington DC or Moscow, respectively. It will be bright enough at 50 miles to cause retinal burns if individuals happen to be looking towards the detonation.
At a range of nearly eight miles, the fireball will appear almost 100 times brighter than a noon hour desert sun, and will ignite clothing, curtains, grass, and light vegetation.
At five miles, it will appear more than 200 times brighter than a noon hour desert sun, and would cause warping of metal surfaces, explosive combustion of the paint off walls, and ignitions of essentially all combustible materials in the fireballs’s line-of-sight. Brittle concrete and granite surfaces would be so rapidly heated that they would explode into dust. Black smoke from partially combusted materials will fill the air, making it impossible to even read street signs from ground level.
At ranges yet nearer to the detonation, heating effects will be so intense, that human flesh would burn explosively into carbon, and asphalt on the streets would melt and, in some cases, vaporize.
At that point, the resulting fires over an area of between 100 and 150 square miles on Earth would efficiently heat large volumes of air near and above the ground. The energy released by this mass fire would be 15 to 50 times greater than the energy produced by the nuclear detonation. The rising hot air would reach wind speeds of 300 miles per hour and be so intense they would knock airplanes above the fire zone from the sky.
This “chimney effect” would pull cool air from outside the fire zone towards the center of the fire at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. These superheated ground-winds of more than hurricane force would further intensify the fire.
At the edge of the fire zone, the winds would be powerful enough to uproot trees of several feet in diameter and suck people from outside the fire into it, fill city streets with flames and firebrands, break in doors and windows, and cause the fire to jump, sometimes hundreds of feet, swallowing anything not already violently combusting.
This ferocious “hurricane of fire” would also be accompanied by the release of large amounts of potentially lethal toxic smoke and combustion gases, creating an environment of extreme heat, high winds, and toxic agents in target areas.
These combined effects will produce a lethal ground-environment for three to six hours while the fire burns most intensely.
Those who tried to escape through the streets would have been incinerated by the boiling hot hurricane-force winds filled with firebrands and flames. Those able to find shelter in the lower-level sub-basements of massive buildings would likely suffocate from fire-generated gases or be cooked alive as their shelters heated to oven-like conditions.
After the fire burns out, the street pavement would be so hot that even tracked vehicles would not be able to pass over it for days. Buried, unburned material from collapsed buildings throughout the fire zone could burst into flames when exposed to air — even months after the firestorm had ended.
As the nuclear debris cloud rises, it will drag with it the radioactive isotopes produced during the detonation of the nuclear weapon. One hour after the detonation, the radioactive isotopes will be about 10,000 times more radioactive than the radiation released in the Chernobyl accident, which occurred in 1986. Since these radioactive isotopes are mostly “short-lived,” within one day the activity levels will drop to several hundred times that of the Chernobyl release.
Some very small fraction of these radioactive materials would be falling to the ground within the hours following the nuclear attack, and since the activity of these materials is so high, they will produce radiation on the ground near and downwind of the target area that will be lethal within hours to exposed individuals.
Facing these realities, can anyone know how to define the meaning of winning a nuclear war?
keep readingShow less
Top Photo Credit: David Cohen via Shutterstock. Safed, Israel-May 1,2017 Jewish Home parliament member Bezalel Smotrich and Ilan Shohat, mayor of the Tzfat, attend the Israel Memorial Day, commemorating the deaths of Israeli soldiers killed
Israeli official: ‘Goal’ is to ‘demolish more than the Palestinians build’
February 18, 2025
According to reports, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that “the goal for 2025 is to demolish more than the Palestinians build in the West Bank.” This comes as the Israeli government is reportedly building almost 1,000 additional housing units in the Efrat settlement close to Jerusalem.
The additional units built for settlers in Efrat would increase the settlement’s size by 40% and block development in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. The roughly 100 existing settlements in the West Bank host around 500,000 Israeli settlers and are considered illegal under international law.
Sunday’s comments from Smotrich reflect his longstanding hopes for Israeli absorption of the West Bank and the nixing of a two-state solution. He published a lengthy plan in 2017 in this regard entitled “One Hope.”
“We need to and can go back to the post-1948 days, regarding both Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of Judea and Samaria,” he outlined in the plan, the first phase of which is called “Victory Through Settlement.” This, he explained, ”will be realized via a political-legal act of imposing sovereignty on all Judea and Samaria, and with concurrent acts of settlement: the establishment of cities and towns, the laying down of infrastructure as is customary in ‘little’ Israel and the encouragement of tens and hundreds of thousands of residents to come live in Judea and Samaria. In this way, we will be able to create a clear and irreversible reality on the ground.”
"The Arabs of Judea and Samaria will be able to conduct their daily life in freedom and peace, but not to vote for the Israeli Knesset at the first stage” as a way to “preserve the Jewish majority in decision-making in the state of Israel.” He vehemently denies that this system resembles apartheid.
Israel has been carrying out military operations in the West Bank’s north for months now, displacing upwards of 40,000 Palestinians, according to experts, which exceeds displacement levels in 1967 after the Six-Day War when Israel annexed the West Bank from Jordan. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reports that the IDF has killed at least 876 people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since Oct. 7, 2023.
“The purpose of the operations is to prevent terror from places a few kilometers from Jewish communities and to prevent a repeat of Oct.7,” said an IDF spokesperson, but the actions have come at a significant cost to civilians. Ramy Abu Siriye, a local barber who was displaced from Tulkarem in January, lamented, “The soldiers are taking over one area after another, destroying homes, infrastructure, and roads.”
Annelle Sheline, Quincy Institute Middle East fellow, said everyone loses with annexation: Palestinians, Israelis, the greater region. “The Israeli government continues to undermine the long-term security of Israeli citizens, which can only truly be achieved alongside security for Palestinians.”
Further normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors may also be in jeopardy if the West Bank is de facto annexed, threatening the prospect of a Palestinian state. Earlier in February, when President Trump floated forcing Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip, the Saudi Arabian foreign ministry confirmed that further normalization with Israel wouldn’t happen until the establishment of a Palestinian state and that their position was “firm and unwavering.”
The State Department has not yet commented on Smotrich’s remarks or the new settlements in the West Bank.
keep readingShow less
Top image credit: Secretary Marco Rubio meets with Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Enrique A. Manalo in Munich, Germany, February 14, 2025. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)
Can US-Philippine talks calm South China Sea tensions?
February 18, 2025
Could a recent meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Philippine counterpart Enrique Manalo be the beginnings of a de-escalation in the troubled waters of the South China Sea?
There are only hints in the air so far. But such a shift by Washington (and a corresponding response by the Philippines and China) would be important to calm the waters and mark a turn away from the U.S. being sucked into what could spiral into a military crisis and, in the worst-case scenario, a direct U.S.-China confrontation. But to be effective, any shift should also be executed responsibly.
The State Department spokesperson’s comments on February 14 about the meeting reiterated familiar points on “bilateral coordination addressing China’s destabilizing actions in the South China Sea” and “reaffirmed U.S. commitment to the United States-Philippines Alliance.” A U.S.readout of an earlier Rubio-Manalo call on January 22 was more expansive, speaking of China’s “dangerous and destabilizing actions” undermining “regional peace and stability” and being “inconsistent with international law.” The readout also reaffirmed Washington’s “ironclad commitments to the Philippines under our Mutual Defense Treaty.”
Intriguingly however, both sets of comments did not repeat the key assertion — first made by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2021 and subsequentlyreaffirmed multiple times by the Biden administration — of the Mutual Defense Treaty extending to “armed attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft, including those of its Coast Guard, anywhere in the South China Sea.”
The omission may simply be an oversight. But it is important to keep the overall strategic context in mind. A radical U-turn in the Ukraine theater and various other administration moves have indicated that Trump is not averse to a major reorientation of U.S. grand strategy. It would be highly premature to label the new approach as “Restraint,” but the shift on Europe is telling. A recognition of the hard realities of interests and a move away from self-defeating framings such as “democracy v. autocracy” would also be a good thing for the United States to embrace in East and Southeast Asia.
However, there is much less reason to believe that the Trump team will aim for a grand reset with China. Washington’s push to confront China economically has, if anything, only escalated. Trump has appointed several China hawks in the National Security Council and the State Department, none of whom are expected to counsel a reset.
However, the Pentagon now includes some Restraint-oriented voices. One, Andrew Byers, the new deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, recently suggested (in a paper on U.S.-China relations co-authored with J. Tedford Tyler) “removing U.S. military forces or weapons systems from the Philippines in exchange for the China Coast Guard executing fewer patrols.”
A recent Quincy Institute brief on the U.S.-Philippines alliance in the South China Sea analyzed the stand-off and recommended several specific policy actions by Washington to initiate a de-escalation, keeping the factors of vital interests, proportionality, and sustainability in mind. These include elimination of one or more U.S. military sites in northern Luzon, a withdrawal of the provocative Typhon missile system from the Philippines, a halt to pulling in U.S. allies jointly and militarily into the South China Sea, and a reversal of moves indicating the United States is pulling the Philippines into the Taiwan theater; all in exchange for corresponding de-escalatory actions by China.
But a de-escalation in the South China Sea as a part of a limited security thaw with China (even as economic and security competition intensifies elsewhere), if it indeed comes to pass, must be done responsibly. The Quincy Institute brief also counseled increased support for strengthening Philippine coast guard, naval and infrastructure capacities and continued strong diplomatic support for its lawful claims in the South China Sea.
It’s one thing to de-escalate incrementally, demanding equivalent Chinese actions at each step, but quite another to summarily abandon a weaker ally that Washington has arguably egged on. In all things, the United States ought to keep regional stability and Manila’s agency in mind while attempting an urgently-needed de-escalation.keep readingShow less
Newsletter
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.