Top image credit: rawf8 via shutterstock.com
What will happen when there are no guardrails on nuclear weapons?
January 29, 2026
The New START Treaty — the last arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia — is set to expire next week, unless President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin make a last minute decision to renew it. Letting the treaty expire would increase the risk of nuclear conflict and open the door to an accelerated nuclear arms race. A coalition of arms control and disarmament groups is pushing Congress and the president to pledge to continue to observe the New START limits on deployed, strategic nuclear weapons by the US and Russia.
New START matters. The treaty, which entered into force on February 5, 2011 after a successful effort by the Obama administration to win over enough Republican senators to achieve the required two-thirds majority to ratify the deal, capped deployed warheads to 1,550 for each side, and established verification procedures to ensure that both sides abided by the pact. New START was far from perfect, but it did put much needed guardrails on nuclear development that reduced the prospect of an all-out arms race.
The deal that sealed ratification of New START in the Senate a controversial pledge to invest $85 billion in U.S. nuclear warheads over 10 years, an arrangement that some critics argued would cement U.S. possession and development of nuclear weapons for the long-term, thereby making it harder to forge a future agreement to bring warhead stockpiles below New START levels.
New START’s strictures on the number of deployed weapons did not prevent the U.S. or Russia from investing in a new generation of nuclear weapons. In the U.S., for example, the Pentagon is moving forward on a plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines — with new warheads to go with them — at a projected cost of $946 billion over the next decade. At least $140 billion of that sum will go to developing and building a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Sentinel. The new ICBM — which is being developed by Northrop Grumman after it received a sole source contract in September 2020 — has undergone tremendous cost growth of over initial estimates. The overrun prompted a Pentagon review of the program, but the assessment led to a decision to go full speed ahead.
Even more crucial than the cost issue is the fact that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world,” former Secretary of Defense William Perry, because a president would only have a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them in a crisis, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm. Independent analyses by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other expert groups assess that the U.S. could retain the ability to dissuade another nation from launching a nuclear attack on the United States without ICBMs in its arsenal.
Russia is also developing a new generation of nuclear weapons, and threats by Russian leader Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine — however impractical that may be — have raised fears, but have not spurred an effective push for new limits on the possession and use of these potentially world ending weapons.
These developments have prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move its Doomsday Clock — an estimate of the risk of a nuclear conflict — to 85 seconds to midnight. Its statement in support of that judgment urged the leaders of the major nuclear weapons states to shed their complacency and take action to rein in nuclear arsenals and reduce the risk that they will be used. They assessed the current situation as follows:
“A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks.”
The lapsing of New START runs contrary to U.S. public opinion on the matter. A poll released this month and commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative found that 91 percent of Americans — including 85% of President Trump’s supporters — believe that “the United States should negotiate a new agreement with Russia to either maintain current limits on nuclear weapons or further reduce both countries’ arsenals.”
Letting the treaty’s limits lapse is also out of step with the positions of the majority of the world’s nations, 74 of which have ratified the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, while another 25 nations have signed the treaty but yet to formally ratify it.
Reversing current trends and restoring a commitment by the major nuclear powers to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear weapons arsenals will require more constructive relations among the U.S., Russia, and China. But even at the height of the Cold War major agreements to curb nuclear weapons development and deployment were reached, from the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970.
Keeping New START limits and negotiating new deals to limit nuclear arsenals and deployments is in the interests of every nation, and should supersede disagreement on other issues. Whether it will is an open question.
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Top image credit: President Donald Trump, joined by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, announces plans for a “Golden Fleet” of new U.S. Navy battleships, Monday, December 22, 2025, at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Trump's realist defense strategy with interventionist asterisks
January 28, 2026
The Trump administration has released its National Defense Strategy, a document that in many ways marks a sharp break from the interventionist orthodoxies of the past 35 years, but possesses clear militaristic impulses in its own right.
Rhetorically quite compatible with realism and restraint, the report envisages a more focused U.S. grand strategy, shedding force posture dominance in all major theaters for a more concentrated role in the Western Hemisphere and Indo-Pacific. At the same time however, it retains a rather status quo Republican view of the Middle East, painting Iran as an intransigent aggressor and Israel as a model ally. Its muscular approach to the Western Hemisphere also may lend itself to the very interventionism that the report ostensibly opposes.
Echoing the rhetoric outlined in the National Security Strategy, the document begins by assailing the foreign policies of previous administrations, which “squandered our military advantages and the lives, goodwill, and resources of our people in grandiose nation-building projects and self-congratulatory pledges to uphold cloud-based abstractions like the rules-based international order.”
Jettisoning these once sacrosanct pieties of U.S. foreign policy — liberal interventionism and social engineering masked as democratization — the document lays forth an alternative approach based in “flexible, practical realism.” This approach is summarized in four pillars:
- Defend the U.S. Homeland
- Deter China in the Indo-Pacific Through Strength, Not Confrontation
- Increase Burden-Sharing with U.S. Allies and Partners
- Supercharge the U.S. Defense Industrial Base.
Such sequencing is quite significant in itself, suggesting that the administration now assesses the Western Hemisphere to be the most critical arena of U.S. foreign policy. Such relegation of the Indo-Pacific is a notable departure from Trump’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which identified China as the most pressing U.S. security threat. But it is indeed consistent with the National Security Strategy released this past December.
In rationalizing its prioritization of the U.S. homeland, this is how the document circumscribes U.S. vital interests:
“[This strategy] does not conflate Americans’ interests with those of the rest of the world—that a threat to a person halfway around the world is the same as to an American. Nor does it see imposing our way of life by force as necessary. It does not seek to solve all the world’s problems. Rather, it focuses in practical ways on real, credible threats to Americans’ security, freedom, and prosperity. As it does so, it recognizes that some threats—like to our Homeland—are more direct and visceral than others.”
This is a fundamentally realist assessment, grounded in a contained understanding of American power in a multipolar world. It calibrates national security threats based on territorial proximity and their deleterious effect on the American people, rather than as amorphous universal abstractions.
On China, the report outlines a strategy of both competition and cooperation, while explicitly rejecting U.S. domination and humiliation. It calls for more expansive military-to-military communications with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), as part of a broader U.S.-China policy of de-escalation, deconfliction, and strategy stability.
Overall, its approach to the Indo-Pacific is to preserve a balance of power, with calls to “erect a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain (FIC),” predicated on increased defensive burden sharing by U.S. regional allies. Notably, the document does not mention Taiwan by name once, strategic ambiguity in its starkest form.
While this Indo-Pacific strategy does not altogether foreclose U.S. overreach and could in practice sustain the same deterrence framework of Trump’s first term and continued by Biden, it is nonetheless a more sensible approach based around balance of power, divorced from bombast around China’s supposed quest to upend the international “rules-based order.”
Relative to the Korean Peninsula, there is no mention of North Korean “denuclearization” as a policy goal. The document also calls for the South Koreans to take primary responsibility over North Korean deterrence, seemingly presaging a reduction in U.S. troops in South Korea.
This burden sharing extends to Europe and the Middle East, calling on NATO allies, Israel, and Arab Gulf partners to take on their own primary conventional defense. The document rightsizes Russia as a manageable threat for the Europeans, citing Europe’s overwhelming economic advantage compared to Russia. It calls for a recalibration of U.S. forces in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, suggesting continued military retrenchment from each region. Recent reports of U.S. plans to leave Syria and Iraq seem reflective of this strategy.
All of these aspects are compatible with realism and restraint, and reflect a positive course correction that, if actualized, would reduce America’s military footprint in the world, foster a more cooperative relationship with both Russia and China, and enable a greater focus on domestic governance.
But for a document squarely grounded in realist principles, its approach to Iran lacks a concrete course of action, and, instead, seems driven by ideological fanaticism. Touting the supposed success of Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER in purportedly “obliterating Iran’s nuclear program,” it nonetheless acknowledges that Iran is intent on rebuilding its conventional military forces, asserting that the Iranian regime “has the blood of Americans on its hands and remains intent on destroying our close ally Israel." Israel, conversely, is held up as a “model ally,” making no mention of points of divergence between U.S. and Israeli self-interest, or Israeli belligerence in its own right.
Such rhetorical flourishes on Iranian behavior mark a considerable departure from a document otherwise grounded in unemotional, realist threat assessment, seemingly foreclosing the possibility of diplomacy. But renewed kinetic military action against Iran does not accord with the practical realism outlined in this report, particularly absent a clearly achievable U.S strategic objective.
One must also be wary of the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which calls for the Defense Department to restore American military dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The prioritization of the U.S. homeland is, as previously mentioned, a prudent strategic pivot, but hemispheric predominance could become a grandiose project in its own right, justifying neoconservative quagmires in our backyard, rather than in far-off lands. Consider the recent report of U.S. machinations to spur regime change in Cuba by the end of 2026. In such an instance, the patina of realism does not change the reality of social engineering as the preferred policy prescription.
Counternarcotics, one of the identified American interests in the Western Hemisphere, has also demonstrated itself to be an extremely flexible undertaking, ranging from taking out alleged drug boats in the Caribbean to removing the leader of Venezuela. Worryingly, this war on drugs could become a perpetual endeavor akin to the war on terror, increasingly divergent from clear strategic objectives and infused with its own ideological pretenses.
There is much to like in the 2026 National Defense Strategy, but it also contains rhetorical inconsistencies and a clear slippery slope in the Western Hemisphere. We shall see what happens in the coming year, subject to the whims of the man in the bully pulpit.
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Top photo credit: Gemini AI
Ding dong the legacy media and its slavish war reporting is dead
January 28, 2026
In a major development that must be frustrating to an establishment trying to sell their policies to an increasingly skeptical public, the rising popularity of independent media has made it impossible to create broad consensus for corporate-compliant narratives, and to casually denigrate, or even censor, those who disagree.
It’s been a long road.
In terms of foreign policymakers being able to control the message, the first Gulf War in 1991 was a high-water mark in retrospect. At that point, Americans were getting their national news almost exclusively from corporate sources and especially the evening news, with the young CNN (launched in 1980 the only cable alternative) adding to network coverage. With such a narrow band of options, narratives could be foisted upon the American public by the Washington establishment and their compatriots in the media, who largely shared the same social circles, backgrounds,and career interests.
Such fanciful and self-serving narratives (babies stolen from incubators and "liberating" Kuwait, the Iraqis, and especially the Kurds from the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein) were accepted by the public pretty much without question. There was an anti-war movement in those days, but it was disorganized, and considered by the mainstream to be vaguely unpatriotic. There was a heavy Pentagon hand, if not outright censorship in the coverage of the war, a deliberate reaction to the independent and more impactful reporting of the Vietnam War a decade before.
In the run-up to the second Gulf War in 2003, TV host Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for hosting antiwar voices and, according to an internal NBC memo at the time, giving the network “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” This from a network that was itself owned by a defense contractor, General Electric, which profited hugely from the invasion of Iraq.
The media fired and marginalized its dissenting voices, including Ashleigh Banfield, a rising star who said she was “banished’ by NBC after making comments in 2003 about how Americans weren’t getting the full picture of the Iraq War. She criticized the network embeds, which ensured only compliant reporters would be allowed into the war zone. The corporate media became handmaidens of the U.S. military and the powerbrokers in Washington, allowing the war there and in Afghanistan to continue for decades, without a serious questioning of the logic.
Then something unexpected happened: public trust in media plummeted from approximately 72% in 1976, to 28% today. Part of this public mistrust may have resulted from the fact that so many of the media narratives of our century, devised in concert with the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, have turned out to be wildly wrong (for example, that the Iraq invasion would bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East, and would end a threatening WMD program; that the NATO bombing of Libya was necessary to prevent a “rape army” fueled by Viagra and methamphetamines, and would bring, again, a democracy to Libya).
But the other obvious reason for the collapse in public trust in corporate media and, by extension, for policymakers’ ability to sell a chosen narrative, is the rise of independent media in the years during and following the wars. The general acceptance of blogs and social media as a source of information coincidentally took off around 2007 — at the very moment that Washington and the corporate media’s lies and misdirections were breaking down and destroying American faith in their institutions writ large.
Today we live in a world where the average age of an ABC, Fox, or MSNBC evening news viewer is 55, and where most people get their news from social media, or from their own preferred sources, which may or may not be sanctioned by the former establishment.
If one were watching President Trump's performance during the so-called 12 Day War with Iran, Trump’s messaging and behavior changed almost daily, as comments from X influencers well known to the MAGA movement, such as Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and others criticized the President’s prior-day actions and attempted to persuade him in another direction. It was as if policy and messaging was being made in real time reaction to social media posts.
It is not hard to imagine that policymakers would long for a return to the world of the past, where they and their cronies in legacy media channels could devise a storyline, and then stick to it. This is one of the reasons we are currently seeing such a strong urge to censor independent media and dissenting voices. We see it in many guises in many countries, whether it is arresting and seeking to deport op-ed writers in the United States, pushing for an end to online privacy under the guise of “child protection” in the UK and Australia, or even the Draconian sanctioning of writers who simply diverge from the policy views of those in power, such as Swiss commentator Colonel Jacques Baud and German journalist Hüssein Dogryu, neither of whom, as we write this article, is technically permitted to make a bank withdrawal, or buy groceries.
There is also a nexus between this censorship push and the general unpopularity of these politicians. Other than so-called “populists” such as Victor Orban and Robert Fico, there is hardly one politician in Western Europe or North America whose popularity exceeds 40%, and in many cases it is less than 20%. These leaders see the writing on the wall. Their policies are unpopular, they are unpopular, and they must be extremely frustrated with their inability to sell the public messaging for courses of action that the public sees as against their interests.
On Integrity Media’s Unfettered Speech podcast, free speech advocate Gabriel Shipton recently noted that “control of the narrative has been lost by these powerful individuals and governments. And so what’s left in their arsenal now to control people is force.”
While the urge to censor has never been stronger, the strength and scope of independent media has never been more powerful. I believe there will be no going back to the time when a war narrative will not be challenged, or when policies that clearly do not benefit the population are pursued with the spurious claims that they are for freedom, democracy, or the general good. Too many people are wise to the shell game now.
But we still must stay vigilant and ensure that the independent voices that have emerged in the last decade or so continue to flourish, and are not snuffed out by this new insidious push for digital censorship that is sweeping the Western world.
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