By Harrison Monsky
George Perkovich is Vice President for Studies and Director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has focused on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation, particularly with respect to South Asia and Iran. He co-authored the Adelphi Paper, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, published in September 2008 by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Perkovich also co-authored a major Carnegie report, Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security, a blueprint for rethinking the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. From 1989 to 1990, Perkovich served as a speechwriter and foreign policy adviser to Senator Joe Biden.
The Politic: You have signed onto the Global Zero declaration, calling for the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons. And you have written extensively about moving toward “Global zero.” What do you think is the most compelling reason to ban the bomb?
GP: First, we have to be clear that what President Obama has in mind and what I would support is a decades-long effort to create the conditions that would motivate all the states that now possess nuclear weapons to give them up ?collectively, incrementally, and with verification. This means the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. When you list them all you realize the difficulty and complexity of the challenge. The main reason why it should be pursued is that nuclear weapons actually can go off, they can be used. A nuclear war would be a truly horrifying, unprecedented experience. It is possible that governments can continue for another 65 years to preserve nuclear deterrence and that no one will make a mistake or a miscalculation, and no irrational actors will acquire nuclear weapons. But I don’t think human beings are that infallible. The longer the current possessors of nuclear weapons insist that these things are vital to their security or prestige, the more other people will want them, and the less likely, in my view, that they won’t be used. So I think it makes more sense to devalue these weapons and to identify with other states the conditions that would have to be met for us all to get rid of them, and then start trying to work through politics and diplomacy to create those conditions.
The Politic: President Obama’s New START treaty was a step in that direction. What should the next step be in a global move toward eliminating nuclear weapons? What is realistically possible?
GP: What I think the next step should be and what is realistically possible are not the same things. The most important condition that needs to be created in order to have any chance to move the world toward elimination of nuclear weapons is for the U.S., Russia, and China to gain mutual confidence that they won’t go to war with each other and that they won’t use military muscle to challenge each other’s vital interests. The U.S. and Russia have 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons; China is the only global power that is building up its nuclear arsenal. These three therefore are the key actors. Without them, others won’t move. Right now none of the three has enough confidence that the other two (acting separately) won’t militarily challenge their vital interests. The U.S. is not worried so much about a direct Russian or Chinese threat on the United States, but rather that Russia might threaten American allies in Eastern Europe, and that China might threaten allies in East Asia, including Taiwan. Russia worries that a U.S.-led NATO may coerce it or interfere if it asserts its interests in its neighborhood. China worries that the U.S. is building missile defenses and advanced conventional weaponry that could threaten China’s nuclear deterrent, and then the U.S. would be free to project power to block China’s interests in Asia. I could go on, but the point is that these three states do not have a shared understanding of how to stabilize their strategic relations, build confidence, and gradually reduce their military postures. Unless and until this situation is improved, there will not be a lot of progress on the nuclear reduction agenda. And I don’t see the U.S. doing its part to make this happen unless the Republican Party changes some of its ideological assumptions and aversion to limiting U.S. military programs in any way. Vladimir Putin, trained as a counter-intelligence operative in the KGB, gives no hint that he will be less inclined to paranoia and bullying in his next presidential term. New leaders will soon be rising in China and it is not obvious that they will refrain from using assertive nationalism as a way to maintain political support.
The Politic: The media have recently focused on an apparent crisis in U.S.-Pakistan relations. Are relations really that much worse than they have ever been? Was this inevitable?
GP: U.S.-Pakistan relations are very troubled now. Underlying this is Pakistan’sdeep internal crisis. I just published an essay on this, Stop Enabling Pakistan’s Dangerous Dysfunction, which explains how Pakistan has gotten to this alarming point, and how the U.S. has in many ways enabled it, the way a friend can enable another person’s self-destructive tendencies. Basically, Pakistan has never established and supported institutions that have a chance of healing the countries many internal conflicts and patterns of injustice. The Army has been the country’s dominant institution, and armies generally are not best suited to structure and encourage the kinds of political processes necessary to reconcile conflicting aspirations of ethnic groups, competing ideologies, and parties, economic interests and so on. What the Pakistan Army has done is obsess on India. It projects India as an unrelenting threat that the country must concentrate its attention on. This justifies the Army’s dominant position of course, but it also has led the country into four wars with India and the cultivation of violent extremist groups (jihadis or terrorists, depending on how you look at it) who have brought violence to India and Afghanistan and are now threatening Pakistan itself. There is no evidence that the U.S. can give the Pakistani Army enough money or punishment to change its mindset. So I think the only hope is to do more to encourage those Pakistanis who want to take political responsibility away from the Army and put it into representative institutions. I’m not optimistic about this at all, but I think it’s the only chance that things can begin to be turned around in Pakistan.
The Politic: Politicians like Senator Mark Kirk have recently called for a strategic “tilt toward India.” How do you think U.S. relationships in the region will substantially change as we decrease our military footprint?
GP: It’s easy to call for a tilt toward India, and India has much to admire. But India has plenty of its own problems and will not agree with many things that the U.S. says and does. Nor can India solve any of Pakistan’s major problems, or help the U.S. structure a more constructive relationship with Pakistan. I’ve written about some things India could do that would help progressive Pakistanis counter the Army’s narrative about the Indian menace, but those things will not change the Army’s obsessions. So when Senator Kirk or Governor Perry and others talk as if tilting toward India constitutes a new and improved strategy they simply reveal their ignorance of reality in the region. That’s not as harsh as it sounds – South Asia is very complicated and U.S. politicians don’t know much about it, yet they feel they have to say something when asked. So they say, ‘India is a democracy, we ought to team up with them.’ You can’t get in trouble for saying that.
As long as the U.S. has such a big military footprint in Afghanistan and acts as if Afghanistan is the most important venue in the region, we won’t be able to get at the more fundamental problem, which is Pakistan. Retrenching from Afghanistan will leave a real mess. There is no happy ending to be had there. But staying at the level that we have been operating will only postpone the years of reckoning through which factions in Afghanistan and the countries that surround it will have to struggle in order to find a tolerable equilibrium. The situation in and around Afghanistan resembles that of Vietnam in the 1970s and beyond.
The Politic: You study one of the most volatile areas of the world. What (if anything) keeps you up at night?
GP: My greatest worry is that terrorist groups with some relationship to Pakistan will conduct another major attack in India and this time India’s leadership will not be able to resist the temptation to strike back militarily. And if India acts to militarily punish Pakistan, however understandable the motivation would be, I think there is a real risk that Pakistan would escalate and use nuclear weapons. Then it is hard to know whether and how escalation could be contained short of a major nuclear war. The world has never experienced a nuclear war. I think its consequences would be horrendous for the people of Pakistan and India.
The Politic: What are you working on now and what kind of research would you like to work on in the coming years?
GP: I’m exploring how the theory and practice of nuclear deterrence depends on the assumption that states possessing nuclear weapons are unitary rational actors. That is, the actions of states – such as military incursions or operations by jihadi groups that they cultivate – are assumed to flow from directions by the leadership, and that whatever a state does in the way of signaling threats and managing violence is an expression of rationally calculating leaders. Similarly, the receivers of such signals are presumed to be unitary rational actors. In other words, deterrence depends on the giver of deterrence signals having a hierarchical chain of command that is unitary so that what is signaled by all actors projecting violence or threats of violence outside the borders of the state is intended and authorized. Deterrence also depends on the receivers of such signals in the escalation process of threat and counter-threat being unitary so that the responses to deterrent threats actually represent the intentions of the leadership and that leadership is in control.
But in the case of Pakistan, it’s not clear how unitary the decision-making and actions are. When terrorists attack India, the Pakistani leadership often says, “It wasn’t us. We don’t control these guys.” But there is evidence to the contrary, and in any case this lack of unitariness of command and control is not acceptable or consistent with the model under which deterrence can work. This is a new problem and it is dangerous, so I’m trying to understand its implications.
I’m also exploring potential parallels between the abolition of slavery in the U.S. and the effort to abolish nuclear weapons. This was prompted by reading Eric Foner’s Pulitizer Prize winning book on the evolution of Lincoln’s thinking and acting regarding slavery, The Fiery Trial. I’m trying to learn whether there are implications for efforts to get rid of nuclear weapons. There was an uplifting ending – abolition – but we sometimes forget that it occurred through the course of a war that killed the equivalent of nine million people in today’s population.
The Politic: What advice would you offer college students looking to follow a similar career path today? Looking back, what advice would you have liked to have had when you graduated?
GP: The most important thing is to know what it is that you really love to do – that your passion is making things, or managing people, or earning money, or traveling – whatever it is. If you can figure this out, then the best advice I can give is to trust that if you pursue it you will eventually find a way to make a living doing it. It will not be easy and it can take time, but if you wake up each day and pursue what you are most eager to do, you will probably be good at it and eventually succeed. For me it was writing. I knew that whatever subject matter I was working on I wanted to be able to spend part of every day writing. The rest sort of happened accidentally.
Harrison Monsky is a junior in Silliman College.
