The Future of Nuclear Arms Control and the Impact of the Russia-Ukraine War

Deter, Compete, and Engage: Europe’s Responsibility within the Arms Control Regime after Ukraine, with or without the United States

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Authors
Nadezhda Arbatova, George Perkovich, and Paul van Hooft
Project
Promoting Dialogue on Arms Control and Disarmament

Paul van Hooft
 

Europeans should recognize the responsibility for their own security including arms control, given not only renewed Russian belligerence but also other global trends undermining strategic stability. As the United States is likely to be even more focused on the Indo-Pacific region in the future, Europeans cannot afford to take a passive role or pursue multilateralism for the sake of multilateralism. Actively taking responsibility for their own security including arms control would mean Europeans learn to combine deterrence, competition, and engagement with nuclear-armed great powers. Such a combination would be particularly important for incentivizing Russia to engage with Europeans on arms control, and to find consensus within Europe to engage with Russia.

The arms control regime built up in the last decades of the Cold War and its aftermath has fallen apart during the past twenty years, with the loss of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (2002), the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty (2007, 2023), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (2019), and the Open Skies Treaty (2021). To complete this sorry state of affairs, Russia suspended its cooperation with the New Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (New START) in 2023. The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine erased what was left of the accomplishments at the end of the Cold War.

At present, reengaging with Russia on arms control is not a high priority in Washington or in most—if any—European capitals, nor is it politically feasible, at least as long as the war in Ukraine continues. For now, the focus of the United States and Europe is on ensuring a Russian defeat in Ukraine, or at least preventing a Ukrainian defeat—though this may change following the elections in the United States and across Europe. Sensing the opportunity to remove the historical Russian threat to their security, Central and East European member states of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) especially are preoccupied with the outcome of the war, and many are focused on weakening and potentially fracturing Russia to an extent that it cannot present a threat in the coming decades—if ever again. These aims create inherent limits on the feasibility of political coalitions within Europe to reengage with Russia on arms control.

At the same time, precisely because of the war in Ukraine, the need for arms control to manage nuclear warhead numbers and delivery systems, to strengthen risk reduction, and to increase transparency is greater than ever.1 The risk of deliberate or inadvertent escalation, as well as accidents, has drastically increased because of the war and the highly elevated tensions between NATO and Russia.2 Crucially, Russia is likely to lean even more heavily on its nuclear arsenal as a tool of coercion. In particular, Russian investments in short- and medium-range weapons with so-called tactical, low-yield nuclear warheads are a problem for European states within their range.3 Many of these weapons are not covered by the U.S.-Russian agreements, though before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the Biden administration was looking to include them.4 Europeans have a clear need to manage these dangerous dynamics, which directly threaten their security, even if the war in Ukraine must take priority at present.

Whatever the future of the global arms control regime, Europeans risk being sidelined as the United States looks to craft a trilateral arms control process with Russia and China. From the U.S. perspective, it must, as the guarantor of extended deterrence for its allies in Europe and Asia—though this may change if U.S. domestic realignment proceeds—retain a favorable balance of power in both regions.5 If it cannot credibly signal its ability to escalate more successfully than its adversaries, Washington will have difficulty reassuring its allies.6 In turn, its ability to provide credible extended nuclear deterrence and conventional protection dissuades potential proliferators from acquiring nuclear weapons.7 In comparison, to strengthen support for nonproliferation, the EU throughout the post–Cold War period has instead focused on “effective multilateralism” as not only a means but an end in itself.8 Yet Europeans were unable to effectively counter Russia’s rejection of conventional arms control after 2008 or Russian investments in its nuclear arsenal and delivery systems.9 Russia’s selective compliance two decades ago should have been a wake-up call.10

Within the context of heightened adversarial relations in Europe, I explore the available options for Europeans to reinvigorate arms control. I discuss the needs in the European context and the extent to which arms control or strategic stability issues could be raised with Russia during the war and in its aftermath. Russia is unlikely to discuss arms control without political reassurances regarding Ukraine’s postwar status in NATO—or if it has suffered a defeat in Ukraine. What would constitute a defeat for Russia is malleable, as Vladimir Putin has considerable leeway to present those events in a favorable or not too unfavorable light. Giving political reassurances to Russia that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO and/or the EU would, however, be hard to accept—if not entirely unacceptable—to the majority of NATO European states, and certainly those in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper therefore underlines, on the one hand, a tension between different levels of political agreement—namely, among the great powers and with the regional powers—and, on the other hand, the dynamics of the nuclear and adjacent advanced conventional weapons realms.

The paper proceeds as follows. The first section emphasizes two interpretations of strategic stability: one that focuses on the nuclear dynamics and a second that includes broader political questions of status quo and revisionism. The second section underlines the need to reinvigorate the arms control regime by considering the threat to strategic stability globally, and in Europe specifically. It discusses the increasing complexity that follows nuclear multipolarity and the overspill between regions, how geopolitical competition is increasing the importance of existing nuclear capabilities, and the technological developments driving change. It then notes the Russian threat to strategic stability, specifically in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. The third section considers the specific needs of European states and contrasts this with the U.S. approach to arms control and strategic stability. The fourth section considers potential paths forward for Europeans to reinvigorate the arms control regime, and underlines the need for Europeans to be more proactive as well as to accept an approach that foregrounds deterrence and competition for the foreseeable future.11 Europeans will need to be more willing than they have been in the past to provoke Russian fears through conventional capability investments and deterrence, in order to incentivize Russia to again engage.
 

Endnotes

  • 1Rebecca Davis Gibbons, Stephen Herzog, Wilfred Wan, and Doreen Horschig, The Altered Nuclear Order in the Wake of the Russia-Ukraine War (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2023).
  • 2Dmitry Adamsky, “Russia’s New Nuclear Normal,” Foreign Affairs, May 19, 2023; Paul van Hooft, Davis Ellison, and Tim Sweijs, Pathways to Disaster: Russia’s War against Ukraine and the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear Escalation (The Hague: Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, 2023); and Heather Williams and Nicholas Adamopoulos, “Arms Control after Ukraine: Integrated Arms Control and Deterring Two Peer Competitors,” CSIS, December 16, 2022.
  • 3William Alberque, “Russian Military Thought and Doctrine Related to Non-strategic Nuclear Weapons: Change and Continuity,” The International Institute for Strategic Studies, January 2024.
  • 4Congressional Research Service, Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons, RL32572 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, March 2021; updated March 2022). At their June 2021 meeting in Geneva, U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin released a joint statement on strategic stability that sought to restore predictability and stability to the U.S.-Russia relationship. In September 2021, Bonnie Jenkins, U.S. under secretary of state for international security and arms control, on behalf of the United States, sought not only to include new limits on intercontinental-range nuclear delivery systems—specifically those aimed at the continental United States—in discussions with the Russians but also nonstrategic nuclear weapons. “Nuclear Arms Control after the Biden-Putin Summit,” CRS Insight, IN11694 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, February 2022), 1–2.
  • 5As Richard Betts notes, “once basic deterrence becomes mutual, it negates extended deterrence by definition, since the latter requires the willingness to initiate nuclear attack.” Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 10.
  • 6Paul van Hooft, “All-In or All-Out: Why Insularity Pushes and Pulls American Grand Strategy to Extremes,” Security Studies 29 (4) (2020): 701–729.
  • 7Francis J. Gavin, “Strategies of Inhibition: US Grand Strategy, the Nuclear Revolution, and Nonproliferation,” International Security 40 (1) (2015): 9–46.
  • 8Polina Sinovets, William Alberque, and Benjamin Hautecouverture, “Introduction,” in Arms Control and Europe: New Challenges and Prospects for Strategic Stability, ed. Polina Sinovets and William Alberque (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2022), 1.
  • 9Oliver Meier, Yes, We Can? Europe Responds to the Crisis of Multilateral Arms Control (London: European Leadership Network, 2020), 3.
  • 10Sinovets, Alberque, and Hautecouverture, “Introduction,” 2–3.
  • 11David A. Cooper, Arms Control for the Third Nuclear Age: Between Disarmament and Armageddon (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2021), 1.

Strategic Stability: Nuclear Dynamics and Geopolitical Competition

Arms control for the sake of arms control is the best description for the European approach after the Cold War; however, this is unlikely to remain a valid policy avenue in an era in which relations between the great powers have soured and mutual trust is in short supply. Yet, historically, arms control is intended to manage competition between bitter rivals, not between friends. 

Much of the difficulty in talking about arms control is that there is an assumption that rivals and adversaries share the same understanding of strategic stability and the forces—whether political or technological—that are undermining it.12 As rivals often do not share a similar understanding, I distinguish between two types of strategic stability: strategic stability (type I), which focuses on the dynamics between nuclear-armed great powers that directly relate to the types and quantities of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems; and strategic stability (type II), which emphasizes the tensions between nuclear-armed great powers that are satisfied or dissatisfied with the international status quo. 
 

Strategic Stability (Type I)
 

Strategic stability (type I), in turn, contains two aspects: arms race (or deterrent or first-strike) stability and crisis stability. Arms race stability exists when neither of two nuclear-armed rivals or adversaries believes they or the other can successfully destroy the other’s second-strike capability, and thus the benefits of adding nuclear warheads or more or different delivery systems do not outweigh the costs and risks of doing so. Most of the first generation of strategic stability work emphasized this dimension.13 Later generations of arms control scholars included crisis stability, which is achieved when a nuclear-armed state or its agents does not believe that their second-strike capability is actively jeopardized by the nuclear or conventional actions of an adversary during a crisis, and therefore does not have incentives to escalate a (potential) conventional conflict to the nuclear level.14 Unlike the former, the time horizon is very short for crisis stability, but the same weapons systems can undermine both arms control and crisis stability.

One of the paradoxes of the nuclear age—and arguably its central paradox—is that efforts to maintain a survivable arsenal can often undermine the confidence of others in their own weapons. Moreover, the search for survivability may be combined with a deep unease among policymakers about the vulnerability of their society. Consequently, nuclear-armed states tend to resort to one or more of eight policies, five of which deal with the credible ability to retaliate even after a first move by the adversary and three of which deal preemptively with vulnerability by exploring which first move they themselves could make.

States have five approaches to credibly threaten retaliation. Four of these look to achieve a secure second strike through material and technological means. The fifth approach takes a procedural and organizational route to ensure retaliation. States can pursue 1) redundancy, by building a nuclear arsenal too large to destroy; 2) hardening, by ensuring fixed launch sites are too protected to destroy; 3) mobility, by ensuring they have numerous land-based, sea-based, or air-based launchers that can be moved around to avoid destruction; or 4) concealment, by hiding land-based, sea-based, or air-based launchers from destruction.15 States can try to avoid the costs (both material and technological) associated with a secure second-strike capability through 5) procedural and organizational adaptation to strengthen the resiliency of the nuclear command-and-control arrangements and thus diminish the risk of counterforce or decapitation strikes, whether by delegating launch authority to more commanders, by changing their nuclear posture to launch-on-warning; and/or by placing their nuclear forces in a condition of high readiness.16 This is a more destabilizing approach than the previous four. 

All five approaches count on the adversary’s fear of a credible retaliatory strike with nuclear weapons. This threat of punishment is fundamentally directed against the things that matter most to that state’s leaders, whether the survival of their society or their personal survival, and is intended to deter states from escalation. 

Precisely because they fear for their survival, states may also employ one or more of three so-called damage limitation approaches that attempt to limit or eliminate the threat of an adversary’s nuclear arsenal.17 Damage limitation can be pursued through 6) a conventional or nuclear counterforce first strike to destroy the adversary’s nuclear arsenal (to be successful, such a strike would in turn rely on some combination of sheer numbers, destructiveness, precision, or surprise); 7) missile defense systems designed to completely intercept an attack either by a weaker adversary or by an adversary whose arsenal has already been partially destroyed through a counterforce attack; or 8) the disruption or destruction of the adversary’s nuclear command, control, and/or communications so as to delay or prevent a response and ensure a window of opportunity to destroy the adversary’s arsenal.

Recent scholarship on the nuclear revolution underlines U.S. policymakers’ deep discomfort with mutual vulnerability. Robert Jervis argues that nuclear powers would not have incentives to compete if they could achieve a secure second-strike capability.18 However, the United States particularly has continued to explore damage-limitation strategies, specifically through counterforce options.19 The United States has a clear motive to do so: it provides extended deterrence to faraway allies, and the credibility of that deterrence and the willingness of American leadership and the public to accept complete vulnerability on the behalf of others are inherently weaker if the United States does not compensate. Having damage limitation options has therefore, among the nuclear-armed states, always been particularly attractive to U.S. leaders, who consequently have been less comfortable with strategic stability (type I).

Finally, as advanced conventional weapons become increasingly able to achieve strategic effects—that is, deterrence by punishment or by denial—and gain counterforce potential, they should be included in future arms control arrangements.
 

Strategic Stability (Type II)
 

Strategic stability (type II) centers on the extent to which potential rivals accept existing great-power arrangements at the regional or global level, including territorial boundaries, exclusive economic zones, maritime approaches, or other agreements. Strategic stability (type II) helps to explain broader systemic dynamics. While the United States and most European states tend to emphasize the stricter nuclear definition of strategic stability, China and Russia implicitly use the broader definition and treat agreement there as a precondition for further discussions.20 Following the logic of strategic stability (type II), one could argue that Russian and Chinese revisionism, specifically toward Ukraine and Taiwan respectively, is destabilizing; however, those states would argue that the United States, by overreaching in the aftermath of the Cold War, took on a revisionist posture and thus destabilized relations between the great powers. Both Russia and China have built up extensive lists of current and historical grievances.21 Moreover, both feel that they are encircled by hostile U.S.-led coalitions of regional states. The Chinese response to this perceived imbalance—namely, to develop countermeasures capable of blunting the U.S. ability to project naval and air power into its vicinity (China’s so-called Anti-Access/Area Denial, or A2/AD, capabilities)—has in turn precipitated U.S. responses with consequences for the nuclear domain.22 Similar conventional-to-nuclear dynamics apply to the Russia-NATO relationship.23

The current destabilizing trends in nuclear strategic stability (type I) are fundamentally caused by deep political tensions between the great powers. While these tensions find their most dangerous expression in the nuclear domain, an understanding of strategic stability (type II) helps define the options for arms control. Whether states hold a status quo or revisionist perspective will shape, all other things being equal, the extent to which they will either accept mutual vulnerability or instead seek an advantage. For example, China’s current nuclear buildup could be intended to ensure it has more space to maneuver in the conventional domain.24 

Yet, while strategic stability (type II) drives a great deal of the dynamics in strategic stability (type I), it is more difficult to address. Such fundamental disagreements on acceptable great-power arrangements, in turn, underline the need for arms control or confidence-building measures to manage and diminish the dangers of escalation. Moreover, developments at the level of strategic stability (type I)—for example, failures of arms control agreements—can, in turn, impact strategic stability (type II).25 For example, Russia became more convinced that the United States was looking to unsettle post–Cold War arrangements in Europe when the latter suspended the ABM Treaty in 2002. 
 

Endnotes

European Needs and Strategic Stability

The European approach to arms control is ill-suited to address these trends. In the European context, arms control and nonproliferation were often presented as ends in and of themselves, with Europeans taking an explicitly multilateral approach. Multilateralism worked out particularly well within Western Europe during the Cold War, and then to deal with a reunified Germany and the addition of multiple former Warsaw Pact states to the European Union. The relief that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union was immense, and together with the limits imposed on European power and autonomy during the unipolar era, the end of the Cold War arguably led to the deep institutionalization within Europe of multilateralism as an approach that relied less on raw power. Europeans then hoped to reshape how international politics writ large were performed.59 Arguably, the European multilateralist approach to nonproliferation contributed to strategic stability (type I). 

However, the European use of multilateralism was also intended to achieve broader systemic effects that fall under strategic stability (type II); for example, by creating other mechanisms for mutual accommodation so as to dampen the likelihood of revisionism. In that sense, arms control and confidence-building measures such as the Helsinki Accords and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe Vienna document that aimed to increase transparency, including with regard to conventional forces, were successful in facilitating the peaceful end of the Cold War. Arms control and nonproliferation clearly helped to safeguard the achievement of the first stable peace in Europe for a century. They ignored, however, the gradually deteriorating state of European and global security. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has definitively dispelled the particular illusion that Europe had found a definitive way out of its violent history.

The European approach to multilateralism as an end in and of itself was also intended to distinguish it from the increasingly unilateral approach adopted by the United States in the twenty-first century. The George W. Bush administration withdrew the United States from the ABM Treaty and invaded Iraq—ostensibly to preempt the reemergence of the Iraqi nuclear program. Washington then also pursued measures to prevent rogue actors from accessing nuclear material, for example, through the Proliferation Security Initiative, which looked to interdict and seize materials shipped to states and nonstate actors of concern.60 Europeans, by contrast, focused efforts on containing Iran’s uranium enrichment program by offering economic incentives, to considerable success. In response to the unilateralism of the George W. Bush years, “effective multilateralism” emerged as a popular slogan in European diplomatic circles.61 U.S. policy under President Trump further undermined European attempts at multilateralism. The Trump administration withdrew the United States from the INF Treaty after Russia’s violation, as well as from the Open Skies Treaty. The Trump administration then unilaterally violated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that the three major European powers—the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—and the EU as an institution had put a great deal of effort into initiating. The Missile Technology Control Regime (MCTR) and restrictive export control policies have arguably still worked to slow down the proliferation of ballistic missiles; however, thirty-one states and nonstate actors possess or can produce such missiles.62

A tension has thus evolved between the arms control approaches of the United States and Europe. U.S. interests in arms control to manage the competition with the Soviet Union and then Russia have always, with some partial exceptions, mixed the need to maintain a qualitatively superior edge and have the freedom to maneuver during escalation. The partial exceptions are associated with the Obama and Biden administrations. In his 2009 Prague speech, Barack Obama explicitly iterated his preference for a world without nuclear weapons—not a new notion per se but one that seemed to point to disarmament. Then, as a candidate, Joe Biden pushed for a No First Use pledge from the United States, though this seems to have fallen by the wayside once he was in office. Official U.S. policy has remained essentially unchanged, however. 

The U.S. nuclear posture was and is strongly shaped by America’s status as a guarantor of extended nuclear deterrence to allies in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Consequently, the United States maintains a first-use nuclear doctrine.63 Even during periods of ostensible great-power peace and stability in the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States continued to pursue damage limitation strategies.64 U.S. allies remain concerned that Washington will not be able to fulfill security guarantees if the United States cannot credibly threaten to escalate (or “to escalate sufficiently”) before or during the initial changes of a conventional conflict. Whether proliferation can continue to be inhibited without U.S. extended nuclear deterrence is questionable. When President Trump proved hostile to alliances and questioned the nonproliferation norm, discussions about indigenous nuclear programs emerged among Washington’s European and, especially, Asian allies.65

Thus, so long as the United States plays an extraregional hegemonic role, it will, from the point of view of the other great powers, undermine strategic stability (type II). This creates incentives for Russia and China to offset U.S. conventional and nuclear preponderance with their own advanced conventional weapons, by exploring emerging technologies, and, in the Russian case, by ensuring a flexible nuclear arsenal with a variety of yields that gives it options to escalate, or, in the Chinese case, by improving the security of its second-strike capability. In turn, the United States considers greater flexibility in its arsenal to be important to managing asymmetries at the regional level.66

European approaches to arms control start from a different point. Undermining the credibility of the U.S. extended deterrence guarantees is not in European interests (or those of America’s Asian allies). Nor is taking European states that participate in NATO nuclear sharing—Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium—out of the sharing arrangement, nor is it for the European member states to leave NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group. However, Europeans face different stakes, as Russian attempts at nuclear coercion are far more likely to be directed at targets on European territory.

Because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created a new context, the European multilateralist approach is likely to be dead on arrival—at least toward Russia. (It remains an option for Europeans if and when they seek to engage with China, for example on emerging technologies.) Russia is unlikely to be open to multilateralist approaches as long as the regime perceives itself to be locked in a struggle for its own survival or (perhaps) even the survival of Russia as a state. Therefore, Europeans could consider other, less-cooperative approaches to arms control and engagement with Russia as they reinforce their collective defense and deterrence capabilities through increased defense spending.

With the tottering position of New START and no progress on its renewal, limits on Russia’s deployed warheads are effectively no more.67 However, because, from a European perspective, New START largely focuses on strategic weapons, the loss of risk reduction measures and transparency is particularly worrying. The end of the ABM Treaty and the slow buildup of missile defenses in Europe have undermined Russian confidence in the security of their second-strike capability. Putting the genie back in the bottle through a new treaty curbing ballistic missile defenses would be difficult given the benefits of the same missile defenses to defend against conventional strikes.

With the collapse of the INF Treaty in 2019, any constraints on Russian ability to build land-based launchers for medium-range weapons (short-to-medium ranges of 500–1,000 kilometers and intermediate ranges of 1,000–5,000 kilometers) have been removed. This is particularly relevant for Europe as most European states are less than 5,000 kilometers from a Russian border. States seeking to defend against the launch of such missiles would face very short reaction times, a fact that would increase fears during a crisis. The MCTR continues to limit the proliferation of ballistic missiles to some extent but does not address the development of dual-capable hypersonic weapons.68 Yet, it is the one arms control measure still in place that seems to enjoy some Russian support.69 The loss of the CFE Treaty removed limits on conventional buildups, which may become less of an issue as Europeans rebuild their armed forces in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Before its invasion of Ukraine, Russia had signaled its willingness to engage in a theater-based arms control approach that would address some of the gaps regarding ground-launched missiles in the short to intermediate range.70 Russia also expressed a preference for including France and the United Kingdom in any discussions on arms control.71 U.S. willingness to participate ended with the invasion of Ukraine. However, both the Trump and Biden administrations looked to expand New START to include nonstrategic weapons.72 As Russia has the advantage in nonstrategic weapons and is itself focused on U.S. strategic weapons, such an approach would be difficult.

Ideally, Europe would need any future arms control regime with Russia to address 1) the short-to-intermediate-range missile threat, either banning them outright or addressing them through caps; and 2) low-yield, so-called tactical nuclear weapons. Moreover, given uncertainty about the capabilities of the Russian military after the Ukraine war, any military-to-military contacts that boost transparency would, again ideally, help to diminish the chances of misperception and aid in risk reduction.
 

Endnotes

European Support for Arms Control after Ukraine

Despite the obvious need to reinvigorate the arms control regime to address growing strategic instability (type I) within Europe, a need that has become all the more acute following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Europe arguably has little appetite right now to invest political resources in the arms control process—at least while Russia still occupies Ukrainian territory. Moreover, some Europeans believe that achieving strategic stability (type II) will require Russia’s eventual reintegration into a European security architecture, while others believe that the only route to long-term strategic stability (type II) is for Russia to be weakened for the foreseeable future, even if that promotes short-term instability. For West European states that are further removed from Russia’s conventional threat but not its nuclear threat, the nuclear challenges arguably have greater priority in the short term. For Central and East Europeans, more proximate both to the Russian threat and to historical memories of Russian aggression against them, the long-term weakening of Russia remains the priority.

Neither view regarding the desirability of engaging Russia is disconnected from the risk of nuclear weapons inherent to strategic stability (type I). As long as Russia exists as a threat to the Central and East European states and can reinforce that threat with nuclear weapons, no real stability can be possible in the long term. Alternatively, if Russia—or the current regime—perceives mounting threats to be existential, it could opt to use nuclear weapons in the short term to diminish NATO pressure. Such an outcome could be deliberate—particularly if it involves the use of tactical nuclear weapons—or inadvertent, the result of misperceptions about NATO conventional actions. Attempting to address strategic stability (type II) concerns with Russia is also likely to be of dubious efficacy. That any outcome could satisfy Russia’s (or the current regime’s) designs on what it considers its sphere of influence is unclear. Moreover, any long-term settlement acceptable to Europeans seems impossible to achieve with the Putin regime—and uncertain with its eventual successor. That is, the two European perspectives weigh the relative risks of strategic stability at levels (I) and (II) differently.

The way forward for European arms control—if any option exists—is thus not obvious. The lowest-common denominator between the two perspectives is to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine, but Europeans disagree amongst themselves on how extensive a Russian defeat would need to be, and, as the war drags on, the willingness within Europe to support negotiations and accept Ukrainian territorial concessions may diverge. Likewise, Europeans are broadly in agreement on the need to reinforce conventional deterrence and defense after the three-decade-long “geo­political holiday.” Still, at the time of writing, they disagree on how this should happen. Should a defense buildup be centered exclusively on NATO, or should it include the EU too? Should a military buildup emphasize short-term, off-the-shelf U.S. armaments, or should Europe prepare for long-term autonomy by increasing its defense-industrial complex? In response to the deteriorated European security situation, France has explicitly called for European involvement in arms control talks with Russia, and President Emmanuel Macron has made overtures to the EU’s skeptical Central and East European member states.73
 

Endnotes

On or Off the Sidelines

Europe faces difficult and limited options for reinvigorating the arms control regime. This may prove particularly problematic for the issues of instability with Russia that most affect Europe. With “effective multilateralism” rendered moribund for the foreseeable future, with uncertainty regarding the direction of American politics, with China’s reticence to engage with the United States, and with Russian aggression on its borders, Europe should be more proactive. I suggest three prospective avenues, none of which are straightforward. They would, however, put into practice the arguments made in Europe about the need to achieve greater strategic autonomy and to take on greater responsibility.
 

Europe–United States
 

Europeans should make arms control and strategic stability one of the priorities of the transatlantic relationship. Europe’s inability to maneuver freely in the arena of arms control results from its structural dependency on the United States for security and intra-European divisions that limit progress on security and defense. However, with the United States now preoccupied by the rise of China and the Indo-Pacific region more broadly, not to mention its domestic divisions, interests on both sides of the Atlantic would be served by a redistribution of existing burdens. A transatlantic redistribution of burdens would require the Europeans to take on greater responsibility for their own security, which would require strengthening their conventional deterrence as well. The alternative is a fractured Europe in which states that feel threatened by Russia and its weapons will make greater demands on the United States or pursue their own nuclear deterrent capabilities. The European dependency on the United States is also institutional, as thanks to decades of underinvestment in nuclear issues and arms control, the epistemic community has shrunk. Structural investment in rebuilding a critical mass of scholars and experts on both sides of the Atlantic is necessary. NATO could potentially take the lead in engaging both Russia and China. Europeans wield significant influence in the Atlantic alliance, and the U.S. presence adds credibility and weight.
 

Europe-China
 

Europe may be able to act as an interlocutor for Chinese strategic stability and arms control measures, preparing the way for a more comprehensive approach between China and the United States.74 As a disinterested—or at least less directly involved—party that does not from the Chinese perspective undermine strategic stability (type II) to the same extent, Europe could possibly play this role by leaning in on its economic and institutional engagement with China. The EU is arguably the right body to engage with China, though the United Kingdom should also be included for reasons of both political weight and its status as Europe’s second nuclear-armed power. NATO, too, might be able to facilitate the establishment of concrete rules of the road with China for emerging technologies.75 While the Europeans could lead the initiative, NATO, because it is an alliance that includes the United States, would have the advantage of greater credibility, potentially leading to positive spillover into other areas of contention between China and the United States. If China and the United States were able to create more strategic stability (type I) between them in the Western Pacific, the United States would have more room to maneuver as it seeks to engage with Russia in Europe. 

However, whether Europe can play a role facilitating agreement between the United States and China regarding arms control and confidence-building measures is questionable, as European states are themselves becoming more directly involved in the Sino-American competition. The increasing European naval presence in the Indo-Pacific region and Europe’s participation in the export controls on advanced technology transfers to China (albeit under pressure from Washington) limit the likelihood of its long-term trust-building efforts achieving success, as does the increasing Chinese belligerence in the region and toward European states. That said, expanding exchanges between the Chinese and European expert communities might be one way to understand how to dampen the escalatory pressures inherent to the current bloc-forming dynamics.
 

Europe-Russia
 

In response to the increased uncertainty regarding the role of the United States in Europe, Europeans need to build the means to engage directly with Russia on arms control. After all, they have the most to lose from Russian aggression and Russia’s buildup of short-to-intermediate-range missiles and low-yield nuclear weapons, but Europeans will struggle to have any direct impact on the progress of bilateral Russian-U.S. arms control for three reasons.76 First, so long as Russia seeks to address its own strategic stability (type I) concerns, it is likely to prefer to talk exclusively with the United States because the United States has most of the capabilities that unsettle Russia and because dealing with the United States on equal footing allows Russia to signal its own great-power status.77 While Russia’s belligerence toward NATO and aggression against Ukraine are overdetermined by a variety of issues—from security concerns about NATO enlargement to domestic Russian politics—a significant part of recent Russian behavior was shaped by the loss of prestige and status after the end of the Cold War.78 The nuclear card still remains the strongest card Russia has left to play and it represents the one dimension of power in which it has no equal outside the United States. A second reason European efforts to influence Russian-U.S. arms control may prove ineffective is that the Russian government may generally be less able to engage in discussions with either Europe or the United States, as the cadre of competent arms control experts and negotiators on the Russian side has declined. Finally, Russia’s concerns are centered on strategic stability (type II). Essentially, Russia’s focus is on its status in Europe, the threats it perceives from the expansion of NATO and the EU to its border, the operations of nongovernmental organizations in Russia that it fears were undermining the regime as had happened in Ukraine and Georgia previously, the decline of its perceived sphere of influence, and the uncertain status of Ukraine.79

The last point is particularly difficult; officials and arms control experts in Europe do not agree on what if anything could be offered to Russia that would satisfy or even minimally address Russian concerns at the level of strategic stability (type II). Many Europeans do not view Russian concerns as legitimate and would have more difficulty still accepting Russian assurances as credible. European willingness to accommodate Russia on broader political concerns is thus extremely limited for the foreseeable future, certainly so long as Putin remains in power. Even given these conditions, the European willingness to discuss arms control with Russia on strategic stability (type I) concerns, specifically risk reduction and arms control, is arguably greater than the willingness on the part of Russia to talk with the Europeans—even when accounting for the extreme skepticism that any such efforts would encounter from NATO and the EU’s East European member states. 

Rather than taking a multilateralist cooperative approach centered on making gains in strategic stability (type II), Europeans could take an approach that instead focuses on using Russian insecurities and fears about the security of its second-strike capability and which belong to instability (type I). Such a European approach would build on the Cold War history of competitive approaches to arms control. The Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT) worked because U.S. negotiators were willing to accept quantitative limits because of their arsenal’s qualitative advantages and their Soviet counterparts’ ability to rely on the quantitative advantages of their arsenal.80 The NATO “doubletrack” decision counted on the placement of short-to-intermediate-range missiles as one track to open negotiations with the Soviet Union on its own missile placements.81

A competitive European approach would be premised on using the increasing investments in defense already underway as a consequence of Russia’s war in Ukraine to build capabilities that would further unsettle Russian confidence in the security of its second-strike capability. Unlike its Cold War antecedents, a current-day European approach would depend on advanced conventional weapons that, by making use of significant gains in precision and destructiveness, are suitable for strategic purposes.82 Adding new nuclear powers to Europe or significantly expanding the French and UK arsenals by adding new types of delivery systems or new variations in warhead yields would likely be significantly destabilizing.83 At present, neither the French nor the British arsenal is designed for active warfighting and essentially contains no nonstrategic weapons.84 An approach that relies on a European assortment of advanced conventional weapons that could achieve strategic effects would require Europeans to take an explicitly strategic perspective as they invest in arms acquisitions, which, at least among the EU member states, could be framed as strategic autonomy, strategic responsibility, or sovereignty in action.

A European competitive approach based on advanced conventional weapons would need to meet three criteria. First, weapons would need to be scalable, countable, and thus verifiable if they are to be conducive to mutually agreed limits, reductions, and transparency. Second, weapons acquisitions would need to be planned to allow Russia sufficient time to respond. A gradual buildup that suggests a slow but sure decline in the Russian position over one to two decades is likely to be more effective than presenting Russia with a sudden reality and dichotomous choices. Third, weapons acquisitions must not directly threaten the survival of the Russian regime. Using these criteria, Europe should consider investing in three broad categories of advanced weapons that are likely to incentivize Russia to negotiate: 1) advanced airpower, specifically stealth and low-altitude flight; 2) high-precision conventional weapons such as cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons; and 3) missile defense.85

As Europeans set their priorities for arms control agreements or measures with Russia, their most urgent goals are to readdress the short-to-medium-range missiles and conventional forces previously covered by the INF and CFE Treaties. However, the European states are not likely to be unified on which approach to emphasize. For the West European states, the ground covered by the INF Treaty is arguably more important; the Central and East European states are likely to care more about managing potential conventional imbalances closer to their borders.

European defense investments that focus on building more robust conventional deterrence options also make sense in light of the wider, strategic stability (type II) consequences of the U.S. focus on the Indo-Pacific region and military competition with China. Should the U.S. commitment to European security grow less firm as a consequence of the demand on U.S. resources in the Indo-Pacific region, or as a consequence of U.S. domestic instability, then a revanchist Russia might rely even more heavily on its nuclear coercive threat to readjust the European status quo and pursue its revanchist ambitions. As long as the United States perceives deterrence gaps in the European theater, it is likely to compensate through nuclear means.86 For these reasons, investments in advanced conventional weapons—that is, the expansion of European capabilities to allow deterrence through denial—can contribute to stability in European security.87
 

Endnotes

Conclusion

The European arms control regime is in bad shape. Russian nuclear belligerence has grown in recent decades, culminating in the invasion of Ukraine, and, aided by wider global trends, resulting in the destabilization of European security. European approaches that focus on multilateralism to strengthen stability at the political level (strategic stability type II) are not likely to be effective in the face of 1) the undermining of arms race and crisis stability within strategic stability (type I) by nuclear multipolarity and emerging technologies; and 2) the reemergence of challenges to the status quo by Russia and China in Europe and Asia that undermine strategic stability (type II).

Russia is unlikely to emerge from the war satisfied with its status, even if it prevents Ukrainians from retaking their lost territories. As Russia can be expected to become more reliant on its nuclear threat, few options for cooperative engagement remain. More important, Europeans, especially those in Central and Eastern Europe, will have no appetite for offering political concessions to Russia. The increasing U.S. focus on the Indo-Pacific region and on trilateralism with Russia and China as a condition for arms control further risks sidelining Europe. Given the European need to limit the threat of Russian short-to-intermediate-range nuclear weapons, Europe has few options to shape the situation. Yet, Europeans could ensure that arms control becomes a central issue in transatlantic relations in the medium term and could attempt to use their multilateralist approach to engage China in the hopes of dampening the escalatory pressures in Asia. Beyond contributing to a general public good, European engagement with China may also provide the United States with more maneuverability in Europe in finding agreement on arms control with Russia.

Finally, Europeans could consider a more independent approach and use their ongoing investments in conventional defense and deterrence to strengthen their ability to pressure Russian delivery systems in a transparent and gradual way. While not without risk, such an approach could incentivize Russian negotiators to talk with Europeans to ensure that their most important remaining strategic and coercive tool does not further depreciate in value. Whatever actions Europeans end up taking, they should be made in the full awareness that they need to take greater responsibility for their own security in the new geopolitical context, and this includes taking an active role in the European and possibly the global arms control regime.