Threat assessment

Rebeccah Heinrichs, director of the Hudson Institute’s Keystone Defense Initiative, studies U.S. military policy, including nuclear arms proliferation and missile defense. She served on the bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission in 2023 that called for major changes to the United States’ defense strategy and its number and types of nuclear weapons to counter threats from China and Russia. Her first book, Duty to Deter: American Nuclear Deterrence and the Just War Doctrine, came out last year. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.

You’ve called the next decade potentially very dangerous for the United States. Why?  This is the first time the United States has to deter two major nuclear powers. Integrating China into the global economy did not liberalize its government as hoped. Chinese leaders remain committed to Marxist Leninism and are investing in a massive military and nuclear weapons program. China is collaborating with the Russians, who are trying to break American influence and power in Europe.

And North Korea and Iran are on China and Russia’s side? Yes, and they’re increasingly collaborating militarily through practice drills, wargaming exercises, and sharing technology in categories that were hard to imagine a few years ago.

President Donald Trump is calling for a “Golden Dome for America,” a new defense system to ward off missile attacks. Why push now for an upgrade to the system in place since the 2000s? Our current ground-based missile defense system only protects against a rogue-state threat and unauthorized or accidental launches from potential peers. When it was designed, we believed in maintaining some modicum of intentional vulnerability. We also thought we were on a more positive trajectory with Russia, so we didn’t invest in a more robust defensive system. And China wasn’t considered an adversary then, but the Chinese and the Russians have been going gangbusters on their own integrated air and missile defense systems.

Is Trump’s proposal feasible? Republicans and Democrats agree we must adapt our missile defense system. We need to add space-based interceptors to counter the sophisticated, maneuverable weapons that threaten our space assets and homeland. It’s very feasible, with launch costs dropping and technology advancing, to incrementally—maybe in three to five years—field a much more robust defensive capability.

What do you make of Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Experts who support Ukraine often brush off Russian threats as bluffs. I don’t think that’s right. I think Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks dynamically about employing a nuclear weapon, and it is the American gov­ernment’s responsibility to constantly convince him that using nuclear weapons would not be worth it. It’s much easier to deter Russian aggression than it is to compel them to stop.

Are the Chinese taking lessons from Ukraine’s plight? The Chinese are learning that nuclear coercion works. Russia’s use of nuclear brinkmanship is a lesson that the Chinese have learned 10 times over.

Do you agree with some military leaders and China observers who say China will likely attack Taiwan before 2030? I think the Chinese government will try to take Taiwan as soon as Chinese President Xi Jinping is convinced that he can defeat any U.S. or other effort to stop him from doing it. All the United States can do is make every single day a day that Xi Jinping concludes that today is not the day. And that might extend us into 2030, 2035, 2040.

The prospect of nuclear war sounds awful. How should Christians think about nuclear weapons and nonproliferation? Everything has a moral or immoral dimension. The government’s responsibility, according to the Constitution and the ultimate authority, God, is to protect its citizens or to impose a cost on the adversary who would threaten the innocent. Christian arguments for nuclear pacifism abrogate the divine duty to provide for the common defense and protect the innocent. Allowing subjugation, death, and destruction of your people is worse than potentially having to employ a nuclear weapon.

So nuclear weapons are compatible with just war theory? Yes; the just war doctrine requires the United States to have a nuclear deterrent and to adapt it to today’s adversaries. A nuclear force that is a credible threat to targets the adversary values is compatible with the laws of armed conflict that include only targeting military targets, proportionality, discrimination, and not targeting civilians.

Let’s talk about Iran. Does its ­unsuccessful missile barrage against Israel last October affect Iranian ambitions? I think the Iranians understand now that they grossly overestimated their own abilities. The Israelis’ integrated missile defense system—not just Iron Dome, but also American sea-based missile defense systems and intelligence from partners and allies—intercepted those weapons. And the Israelis took out the vast majority of Iranian air defenses, which kneecaps Iran.

How can the international community convince the Iranians to stop work on their nuclear program? The Iranian government is ruled by an iron-fisted, genocidal regime that wants to see the destruction of the Jewish people, the Jewish homeland, and seeks our destruction as well. The only way the Iranians are going to understand that they will not have a nuclear capability is to constantly degrade and destroy their nuclear program.

Is Trump’s approach to international relations challenging long-held ­geopolitical assumptions? Could this be a new approach to allies and foes? It’s too early to tell. President Trump is extremely pragmatic. He’s nonideological; he wants outcomes based on what he believes will be beneficial and wants to avoid fighting unnecessary wars. The first Trump administration began modernizing our nuclear program while the president engaged with Putin. You had hard power and cost impositions going on at the same time as diplomacy. I haven’t seen that first part happen yet in this second Trump administration, but I hope they go back to it.

Are allies becoming less important under President Trump? Trump did a great job making NATO allies stronger in the first administration. We want to encourage our allies to be stronger and do more, but we don’t want to push them away or break NATO or key alliances in Asia. China is investing heavily in its nuclear weapons, and we can’t deter our adversaries and maintain peace and security by ourselves.