Beauchamp: Does the United States need to pivot to Asia?

Posen: No, not really. Even if we could, it probably isn’t necessary. Quietly shore up a few positions, yes. Get our allies to start thinking about their contributions. One of the bad things about current U.S. policy is that we de-energize our allies from doing anything in their own defense. They don’t actually do enough. We do too much.

If China’s power grows, we need to pay attention to our power too. Our military capabilities have to be adequate to do the things that we might wish to do in that part of the world. Again, with the caveat that some of the things we presently say we want to do in that part of the world are probably unnecessary and provocative.

Two other problems. [One is] nuclear proliferation, everyone’s hardy perennial. I’m less worried about this than some are. I tend to believe the United States could pretty much deter any state in the world from using nuclear weapons against itself, and I think most of our allies who have nuclear weapons can certainly deter the use of nuclear weapons against them. Our allies who don’t have nuclear weapons, who are relying on America’s extended deterrent commitment, given the kinds of challenges they face, the commitment is reasonably credible right now.

So I don’t think proliferation in the sense of new nuclear-weapons states is a gigantic problem. It’s good that the United States has policies that try and slow the rate of the emergence of new nuclear-weapons states, because it takes time for countries to figure out how to build these things, but more importantly how to take care of them. It takes time for others to figure out what difference it actually makes, whether they should be in a panic. So slow proliferation is better than fast. No proliferation is probably the best of all, but probably can’t be achieved. Nuclear weapons are just too easy to build. The technology is not that esoteric. It’s an old technology now.

So really, our objective should be to keep nuclear weapons in the hands of states, and to be sure that states use best practices in terms of safety, security of their arsenals, that they have robust and reliable command and control.

Beauchamp: This applies even to Iran?

Posen: I would be against waging preventive wars to keep Iran from having a nuclear-energy infrastructure. This is a remedy that’s way beyond the nature of the problem. However, there is a potential problem, which unfortunately we haven’t confronted, which is the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be deterred because many of them have no base. And they may be so ideologically extreme that they don’t care about the consequences, even to their own friends, of using nuclear weapons. Using a nuclear weapon—because that’s what we’re really talking about here. That’s something we really should be very concerned about. This is why I think the United States should be more active in working with other countries on how to secure their arsenal, to secure their stockpile to prevent smuggling and theft of materials. It’s very intelligent for the United States to pay attention to that because those are the things that you should do to ensure that nuclear weapons stay out of the hands of groups that may not be deterrable in a conventional sense because they have no return address.