Potential Implications of the Russia–Ukraine War for Northeast Asia

ABSTRACT

The Russia–Ukraine war has caused decision-makers worldwide to acknowledge the thinkability (plausibility) of limited nuclear war. It has probably reduced any confidence China may have about being able easily and quickly to invade Taiwan. It will stimulate the United States to spur allies in Northeast Asia to beef up their own military capabilities by developing, purchasing and deploying advanced defensive weapons effective in actual war. Having experienced dilemmas in the Russia–Ukraine war, the United States may be even more reluctant to use nuclear weapons in defense of its allies and it may become less strident in discouraging its vulnerable allies in NE Asia from having nuclear weapons. Experience from the Russia–Ukraine war also highlights the importance of broad-ranging economic warfare as part of a response to aggression. Also, it highlights the importance of having the industrial capacity and agility to support long wars demanding massive numbers of precision conventional weapons. Finally, experience with the war should make both analysts and policymakers even more skeptical about best-estimate predictions or assessments. In particular, they should not assume away scenarios that involve long military-economic wars, countervalue attacks that blatantly violate laws of war, or even the intendedly limited use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Limited nuclear war
• nuclear weapons
• Russia–Ukraine war
• Northeast Asia
• Korean peninsula
• Taiwan

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Peter Hayes and David von Hippel for having stimulated this work and commenting on earlier drafts, as well as having commissioned a sizable number of very thoughtful related papers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Some late-1990s studies sought ways to make invasions by a Soviet-style mechanized army obsolete (Defense Science Board 1996; Defense Science Board 1998). These and other studies of the period (Davis, Gompert, and Kugler 1996; Davis et al. 1998) urged “transformation” of US military forces. Andrew Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment saw the potential for a new revolution in military affairs (McKitrick and Angevine 2022). The US Joint Staff issued a visionary document (Joint Staff 1996) that was endorsed by the Secretary of Defense (Cohen 1997)..

² This may seem hopeless because nations often interpret defensive actions as threatening. It is notable, however, that – late in the Cold War – Soviet leadership came to recognize that its military posture was understandably perceived by NATO as aggressively offensive and threatening, and that NATO did not pose a credible offensive threat to the Soviet Union (Garthoff 1992, 1994). This shift probably contributed to Gorbachev’s unilateral decision to pull many forces back from Eastern Europe. Of interest to readers outside governments, the shift was probably influenced by the many informal non-governmental meetings held between Western and Soviet scholars in which the military balance was discussed candidly, sometimes at the political-military level and sometimes with discussion of nitty-gritty military analysis and even military modeling (Huber 1990)..

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Paul K. Davis

Paul K. Davis is a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a retired Senior Principal Researcher at RAND. After earning a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he did research on strategic warning technology and practiced systems analysis at the Institute for Defense Analyses before joining the US government to contribute to strategic force planning and strategic arms control. Later, as a Senior Executive, he led analysis of global military strategy and related defense programs in the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. He then joined the RAND Corporation, where his research has dealt with strategic planning under deep uncertainty; deterrence theory; modeling; information fusion; and causal social science for policy applications. He has served on numerous national panels and journal editorial boards. His professional web page is https://www.rand.org/about/people/d/davis_paul.html.