Tripolar Instability: Nuclear Competition Among the United States, Russia, and China

by Robert S. Litwak

The central organizing argument of this study is that the combination of emergent nuclear tripolarity and geostrategic dangers over Ukraine and Taiwan are recreating two interlocking Cold War risks. They threaten to undermine arms race stability and crisis stability—the two elements that comprise strategic stability. The first risk is what analysts called “the stability-instability paradox”—that a nuclear stalemate would deflect competition to regions of peripheral interest in what was then called “the Third World.” In contrast, today Russia and China are vying in strategic competition with the United States over the status quo in regions of vital, not peripheral, interest. The second risk compounds the first: the “balance of terror” in the emergent tripolar order is becoming less stable. We are on the cusp of unconstrained competition with the dismantling of the arms control architecture, the advent of destabilizing new technologies, the blurring of conventional military and nuclear operations, and the extension of great-power competition into the new domains of cyberspace and outer space. This study examines the various pathways of escalation—accidental, inadvertent, and instrumental. In the current strategic environment, a dangerous prospect is that Russia and China will pursue instrumental escalation over Ukraine and Taiwan in what strategist Thomas Schelling called a “competition in risk-taking.”

124 pages, ebook

Published June 27, 2023