Before exiting the Pentagon this summer, nuclear strategist and MIT professor Vipin Narang told reporters that we may “one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as a nuclear intermission.” His comments were delivered in the context of President Biden’s quietly approving a new nuclear strategy to counter the threat of coordination between China, Russia, and North Korea. China, in particular, is rapidly building its nuclear arsenal and is projected to possess an equal number of warheads as the United States by 2035. The specter of nuclear conflict, be it the use of “tactical nukes” or nuclear holocaust, now looms over the world in a way it has not since the 1980s. We are, as many have now acknowledged, in the early stages of a second Cold War.

This need not be cause for alarmism, but the fact of nuclear resurgence in particular should provoke our policymakers to revisit those Cold War strategists whose prescriptions placed the US on a winning trajectory against the Soviet Union. Towering figures appear as immediate candidates: George Kennan, George C. Marshall, and Dean Acheson. In a new book, however, State Department historian James Graham Wilson makes a compelling case that the under-celebrated example of Paul Nitze is both the most instructive and most deserving of our emulation.

At once both a biography and a history of foreign policy during the Cold War, America’s Cold Warrior, highlights Nitze’s achievements during the country’s transformation into a global leader while also paying proper attention to the man’s blind spots in the conduct of the Cold War. An indefatigable force with a serpentine mind, Nitze is indeed a cold warrior for our times.

The Cold Warrior

Often overshadowed by Kennan in Cold War hagiography, Paul Nitze had a remarkable career: he served in seven presidential administrations from Franklin Roosevelt to George HW Bush; he authored NSC-68, whose militarized approach to containment every administration implemented with varying flavors; he was in the room with Kennedy during both the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis; and, under Reagan, he headed negotiations with the Soviet Union that yielded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. As Wilson points out, Kennan’s career in public service ended shortly after his famous Long Telegram. While the vaunted diplomat was writing scathing articles in Foreign Affairs about the Reagan administration, Nitze was still in the heart of things, crafting one of the most consequential nuclear deals of the era.

Throughout his six decades of service, Nitze possessed an unshakable conviction that strategic superiority in both nuclear and conventional forces was critical for checking communist ambitions. He learned this lesson while serving on the Strategic Bombing Survey assessing the efficacy of Allied bombing campaigns in Europe and the Pacific during World War II. Japan, in Nitze’s appraisal, felt confident attacking the United States in 1941 because America failed to both maintain and project a “preponderance of power.” Perceived weakness, in will or armaments, is an invitation for hostility and risky behavior on the part of our adversaries. Nitze made it his mission for the rest of his career to correct this mistake. This conviction is on full display in the document for which he is most famous, NSC-68.

“United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” better known as NSC-68, elected a militarized version of containment for American strategy against Soviet communism. Echoing many of Kennan’s insights from his Long Telegram and X article, NSC-68 acknowledged the bipolar power distribution of the post-WWII era and identified Soviet leaders as fanatical in their beliefs, expansionist in their designs, and dangerous to American interests and the cause of freedom more broadly. The global threat posed by the Soviets, and their own recognition of the US as their primary rival, impelled Americans to “take up the mantle of world leadership.” Containment needed to be comprehensive: “In the context of the present polarization of power, a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” In addition to blocking any further Soviet expansion, victory required of the US to “so foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system that the Kremlin is brought at least to the point of modifying its behavior to conform to generally accepted international standards.”

Such an ambitious goal, in Nitze’s estimate, required a massive investment in defense spending. Whereas Kennan had argued for a similar containment policy, he was content to rely on economic, political, and “counterforce” levers to check Soviet designs. Nitze thought containment was a fantasy without the added variable of military superiority: “Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of ‘containment’ … is no more than a policy of bluff.” For example, economic and political influence in the Marshall Plan (which Nitze helped implement) was only possible because it was sustained by decisive military prowess.

“Strategic superiority” was the prism through which Nitze interpreted nearly every major development in the Cold War. It explained why the Soviets backed down during the Cuban Missile and Berlin crises and, once they attained superiority, why they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Moreover, the fact of Soviet superiority led Nitze to wrongly assess Mikhail Gorbachev as a liar who would never pursue meaningful reform.

But nowhere was the imperative more strongly felt than in nuclear weapons, the field where Nitze spent the remainder of his public career. From NSC-68 through the INF treaty, he feared a scenario wherein the Soviets, having gained the nuclear advantage, launched a surprise attack that crippled American retaliatory capabilities to the point that America’s only choices were to surrender or launch vain strikes in response. Our only options would be slavery or punitive genocide.

Preventing this “Nitze Scenario” required the United States to do anything necessary to keep the nuclear edge, in delivery and defense systems but also in the quality and quantity of nuclear warheads. Nitze’s logic spurred the United States on the arms race, a race it won in terms of raw numbers until the mid-1970s when the country amassed a staggering 25,000 warheads. It deeply troubled him that we failed to keep up with the Soviets as they amassed over 40,000 warheads in the 1980s.

It is wrong to say that Nitze learned how to love the bomb. He feared the prospect of nuclear holocaust as much as J. Robert Oppenheimer, with whom he went toe-to-toe over the hydrogen bomb. Instead, Nitze recognized that nukes were a fact of geostrategy and, rightly it turns out, that the Soviets would pursue their development whether we stopped or not. While nukes remained a factor, peace depended on America retaining the strategic edge. It is crucial to recognize that when Nitze (and Reagan) saw the chance to reverse the arms race, he leapt at it. The INF treaty he negotiated not only placed hard limits on offensive missile development, it put the Americans and Russians on a trajectory to reduce their stockpiles to the limits in effect today (a cap at 1,500 warheads, down from 40,000 Russian and 28,000 American bombs at the height of the arms race).

Assessing Nitze’s Legacy

Despite his towering achievements, Nitze was wrong on a number of fronts. He wanted to invade Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a move that likely would have triggered a Soviet invasion of Berlin. Though not eager to defend South Vietnam, he thought it necessary to win once we had sent troops. Moreover, while it is difficult to determine the extent to which strategic superiority was a primary factor in the Soviet retreat from Cuba or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Nitze was wrong in thinking that a larger nuclear arsenal promised Soviet victory in the Cold War.

Wilson chalks these mistakes up to the difficulties of being a policymaker working with imperfect information. Some slack must be given in this regard, to be sure. But might these oversights not be due to some deeper problem with Nitze’s view of the world? Nitze’s obsession with military superiority blinded him to other considerations that are just as vital to explaining countries’ conduct on the world stage. In particular, he struggled to entertain the notion that men with guns would do anything but cling to power. There is a revealing tension in NSC-68 that foreshadows this problem. That document described Soviet leaders as at once fanatics enthralled by a religious ideology and power-hungry thugs no better than mob bosses. It is the same problem that has today’s pundits describing Putin both as a routine oligarch and as a nationalist obsessed with restoring the old grandeur of the Russian empire, or the Iranian mullahs as at once corrupt autocrats and extreme religious zealots. If we treat all authoritarians as power-hungry cogs instead of misguided men capable, if only occasionally, of noble motivations, we will forever be surprised when we encounter genuine reformers like Gorbachev who are concerned with the welfare of their people.

Nitze’s saving grace was that he was always willing to work with “miserable sons of bitches.” He never opposed negotiations or détente on principle—he only cautioned that overtures of premature peace lessened the likelihood of continued investment and upkeep of our military, leading eventually to the loss of strategic superiority. It is important to emphasize that despite thinking Gorbachev a liar, despite thinking that Soviet intentions in 1985 remained identical to Stalin’s in 1950, he pursued negotiations over offensive arms limitations with the Soviets in good faith. In a poetic twist of fate, the man who led the charge for increasing our nuclear stockpile landed the deal that would dramatically decrease the global amount of nuclear weapons.

Moreover, NSC-68 proved prescient. Despite obvious missteps (e.g., Vietnam), the danger of the doctrine lay more in its excesses than in the logic of the document. The Soviet Union was expansionist. If communism’s spread was slow and piecemeal after 1950, that was not on account of a lack of will on the part of the ideologues, but rather because the US acted to counter its spread. By holding the Soviets at bay through political and economic means backed up by overwhelming military might, the United States was able to retain its safety as well as guarantee the safety of free societies the world over, whose collective example served to gradually erode the confidence of communist leaders and sympathizers. In other words, Nitze’s brand of containment worked.

With such a mixed legacy, what are we to make of Nitze? Should we and can we apply this martially minded man’s strategic insights to our Cold War circumstances without committing his many mistakes? Is it possible to eliminate the mistakes without diluting the core of his thought? I believe the answer to each of these questions is yes. How exactly Nitze would respond to our challenges is impossible to know. But we can be sure that in our time, when our adversaries will have twice the number of nuclear warheads as we possess in less than ten years, Nitze would insist that we expand our nuclear arsenal, double down on modernization, and tell Americans to get over the price tag. Though he would take the dangers of an arms race seriously, he would consider the risks of losing strategic superiority more dangerous. An arms race risks nuclear war. Loss of superiority, however, means that if there is one, we will lose. Similarly, he would likely urge unwavering support of Ukraine and heightened deterrence in Taiwan. Following NSC-68, he would unapologetically recognize the conflict for what it is, a global ideological contest between the forces of freedom and autocracy. And, just like in NSC-68, he would insist with equal vigor that we always remain open to dialogue and peaceful coexistence.

Finally, Nitze would urge us to remember and celebrate the vitality of liberal institutions. He would consider the widespread panic over the threats to democracy stupid, not just because they are overblown but because they weaken our greatest weapon against a new axis of totalitarianism: faith in the cause of liberty. Nitze nourished a powerful belief in the superiority of liberal values. It was that faith that ultimately won the first Cold War. We should be confident that it will win the second.