The Atomic Option
International relations theory helps explain U.S. politics now. That's bad
One of the benefits of being the hegemon is that you can speak of grave outcomes that don’t apply to you as if they were the lightest of metaphors. And so it came to pass that minor changes to Senate procedures have come to be known as the “nuclear option”.
Explicating the process by which an immensely civilized process (tweaking rules) comes to be conflated with an immensely violent one (the use of thermonuclear devices) is intriguing. The metaphor, it seems, is not that nuclear weapons are destructive but rather that they are tools of the trade, in fact ultimate trump cards—tools that are restrained not because of the thought that the actor who plays them might be directly harmed but rather because their use would allow a quick win (the U.S. myth of Hiroshima) followed by a period of greater danger. It is, in its own way, a form of nuclear taboo: you don’t use nuclear weapons because to do so would not be ineffective but rather so effective its results would shatter the established order.
International relations theory and its related fields, of course, spend a lot of time thinking about nuclear weapons and strategy. Some of this is scholastic nonsense, of course. The most compelling sections in the novel Fail-Safe concern the incisive skewering of armchair or academic nuclear strategists as essentially provocateurs who delight in playing with ideas but do not really expect them to matter. (Unsurprisingly, one of the authors of the book was himself as political scientist.) But much of it is actually surprisingly sound, or at least a way of systematizing intuitions to allow for more precise discussions.
It’s telling that it was the practitioners of domestic politics and their kibitzers who dubbed “the nuclear option”. It is not the way that most academics who specialize in the subject would use the term. The vocabulary of (most) American scholars who look at these materials, after all, is one of deterrence and negotiation. The point of nuclear weapons (again, to most but not all) is to take other options off the table or to force negotiations. The nuclear option is supposed to be a non-option, or at most a backdrop to more productive employment of other means. The devastation of such weapons is also never far from the minds of those who think about these topics—even if they think they may spend too little time talking about the particulars of nuclear horrors, they certainly have spent more time than non-specialists.
I am no such specialist, but I can attest that reading about atomic history and nuclear weapons will enliven your nightmares, both sleeping and waking.
I bring this up at the moment because the line between the habits of thoughts needed to understand American politics and international relations theory is eroding. In normal times, the two are mostly distinct, with the dominant mode of American politics being compromise and conflict under the conditions of a stable order, while international relations theory looks to a a more diffused range of power centers contending under a somewhat less formal order.
The current debt limit standoff, however, resembles much more something out of international relations theory and its related disciplines. Specifically, it looks like an example that Tom Schelling would have added to Arms and Influence had it been in the newspapers. Instead of David Mayhew’s midcentury legislators straining for re-election or Richard Neustadt’s presidents trying to persuade, we have a standoff between two groups of actors in which one is trying to use the prospect of the unthinkable (a debt breach) to force the other side to do something they would prefer not to do. Kevin McCarthy may not seem like Chairman Khrushchev, but the metaphor to any number of “crises” during the Cold War is more apt than most domestic political situations.
Some view this as irrational. After all, if a debt default would harm everyone, who would want to risk it? Schelling laughs. That is the whole idea of a doomsday device. You don’t want it to be triggered—but you want the possibility that it might be triggered to steadily increase so that eventually the weaker side will be forced to give way to prevent that outcome. And McCarthy’s incredible weakness as Speaker—the fact that any member can call a vote of confidence in his leadership—binds him far more credibly to his path than Biden, who seems to believe his options are quite narrow, is.
Forget the Senate rules. Triggering default is the true nuclear option. Or, rather, it is the atomic option. We should not devalue what a real, or even a “limited”, nuclear war would mean—it would be devastating perhaps even to civilization itself. The unfortunate fact is that a debt default would not be the end of American civilization but merely an incredibly grave wound whose effects would be felt for a generation. Indeed, it is the fact that McCarthy, or at least someone in the GOP camp, seems to have calculated that even a default could rebound to their benefit (by making Biden the villain in the resulting economic chaos), that means that we are not in a pure situation of bargaining over Armageddon. Rather, the House GOP seems to think it is only a question of how much they will win on net—whether they will split Democrats and force spending cuts that will achieve Republican goals and harm Democrats’ fortunes, or force a default and achieve the same plus putting Trump in a better position for 2024.
None of these consequences are “nuclear”. But they are atomic, in the sense that innocent people would bear a lot of pain and the subsequent world would be one in which such a tactic, having been tried, would be tried again.
These are stakes that go a little beyond position-taking and credit-claiming. This is the true weaponization of government.