What is the important part that needs to be said?
Adversaries and potential adversaries are improving familiar capabilities and acquiring new and unprecedented instruments of coercion and warfare. Some appear willing to employ or abide by the employment of weapons that have, until recently, been deemed outside supposedly global norms, such as chemical weapons. Improvements in ballistic and cruise missiles, missile defenses, anti-access and area denial measures, hypersonic, cyber and space weapons have or will open new domains for threat and warfare, and, correspondingly, pose new challenges for US deterrence strategies.
This new strategic environment is very different from that of the Cold War or the immediate post-Cold War period. As we consider how to adapt deterrence to the realities of this period we first need to understand the necessary deterrence roles for our nuclear weapons given the emerging spectrum of adversaries and potential adversaries who are pursuing external goals that threaten us, our allies and the existing post-Cold War order in general. Effective nuclear deterrence is increasingly important in this new strategic environment characterized by severe, coercive nuclear threats against us and our allies, and the increasing prospect for adversary employment of nuclear weapons, and possibly other WMD.
Moscow clearly feels that it must correct an unacceptable loss of position supposedly imposed on it by the West following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, Moscow is pursuing Great Power competition aggressively, with a revanchist agenda backed by coercive nuclear threats. Its explicit nuclear threats to the West surpass even those of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and its nuclear programs, according to Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, already have resulted in the modernization of three-fourths of Russia’s “ground, air and sea strategic nuclear forces
Chinese leaders feel that they must overturn a “century of humiliation,” and, in doing so are provoking US allies severely as Beijing seeks to overturn the existing order in Asia. Its illegal expansionism and rapidly growing military capabilities, nuclear and non-nuclear, pose a direct threat to US allies and interests.
Western deterrence goals to preserve an international order which these Great Powers now seek to overturn will be particularly challenging as they seek to recover what they believe to be rightfully theirs, but now is denied them by Western opposition.
Now, here is the part where I part company with all of the globalist neo-cons, like Keith where he says: Russia’s illegitimate occupation of Crimea and China’s illegal expansion into the East and South China Seas certainly appear to reflect this dynamic
Crimea was Russia's since before we were a country. The US has no moral claim there and part of the new Russina nuclear posture is to keep the US from sticking its nose in places where our nose just doesn't belong. And regarding China - I believe strongly in reassuring our allies on the Pacific Rim that we have their backs. But that doesn't mean that China has to get permission from the globalist imperialists before they can sail a fishing smack in the South China Sea - and that is sort of the US interpretation of the global world order.
We should not have pointed fingers at Russia and laughed at them and shown them our contempt when we did [drove our tanks up to their front porch as Buchanan puts it]. At no time in the Russian revolution and after did Russia cease to be a peer nuclear power capable of ending our way of life, however bad things got for them otherwise.
As for anything Keith has to say about NK, he was there in the Pentagon when they let that happen. He should be ashamed and embarrassed.
Trump has it about right in his Godfather approach to NK. No punk, I don't respect you and I am not dealing with you. Start anything and you disappear. You put yourself in that hole. You bankrupted yourself and starved yourself to act like a bigshot. This is not going to end well for you.