++Voices from a besieged Rafah. +
++More than four months into the Israel-Hamas war, Gaza residents are struggling to survive winter conditions with insufficient food, drinking water, medicine, and clothing. +
++The majority of them have fled to Rafah, a city in the south bordering Egypt. With a prewar population of about 280,000 residents, Rafah is now housing nearly 1.5 million refugees, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (and confirmed by satellite images). +
++It was, theoretically, a refuge from the intense shelling and ground operation Israel launched after Hamas brutally attacked the country on October 7. That sense has been shattered this week. Israeli airstrikes on Monday killed about 100 people, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated a ground offensive might be imminent. +
++Meanwhile, negotiations have stalled on discussions of a ceasefire deal and a hostage and prisoner swap between Israel and Hamas. +
++The negotiations, helmed by the United States, Egypt, and Qatar, ground to a halt Wednesday after Netanyahu called his delegates back from a summit in Cairo, accusing Hamas of presenting “delusional” demands in order to avoid a deal. +
++The relatives of the estimated 130 remaining hostages said the decision amounts to a “death sentence” for their family members languishing in Hamas captivity, about a quarter of whom are presumed dead. +
++And it leaves the Palestinians sheltering in Rafah feeling even more hopeless. The Today, Explained podcast team spoke with Aseel Mousa, a Palestinian freelance journalist who grew up in Gaza, about how we got here, what it’s like on the ground right now, and what happens next. +
++How so many Palestinians ended up in Rafah +
++As Israel started its aerial bombardment — following the October 7 Hamas attacks, which killed about 1,200 Israelis, with more than 240 people taken hostage — it directed Gazans to flee south to avoid the fighting. That was always a fraught directive in a territory the size of Detroit but almost four times its population. But as the war has progressed, more than 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced. +
++Mousa’s family is among them. On October 13, her family left their home outside Gaza City and sought shelter in the al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. +
++For about 80 days, they stayed in her grandfather’s house along with about 40 other displaced people. +
++“The situation there was dire,” Mousa said. “We faced severe shortages of food, running water, and even drinkable water. And also Israel cut off electricity, communication lines, and internet access.” +
++“And even though Israel claimed that area as a safe area, I lost 10 people of my family,” she added. “Israel targeted the house of my cousins. And as a result, 10 of my relatives were killed. Seven of them were children. And one of them was a woman. And the others were young men.” +
++Rafah, refuge no more +
++Mousa’s childhood home and her grandfather’s home in al-Maghazi were both bombed. As Israeli airstrikes intensified, her family fled farther south, to Rafah. +
++Now, she and over a million other Palestinians are trapped. A sense of despair pervades Rafah, said Matthew Hollingworth of the World Food Programme, where people are scavenging for food, fuel, and shelter amid “damp, cold, and miserable” conditions. Mousa has been documenting their stories. +
+ ++She called Monday’s assault “a night of terror beyond description” but said compounding the fear of death is the lack of basic supplies: +
++“The Israeli bombardment is hard in itself, being under fire, under bombardment, she said. “But being under bombardment without even the essential needs — such as food, water, medical supplies, medicines — is making the problem or the tough time harder than enduring it with only bombing.” +
++Is a ground offensive coming? +
++Israeli officials say Rafah is Hamas’s last stronghold in Gaza, and that a ground offensive is needed to defeat Hamas and bring an end to the war. +
++The UN warned that such an operation would lead to “carnage.” But Netanyahu brushed aside concerns in a Fox News interview, saying, “I think the people who are telling you, ‘Oh, you can’t do it, you can’t go into Rafah under any conditions,’ are basically saying ‘Don’t win, lose.’” +
++Moussa says Rafah’s displaced population is dreading a ground invasion, which she said would be “a catastrophe, as … the people now have no place to go to.” +
++“What can we do?” she said. “We stay. We stay in the houses. In the tents. In the streets. In the shelters, waiting to be killed. We don’t have a plan F. We made the plan A, plan B, plan C. And we have no more plans.” +
++The threat of an invasion has increased pressure on US and other officials to get diplomatic negotiations back on track — for both an immediate deal and a longer-term solution. +
++Arab states insist that after a ceasefire deal is reached, a two-state solution is a prerequisite to normalizing relations with Israel and rebuilding a devastated Gaza Strip. +
++But Mousa and others like her in Rafah have more immediate concerns: +
++“We don’t have the luxury to think of the aftermath. We only think how to survive day by day. We think of how to flee from being killed.” +
++This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions. +
++The star of Madame Web is a charming terror. +
++To love Dakota Johnson is to understand that Dakota Johnson probably hates you for it a little bit. +
++When she was in 50 Shades of Grey, all anyone could talk about was Johnson’s sheer lack of chemistry with (and perhaps even strong distaste for) handsome costar Jamie Dornan. For a movie that’s supposed to be all about mutual appeal, the press tour lacked even the faintest suggestion of it. If you found their onscreen relationship at all convincing, Johnson would probably politely say, “I love that for you!” +
++Even bigger than her open embrace of the 50 Shades stiffness came from Johnson’s run-in with Ellen DeGeneres. The actor confronted the terminally amicable talk show host, who had until that point held the mantle of the nicest person on TV, calling Ellen out as a liar. Technically, it was DeGeneres who snubbed Johnson’s birthday party invite, Johnson explained, not a lack of invitation. DeGeneres’s saccharine empire crumbled soon after and Johnson was cheered as the people’s princess. “It will haunt me,” she said to L’Officiel this month of the interaction, telling the publication that journalists as a whole do not understand sarcasm. +
++Johnson’s unrelenting dryness is her hallmark, like when she famously claimed to love limes. “I love them so much. They’re great, and I love them so much, and I like to present them like this in my house,” she said, pointing to a pyramid of limes during her house tour with Architectural Digest. There was an uncanniness to her delivery; something was endearingly off. Later, on The Tonight Show, she revealed that she was actually allergic to limes, and they were planted by a set designer. “It was hard to just ignore them, so I just lied,” she said, of the citric flourish. Later, she doubled down, saying “I don’t really care about limes.” +
++As a media personality, Johnson is organic and truly unrehearsed. But when she does or says something fascinating or amusing, she seems to think you’re the weird one for liking it. Being charming is just normal for her. Being charmed by her normality is, to her, a little silly. +
++Putting her front and center in Madame Web, a Spider-Man-based superhero movie, is an inspired but counterintuitive choice. Superheroes are built on winning an audience over. People root for superheroes. Dakota Johnson doesn’t seem to ever want you rooting for her. And if Dakota Johnson doesn’t really care about limes, why would Johnson care about a tertiary Spider-Man character? +
++That’s the magic of the gloriously clumsy, terrifically absurd Madame Web, a movie that Johnson herself said was maybe, probably, going to be kind of terrible. And if Dakota Johnson says something is kind of terrible, don’t you kind of want to see what she means? After all, it could just be an unenthusiastic illusion, like the limes. +
++Don’t take Madame Web too seriously. Don’t take any superhero movie too seriously. +
++In Madame Web, Johnson plays Cassandra “Cassie” Webb, the Spider-Lady at the heart of the movie. Even though her arthropod-esque, prophetic name kinda gives everything away, Cassie thinks she’s just a New York City EMT. What Cassie doesn’t fully know is that she has powers thanks to her late mother, an intrepid amateur arachnologist. +
++Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé) believed spiders could cure disease, specifically that there was a special spider in the Peruvian Amazon whose venom and cell structure could yield special benefits. Even seven months pregnant with Cassie, she considered that spider worth risking a jungle adventure. To communicate this potential to the audience, Constance and other characters just say “peptides” over and over, waving away technicalities, science, and logic. +
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Jessica Kourkounis/Sony Pictures
++If you take umbrage with that kind of storytelling, I have no idea what to tell you. That’s your own problem. This is no bait and switch. This is a movie with Dakota Johnson playing an EMT who is also a psychic Spider-Lady. This isn’t an exegesis on the themes of Foucault, but you should already know that. +
++The writing duo behind Madame Web also gave us Morbius, a Spider-verse story about an antihero vampire in STEM, and the doomed 2017 Power Rangers reboot. Their continued Hollywood employment despite consistent clunkerdom is a feat. Like those “movies,” Madame Web isn’t so much a film but rather a 116-minute collection of 13-second intervals where characters tell you how they feel (usually one of sad, happy, or scared), who they are (their names, what they’re good at, and where they live), or exactly what they’re gonna do next (going to a diner, going to Peru, going to kill some people in Peru). +
++Unfortunately for Constance, she’s not the only one who’s on the hunt — her bodyguard Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) has been searching for the rare arachnids too, which is why he sadly needs to shoot her. Ezekiel believes in the myths of Arañas, people with spider-granted super strength who can zip through jungle trees. As Constance bleeds out in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon, she discovers that the Arañas are real. They compel their magical medical spider to sink its fangs into her, which doesn’t save Constance’s life but does save Cassie’s. It also imbues her with the power to see the future. The Arañas, thankfully, for some reason, speak English, which makes this entire kidnapping-spider-biting ritual feel less hostile, as they tell the dying Constance they’re saving her unborn baby. +
++Like the audience watching, Constance is encouraged to just go with it. +
++It’s unclear who named Cassie or how adoption works in the Peruvian Amazon. Being so far from civilization, the Arañas ostensibly had to care for this newborn orphan for some amount of time. Yet, Adult Cassie tells us she’s the product of the American foster care system and also somehow has a trunk full of her mom’s spider research, a series of notebooks that undoubtedly has the word “peptides” underlined over and over. Perhaps the Arañas’s real superpower was finding a way to get baby Cassie, a Peruvian immigrant, to the United States with her mom’s scientific research intact and dropping her right into the hands of CPS. +
++Raising Cassie as an Araña would surely have been an easier time for everyone involved. But like Cassie, we cannot change what’s already been decided for us. This is Madame Web, not Señora Araña! +
++Cassie Webb kind of sucks, and that rules +
++According to Spider-Man lore, a radioactive eight-legged arachnid bit Peter Parker and gave him “Spidey sense” plus enhanced agility, super strength, and wall-climbing abilities. Similarly, the itsy-bitsy that bit Miles Morales activated those gifts plus invisibility and bioelectric venom strike. In the Spider-Verse, spiders bite people and grant them the powers they share. +
++Going by this logic, the spider that bit Cassie’s mom could see the future and maybe, was kind of a jerk. +
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Sony Pictures
++In this world, spiders have some kind of foresight that allows them to glimpse the future — but a very specific and localized peek and not, like, a profound understanding of the fullness and fabric of time. The power functions like déjà vu, as the spider would ostensibly fully live through one version of the future and snap back to 30 seconds before it all happened. Given that a spider’s life in the Peruvian Amazon is probably filled with all kinds of threats, this way of living would probably make it a little bit supernaturally cranky. This heightened anticipation also explains how the spider managed to elude humans for so long. +
++Like the spider that bit her mom, Adult Cassie doesn’t particularly enjoy human interaction. This might seem at odds with Cassie’s vocation as a post-9/11 first responder — the movie is set in 2003 — until you remember that Cassie helps people who are usually extremely injured and unconscious. +
++Cassie dodges her own captain’s baby shower with a Johnson-esque “I don’t want to get roped into that.” She’s mostly okay with only one coworker, her partner Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Yes, that name is supposed to raise all kinds of alarms, as does the fact that Ben has a pregnant sister named Mary (Emma Roberts). That sure would make him an uncle named Ben. +
++Johnson delivers all of Cassie’s lines — from saying “you’re welcome” to the loved ones of her patients to telling party attendees that her dead mom was probably irresponsible — with weaponized uptalk. Uptalk, some researchers say, is designed to slyly announce dominance in a submissive way; it’s an assertion disguised as a question. In Cassie’s voice, it feels like she’s asking the audience to empathize with the dolts around her. +
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Sony Pictures
++This isn’t that different from how the real Dakota Johnson, daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren, speaks: fearless deadpan combined with condescending inquisitiveness to create an undertone of cool menace. Johnson is not a chameleon, and her best roles have tapped into that unreadable opacity, making use of her ability to turn others into the inconsequential lime sitting on her counter. +
++In Madame Web, Johnson’s delivery often feels like she’s making fun of the movie she’s in. Every line has a wink, a vague suggestion to the audience that she can’t believe she’s saying things like “The best part of the future is that it hasn’t happened yet” either. Yet her half-hearted commitment to the bit is endearing because maybe superhero movies are made to be laughed at. Extremely stupid and extremely fun are not mutually exclusive. +
++Instead of her power allowing her to win the lottery or at least invest in pre-iPhone Apple, Cassie has to use her power to protect three teenage girls — played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabel Merced, and Celeste O’Connor — from Ezekiel, who is back from his own trip to the Amazon. She’s extremely annoyed that her precognitive abilities have turned her into a very powerful au pair. +
++“Don’t do dumb stuff,” she tells the girls. Unfortunately, teenage girls aren’t easily frightened by uptalk inflection. They continue to do dumb stuff, and Cassie considers abandoning them. Cassie Webb is perhaps the most relatable superhero in the Spider-Verse. +
++Ezekiel has foreseen, via spider bite, that these teens will eventually become superhero Spider-Women and kill him. He’s hired a woman named Amaria (Zosia Mamet, another talented nepo baby) to hack into the NSA and track the girls, an extraneous plot device but one that allows Mamet to shine as a snarky lady computer genius in a room of screens and monitors. +
++Like its superhero movie brethren, one of the huge reasons Madame Web exists is to lock in IP and tease out the possibility of more superhero movies. The girls in the film will grow up to be comic book superheroes known as Spider-Woman, Spider-Girl, and also Spider-Woman (titles in comics get passed around a lot). Cassie becomes the psychic, future-manipulating powerhouse known as Madame Web. Given Marvel’s compulsion to drive superheroes into the realm of cinematic anesthesia, Sony, perhaps unintentionally, making a movie as clumsily fun as Madame Web is refreshing. I would see at least two more of these at the theater. +
++That’s a testament to Johnson’s innate ability to charm despite the material. Her performance feels like an inside joke that you’re lucky to be privy to. It’s as though she’s acknowledging that this whole thing — the peptides, the Arañas, the ability to read the future, this loser who wants to kill teenage girls — is all rather absurd. And that’s okay because it’s a superhero movie, but she’ll think you’re weird for liking it. +
++Adversaries keep chipping away at America’s military credibility. Trump isn’t helping. +
++Does the US still have the power to deter its adversaries? +
++When the US launched airstrikes earlier this month against the proxy militias linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in retaliation for the attack that killed three US soldiers at a base in Jordan, President Joe Biden noted that while the US would continue to respond to Iran-linked attacks “at times and places of our choosing,” it “does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s statement on the strikes used almost identical language. +
++Readers of these statements might reasonably wonder how one can bomb 85 targets and kill nearly 40 people without “seeking conflict.” B-1 bombers are not exactly an instrument of Gandhian nonviolent resistance. Officially, the motivation for the strikes, according to the letter the White House sent to notify Congress in accordance with the War Powers Resolution, was to “deter the IRGC and affiliated militia groups from conducting or supporting further attacks on United States personnel and facilities.” +
++Since the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and the war in Gaza that followed, “deterrence” — specifically deterring Iran and its various proxies from initiating a wider regional war — has been the guiding concept behind US policy. “Deterring a broader conflict” was cited by Pentagon officials as the motivation for deploying more US military assets, including aircraft carriers, to the Middle East last fall. In January, the US launched military strikes in Yemen with the goal of “deterring Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.” +
++This sort of language is not new. Establishing a “strong deterrent” against chemical weapons use was President Donald Trump’s stated motivation for launching airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria in 2018. President Barack Obama assured wary American allies in the Persian Gulf in 2016 that despite his attempts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, he would not hesitate to use military force to “deter” Iranian aggression. +
++In recent cases, at least, the effectiveness of all this deterrent activity has been decidedly mixed. Iran has not yet directly attacked Israel or US military targets with its own forces. Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, has not yet launched a full-scale war with Israel, as many feared earlier in the conflict. But at the same time, US troops in the region have been targeted in dozens of attacks that have resulted in those three deaths and dozens of wounded; the exchange of fire between Hezbollah and Israel has been intensifying, even if it’s still short of all-out war; and the Iran-backed Houthis have continued their attacks on shipping, declaring that Western airstrikes “will not deter us.” Just two days after the US strikes in early February, a drone attack claimed by Iran-linked militias against a US base in Syria killed six Kurdish fighters, who are allied with US forces in the region. +
++At press briefings, US government spokespeople now regularly face questions about whether US deterrence in the Middle East has failed. But with conflicts on the rise globally and many longtime partners starting to question the value of US security guarantees, it’s a question that has ramifications beyond just this region. In today’s world, is the US still able to deter its adversaries? +
++Carrying a big stick +
++The concept of deterrence — dissuading an adversary from carrying out some action through the threat of punishment — has been a feature of international relations and military strategy since at least the ancient Greeks. The concept was fleshed out at the height of the Cold War by theorists like the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling, whose 1966 book Arms and Influence examined how countries can use military power — including, in the nuclear age, the power to kill millions almost instantaneously — to influence each other’s behavior. +
++Schelling portrayed superpower competition in the nuclear era as a “competition in risk taking, characterized not so much by tests of force as by tests of nerve.” In other words, the measure of a country’s power to deter or coerce its adversaries was not just the number of troops, guns, and bombs at its disposal but its ability to create the impression that it is willing to use them, a dynamic he refers to as the “manipulation of risk.” +
++The ongoing war in Ukraine has been a textbook lesson in the manipulation of risk. Throughout the conflict, Russia has had to tolerate billions of dollars worth of Western military aid flowing into Ukraine, significantly bolstering that country’s ability to fight. Critically, this aid is flowing from NATO countries like Poland, which are covered by a treaty that declares an attack on any member of the alliance to be an attack on all. Vladimir Putin evidently considers that guarantee credible and wants to avoid getting into a shooting war with the entire alliance by attacking the aid shipments. +
++But deterrence cuts both ways. NATO countries want to avoid a direct war with Russia, too, particularly in light of Putin’s frequent threats to use nuclear weapons. This has limited the types of assistance they have provided to Ukraine: no NATO troops on the ground, no NATO planes enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. +
++Over time, though, the West has gradually increased the amount of aid it has provided to Ukraine, with no catastrophic nuclear response from Russia, undermining the credibility of Putin’s threats. So Ukraine is now receiving forms of aid — targeting assistance, tanks, fighter jets — that would have been unthinkable in the early days of the war, when according to many accounts keeping the fighting contained within Ukraine was a bigger priority for US security officials than Ukrainian victory. This type of escalation — gradual but without ever doing anything dramatic enough to put your adversary in a position where they feel compelled to respond — is referred to, by Schelling at others, as “Salami tactics,” meaning cutting off one thin slice at a time, eroding your opponent’s red lines without provoking them into a major response. +
++What has not been deterred, of course, is Russia’s willingness to prosecute ongoing, extraordinarily destructive war within Ukraine itself. +
++The limits of deterrence +
++Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official now with the Middle East Institute, says it’s not accurate or fair to say that the ramped-up US military presence in the Middle East has failed to deter Iran. “If there weren’t that forward deployed immediate deterrence in the region, you probably would have seen a whole lot more activity from Iran to spread its influence without being checked,” he told Vox. Saab pointed out some far more provocative actions that Iran could have taken, including an attack that killed dozens rather than just a few US soldiers or shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which would have an even more significant impact on global energy supplies than the disruptions the Houthis have caused in their attacks on Red Sea shipping. +
++Saab acknowledged that it’s difficult to “prove that deterrence is working because at the end of the day, you can’t prove something that didn’t happen.” +
++At the same time, the frequent attacks by Iranian proxy groups against US military targets in the Middle East — more than 160 strikes since October, according to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — show that there are some activities Tehran has definitely not been deterred from carrying out. +
++“It’s basically become the status quo: a proxy group lobs rockets at US bases, then US forces bomb and kill the proxies,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. +
++Even if this state of affairs avoids a catastrophic regional war, it leaves US troops in the region — notably the roughly 2,500 in Iraq and 900 in Syria who are ostensibly there to defeat ISIS — in the crossfire. As the Economist recently noted, these troops constitute a “military presence big enough to present a menu of targets but too small actually to constrain Iran.” +
++Jonathan Lord, a former Defense Department official who now directs the Middle East program at the Center for a New American Security, said the attacks on these targets seem calculated to “inject uncertainty into either US or Israeli decision making” but “avoid putting the US to a decision point where it has to respond forcefully.” Both sides are trying to influence the other’s behavior without sparking a conflict they can’t control. Using proxies makes it easier to maintain this balance than it would be if Iran were directly attacking the US military with its own military. +
++Of course, even “controlled” tit-for-tat exchanges of potentially deadly fire can easily lead to unintended escalation. The strike in late January that killed three US troops may have been a case of the “dog that caught the car,” Lord said, in that it prompted the US to take much more serious action in retaliation. +
++Some Republican critics have called for the Biden administration to take even more aggressive action to deter Iran, including striking within the country itself. Given the track record of US military interventions in the region over the past 20 years, the administration has very good reason to avoid getting involved in a direct conflict with Iran. (For what it’s worth, Trump also stopped short of striking within Iran itself, despite coming very close to doing so.) +
++Lord said that the US reluctance to escalate is “coming from a good place and well-intentioned,” but that the strategy has essentially given Iran the message that a certain amount of violence targeting US troops will be tolerated, or at least that the response to it will be measured and limited. “[Iran] has a freer hand, knowing that we’re going to be moderating our actions,” he said. +
++The US retaliation to the Jordan strike that killed three troops does appear to have had some effect. Iran has reportedly instructed the militia behind the attack, Kataib Hezbollah, to stand down, and the number of overall strikes has since decreased. But it’s far from clear how long this will last. The US drone strike in 2020 that killed Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force and architect of its proxy network, was also supposed to restore “deterrence” against Iran. In fact, it may have made some of the proxy groups more aggressive and less predictable since Tehran’s direct control over them does not appear to be as strong as it once was. It’s another factor that makes deterrence less reliable — proxy forces may not operate under the same assumptions as their sponsors. +
++Ashford was skeptical of the notion that military strikes against these groups constitute “deterrence” at all, in the traditional definition, noting that the whole point of deterrence is to prevent your opponent from taking some action, not responding to them after they already have. Once you’re exchanging fire with your adversary, that adversary has, by definition, not been deterred. +
++“Either have deterrence or you don’t,” she said. “It’s either succeeding or it’s failed. Maybe you could have deterrence again in the future, but there’s no such thing as ‘restoring’ deterrence.” +
++The future of deterrence +
++The Middle East is not the only place where US deterrence has been called into question in recent days. At a rally in South Carolina last week, former President and current candidate Trump said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that failed to meet the alliance’s defense spending targets. Trump is not alone in calling for some European countries to meet those targets, but NATO isn’t like a country club where you have to pay your dues to get your service. With his comments, Trump fundamentally called into question the very mutual defense guarantee that has, so far, successfully deterred Russia from directly attacking NATO states. +
++The ability to use the threat of military force to prevent an ally from attacking not only your own territory but the territory of your allies is often called “extended deterrence,” but it only works if those allies and adversaries are certain you will live up to your commitments. That credibility is tough to maintain in today’s hyperpartisan US, where — as shown by Congress’s current inability to pass aid packages for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel — there’s little consensus on basic national security priorities or continuity between administrations. +
++“Any country that’s in a treaty relationship, or in a treaty alliance with the United States can no longer treat Washington as a somewhat predictable being,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Allies know that Biden will, as he promised, defend “every inch” of NATO territory — as President Obama and every other postwar president before would have done. But they also know now that what the US might do in the future will depend on who sits in the White House — and which party controls Congress — in 2025 and beyond. +
++In that context, it’s not surprising to hear serious discussion in countries that have highly adversarial neighbors, like South Korea or Poland, about obtaining nuclear weapons of their own. +
++Even though nuclear weapons are not a failsafe guarantee against any military action, as Iran’s recent missile strikes on the territory of nuclear-armed Pakistan demonstrate, “what nuclear weapons are good at doing is deterring existential threats or major wars,” said Panda. +
++For all that deterrence often fails, we shouldn’t overlook that since 1945, no country has used a nuclear weapon on the battlefield and only a small handful of new countries have obtained them, something that would likely have come as a surprise to leaders at the dawn of the nuclear era. But a future in which numerous countries feel so unsafe that they choose to obtain nuclear weapons is precisely the future that decades of postwar US security policy dedicated to nuclear nonproliferation sought to prevent. Averting that future is, as President John F. Kennedy said in a famous speech to the UN in 1963, “a practical matter of life or death.” +
++Whether it can still be averted may come down to whether other countries — both friends and enemies — still believe the US will make good on its word. +