The more things change, the more they stay the same. There is a new arms race in the Indo-Pacific, including a nuclear arms race, and American academics — including Matthew Bunn of Harvard’s Kennedy School — call upon the United States to unilaterally disarm. Bunn, writing in the National Interest, invokes President John F. Kennedy’s speech at American University where, Bunn writes, “Kennedy made the case that the horrors of a potential nuclear holocaust made it urgent to find a path to peace and that doing so required both sides of the Cold War to change.”

But Bunn recommends unilateral moves by the United States to “reduce tensions,” such as the Biden administration’s pledge to refrain from conducting direct-ascent antisatellite (ASAT) weapon tests, which Bunn praises but says is not enough. Bunn also urges Biden to announce that some of our nuclear missiles will be taken off alert, commit that we will not use nuclear missiles first “unless the very survival of our country or one of our treaty allies was at stake,” pledge to never deploy nuclear missiles where they can reach Beijing or Moscow in “just a few minutes,” offer to allow China and Russia to monitor our “weapons-maintenance experiments” to ensure we are complying with a nuclear test ban, and allow “international inspection” of our “nuclear enrichment and plutonium processing activities” to ensure that we are not using them for nuclear weapons. Those steps, Bunn hopes, will lead to new arms control treaties. What Angelo Codevilla called the “arms control delusion” lives on in the faculty rooms of Harvard.

[It was ever thus. Academia demanded nuclear freezes, unilateral disarmament, and blamed the US for the Cold War. Lather, rinse, repeat, it seems. — Ed]