If you will permit the equivalent of a commercial break as this piece begins, let me explain why I'm about to parse in detail each candidate's actual answer to Holt's question. Amid deep dives into, and expansive punditry regarding, issues like how "fat" a former Miss Universe may have been and how high an imagined future wall on our southern border might prove to be, national security issues likely to test the judgment of a commander-in-chief have received remarkably little attention. So indulge me. This largely ignored moment in last week's presidential debate is worth examining.
With regard to the issue of "first use," every president since Harry Truman has subscribed to the same posture: the United States retains the prerogative of employing nuclear weapons to defend itself and its allies against even nonnuclear threats. In other words, as a matter of policy, the United States rejects the concept of "no first use," which would prohibit any employment of nuclear weapons except in retaliation for a nuclear attack. According to press reports, President Obama had toyed with but then rejected the idea of committing the United States to a "no first use" posture. Holt wanted to know where the two candidates aspiring to succeed Obama stood on the matter.
Cruelly, the moderator invited Trump to respond first. The look in the Republican nominee's eyes made it instantly clear that Holt could have been speaking Farsi for all he understood. A lesser candidate might then have begun with the nuclear equivalent of "What is Aleppo?"
Yet Trump being Trump, he gamely -- or naively -- charged headlong into the ambush that Holt had carefully laid, using his allotted two minutes to offer his insights into how as president he would address the nuclear conundrum that previous presidents had done so much to create. The result owed less to early Cold War thinkers-of-the-unthinkable like Herman Kahn or Albert Wohlstetter, who created the field of nuclear strategy, than to Dr. Strangelove. Make that Dr. Strangelove on meth.
Trump turned first to Russia, expressing concern that it might be gaining an edge in doomsday weaponry. "They have a much newer capability than we do," he said. "We have not been updating from the new standpoint." The American bomber fleet in particular, he added, needs modernization. Presumably referring to the recent employment of Vietnam-era bombers in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, he continued somewhat opaquely, "I looked the other night. I was seeing B-52s, they're old enough that your father, your grandfather, could be flying them. We are not -- we are not keeping up with other countries."
Trump then professed an appreciation for the awfulness of nuclear weaponry. "I would like everybody to end it, just get rid of it. But I would certainly not do first strike. I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over."
Give Trump this much: even in a field that tends to favor abstraction and obfuscating euphemisms like "fallout" or "dirty bomb," classifying Armageddon as the "nuclear alternative" represents something of a contribution.
Still, it's worth noting that, in the arcane theology of nuclear strategy, "first strike" and "first use" are anything but synonymous. "First strike" implies a one-sided, preventive war of annihilation. The logic of a first strike, such as it is, is based on the calculation that a surprise nuclear attack could inflict the "nuclear alternative" on your adversary, while sparing your own side from suffering a comparable fate. A successful first strike would be a one-punch knockout, delivered while your opponent still sits in his corner of the ring.
Yet whatever reassurance was to be found in Trump's vow never to order a first strike -- not the question Lester Holt was asking -- was immediately squandered. The Republican nominee promptly revoked his "no first strike" pledge by insisting, in a cliche' much favored in Washington, that "I can't take anything off the table."
Piling non sequitur upon non sequitur, he next turned to the threat posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea, where "we're doing nothing." Yet, worrisome as this threat might be, keeping Pyongyang in check, he added, ought to be Beijing's job. "China should solve that problem for us," he insisted. "China should go into North Korea. China is totally powerful as it relates to North Korea."
If China wouldn't help with North Korea, however, what could be more obvious than that Iran, many thousands of miles away, should do so -- and might have, if only President Obama had incorporated the necessary proviso into the Iran nuclear deal. "Iran is one of their biggest trading partners. Iran has power over North Korea." When the Obama administration "made that horrible deal with Iran, they should have included the fact that they do something with respect to North Korea." But why stop with North Korea? Iran "should have done something with respect to Yemen and all these other places," he continued, wandering into the nonnuclear world. U.S. negotiators suitably skilled in the Trumpian art of the deal, he implied, could easily have maneuvered Iran into solving such problems on Washington's behalf.
Veering further off course, Trump then took a passing swipe at Secretary of State John Kerry: "Why didn't you add other things into the deal?" Why, in "one of the great giveaways of all time," did the Obama administration fork over $400 million in cash? At which point, he promptly threw in another figure without the slightest explanation -- "It was actually $1.7 billion in cash" -- in "one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history."
Trump then wrapped up his meandering tour d'horizon by decrying the one action of the Obama administration that arguably has reduced the prospect of nuclear war, at least in the near future. "The deal with Iran will lead to nuclear problems," he stated with conviction. "All they have to do is sit back 10 years, and they don't have to do much. And they're going to end up getting nuclear." For proof, he concluded, talk to the Israelis. "I met with Bibi Netanyahu the other day," he added for no reason in particular. "Believe me, he's not a happy camper."
On this indecipherable note, his allotted time exhausted, Trump's recitation ended. In its way, it had been a Joycean performance.
Bridge Over Troubled Waters?
It was now Clinton's turn to show her stuff. If Trump had responded to Holt like a voluble golf caddy being asked to discuss the finer points of ice hockey, Hillary Clinton chose a different course: she changed the subject. She would moderate her own debate. Perhaps Trump thought Holt was in charge of the proceedings; Clinton knew better.
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