A 
report from a State Department advisory board provides useful insights into how to transition the US-Russia security relationship from one based on mutually assured destruction to one characterized by mutually assured stability, said Rose Gottemoeller, acting under secretary of state for international security matters. The report “makes for an interesting read,” she said during a Sept. 7 speech in Moscow. Building this new security arrangement is a main foreign policy goal of the Obama Administration. To achieve it, report calls for both countries to join together in their commitment to reducing the global nuclear threat. Both should also establish the “gold standard in nuclear technologies and best practices for nuclear materiel security,” it states. They must also ensure actions, such as treaty monitoring, are clear to each other and put in place assurance measures that show the value of peaceful interaction over the perceived benefits of military conflict, states the report. “Progress toward these essential components can serve as a set of measures against which to test the progress in developing this new relationship with Russia, and to assess our level of confidence to go to lower numbers of nuclear weapons,” states the August report (caution, large-sized file).
While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite…