The Clint Eastwood classic “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” ends with a three-way duel. Of course, there is no way to win a “three-way duel” except to cheat. Which is all part of the plot… It also mirrors where the US finds itself.

The current national security discussion in the US seems to have become digital: you must either be an isolationist or you must want to pour all of our assets into Ukraine today, wipe out the Russian army and remove Putin from the Kremlin.

The problem with one side of the problem is that we can no longer be, strictly speaking isolationists. Between the metals we need to live in a modern world, the import of oil and chemicals, and the global food market, we can’t simply close the border. Even if we unravel the mess created by Washington in our oil, gas and energy industries and return to just 15 months ago when we were a net energy exporter, we’re still intimately involved with the rest of the world; we do have friends and allies, and we can’t simply abandon them.

At the same time, while we can want Ukraine to win, to be free and whole again, undoing 2014 and the seizing of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, we don’t need to want to see the desolation of Russia. This is true if for no other reason that we don’t want to see Russia turned into a true 3rd World Country, but one with 4,000+ nuclear weapons. Some people say we don’t need to worry, and quickly move past any concern that events could tumble out of control and result in a nuclear weapon use, but I refuse to be unconcerned about the Russian nuclear arsenal.

But is there some terrain between the two positions?

To begin, we need to be clear: American interests need to come first. There is no other way to state that, for any of a host of reasons. There is no global constitution, no global government, no global enunciation of human goals, which are in accord with the US Constitution, nor are they in any way accessible within a representative government into which we have input. And, short of some hand-waving and some feel-good generalities, there are few trans-national agreements on what exactly are the common interests of mankind. We have a hard enough time defining US interests.

Consider something as simple as clean water. We all want clean water. Who defines the standard? Under what authority? Do you want the UN showing up in your town and setting standards on drinking water and waste treatment and arresting those in non-compliance? And that’s about the most simple common interest on the planet.

Yet, we do have some well stated national interests, and we all know them:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Further, there is this: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…

Secure our rights, institute a government that works for the people, establish justice, domestic tranquility, common defense…

And we have a process that should help us reach an understanding of our national goals: we discuss them all the time in our elections. Whether they are pursued after the election is a separate issue.

But what does provide for common defense really mean? Well, more than anything else, it means we get to decide; no outside force gets to tell us what to do. That means we need to be strong enough to ensure that no one can tell us what to do. And “strong enough” since 1945 has to include nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, simply having nuclear weapons doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be destroyed. Instead, in Dr. Strangelove fashion, our nuclear arsenal guarantees only that if we’re attacked by nuclear weapons that everybody else will pay the price as well.

Now, with China in possession of a growing and quite capable nuclear arsenal we find ourselves in a potential three-way duel. But we aren’t going to get the chance to unload China’s weapons the night before. In fact, the way things stand right know, no matter who “draws first” in a nuclear exchange, everybody loses. And this doesn’t include the other nuclear arsenals and soon-to-be nuclear arsenals around the world, some of which may well be pointed at us, arsenals such as North Korea’s or Iran’s. In the not-to-distant future the three way duel could grow into a 4 or 5 way duel.

Said differently, with three large nuclear powers and more smaller nuclear powers, Mutual Assured Destruction – MAD – no longer works. We’re left with the terrifying certainty that if the nuclear genie is pulled out of the bottle it is going to be horrific.

But why can’t we knock those weapons out of the air?

When Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative the public was really unaware of how the technology to engage air craft and missiles had evolved. It has continued to evolve. By the mid 1990s we had already developed technology that would have been able to successfully intercept a large percentage of the incoming warheads of even a major nuclear attack. And the technology has improved significantly since then.

There is work to be done. Engaging hypersonic missiles and aircraft is a slightly different problem than intercepting the smaller and much faster reentry vehicles of an ICBM. But it can be done, we just need to address the problem.

But what me must do first is recognize that our national interests, and our freedom to act in our own interests, is being held hostage by simple existence of these growing nuclear arsenals and our reliance on an outdated strategic concept. We need to put MAD firmly into the history books and build a new strategy based on survival; the technology is here.

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