International Order and Transatlantic Fault Lines

Frank A. Rose has spent three decades at the centre of American
nuclear and arms control policy — as Principal Deputy
Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration
and, before that, as Assistant Secretary of State for Arms
Control, Verification and Compliance.


We begin where most conversations about defence stop:
procurement. The United States designed, built and fielded the
Polaris system (submarine-based nuclear missiles) in five years.
Today, Rose argues, there is no major weapons system that could
be delivered on that timeline — not for want of engineering, but
because a system built in the late 1960s for oversight and cost
control was never built for speed.


From there the conversation widens. Why did bureaucratic overhead
keep growing through two decades of war? What did the 1993 "Last
Supper" cost the American defence industrial base, and why can
lost tooling and lost people not be bought back? Rose makes the
case for mass over exquisiteness, and for treating startups and
venture capital as a core acquisition pathway rather than a side
channel.


On world order, Rose expects historians to describe the post-1989
decades not as a new order but as a deviation from the normal — a
holiday from history. He revisits Gideon Rachman's argument about
the two 1989s, sets out why he does not accept NATO enlargement
as the root of the rupture with Moscow, and calls the 2008
Bucharest compromise on Ukraine the worst of both worlds.


And on Europe: the talent is there, the technology is there. What
is missing is the market structure to deploy it.


Further Reading: 


https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2025/08/04/technology-not-geography-will-grant-global-power-in-the-21st-century/


https://www.realcleardefense.com/2025/12/10/the_revenge_of_nuclear_deterrence_1152430.html 


https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-america-still-needs-lead-europe-frank-rose-x9une/ 


https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2025/09/how-trump-can-make-defense-reform-stick/408383/