U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent foreign-policy moves have alienated the country’s traditional allies in Europe while stirring glee in Moscow. While it’s a catastrophic development for Ukrainian security and democracy, this paradigmatic shift portends much larger risks for global security. The most pressing is the threat of rampant nuclear proliferation that the Trump administration’s actions will elicit.
While on the surface it might seem as though a warmer relationship between two of the world’s largest nuclear powers could reduce the risk of nuclear war, the opposite is true. We are on the precipice of a global turn toward nuclear instability, in which many countries will be newly incentivized to build their own arsenals, increasing the risk of nuclear use, terrorist subversion, and accidental launch. Countries like South Korea, Japan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are all so-called nuclear latent states that could potentially build nuclear weapons quickly—as are Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent foreign-policy moves have alienated the country’s traditional allies in Europe while stirring glee in Moscow. While it’s a catastrophic development for Ukrainian security and democracy, this paradigmatic shift portends much larger risks for global security. The most pressing is the threat of rampant nuclear proliferation that the Trump administration’s actions will elicit.
While on the surface it might seem as though a warmer relationship between two of the world’s largest nuclear powers could reduce the risk of nuclear war, the opposite is true. We are on the precipice of a global turn toward nuclear instability, in which many countries will be newly incentivized to build their own arsenals, increasing the risk of nuclear use, terrorist subversion, and accidental launch. Countries like South Korea, Japan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are all so-called nuclear latent states that could potentially build nuclear weapons quickly—as are Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.
For the last eight decades, the United States has served as a security guarantor to many countries in both Europe and Asia. Trump insists that Washington has received the short end of the stick from these arrangements, since it was the U.S. nuclear arsenal that served as the ultimate deterrent in defense of the United States’ allies. The massive upside of U.S. security guarantees, however, including for Americans, has been the astonishing containment of nuclear proliferation elsewhere.
Only nine countries around the world have nuclear weapons today: the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. (South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons and then signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1991.) Today, 190 countries are parties to the treaty, which went into effect in 1970. The only non-signatory states are India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan. (North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003 to pursue its nuclear weapons program.)
Many countries signed the NPT because of U.S. assurances about their security—what is commonly known as the nuclear umbrella. These countries include NATO members in Europe (such as Germany, Italy, and Belgium), along with other U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea. When Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus inherited a large number of nuclear weapons and delivery systems in the early 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, U.S. security assurances helped convince them to give up their nuclear weapons.
The confinement of this deadly technology to relatively few countries has been a massive boon to global security and allowed for much greater prosperity. Without U.S. security assurances, the world might have been far more insecure, with several additional nuclear weapons states across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Nuclear safety and inadvertent escalation concerns about the possession of nuclear weapons mean that we might even have seen potential nuclear use—deliberate or accidental—which would have had catastrophic consequences.
U.S. security guarantees, long perceived as highly credible, have been a pillar of the global nonproliferation regime that has reduced the likelihood of nuclear war and nuclear accidents, and allowed countries to devote resources to other purposes—including economic prosperity.
The credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella has now been shattered by Trump. Why would NATO allies in Europe—recent targets of intense criticism by the Trump administration—believe that the United States would stand by them in the case of a nuclear threat from Russia?
Among U.S. allies threatened by China or North Korea’s nuclear weapons, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are undoubtedly asking themselves this same question. The broader concern here is that even if just one of these European or East Asian allies decides to secure themselves by building their own nuclear weapons, there might be a domino effect leading to several more nuclear states. This would sound the death knell of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
There may be higher risks of nuclear proliferation in Asia than in Europe because both France and the U.K. have nuclear arsenals that could provide extended deterrence to NATO. Even in Europe, however, political conditions are concerning. The parties garnering the second-most popular support today in France, Germany, and Poland are all right-wing nationalists. Marine Le Pen, who could potentially become the next French president, recently said that France should not share the country’s nuclear weapons, “let alone delegate” their use to other European countries.
There have also been calls for Germany to recommit to civilian nuclear research, with the aim of developing its ability to build nuclear weapons. Poland is also considering its nuclear options. The stability of the erstwhile European security architecture that used to be upheld by the promise of U.S. nuclear assurances is now rapidly fraying and giving way to a path of nuclear proliferation on the continent.
Some scholars have argued that more nuclear weapons around the world would actually enhance security. They cite the absence of nuclear use between the United States and Soviet Union over the course of the Cold War, inferring that because the consequences of nuclear use are so dire, states are almost never willing to take that risk.
According to this reasoning, we don’t need to fear nuclear proliferation because that will not necessarily increase the risk of use. This school of thought argues further that nuclear proliferation could even reduce the incidence of conventional war since the dangers of nuclear escalation would always lurk in the background.
Unwittingly encouraging widespread nuclear proliferation is a highly reckless move, however. The introduction of nuclear programs is known to create fear, distrust, and competition—even among allies. France’s development of nuclear weapons in 1960 led to an acrimonious relationship with the United States that prompted Paris to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966. China’s development of nuclear weapons in 1964 also hastened its split from the Soviet Union in the 1960s, eventually leading to a nuclear crisis by the end of the decade.
Security dilemmas would replace alliances. The risks of accidental launch exponentially increase if more countries possess nuclear weapons. Not every state has the resources to maintain safe and secure nuclear arsenals, raising huge concerns about command, control, and vulnerability to terrorist sabotage or theft. For example, in Pakistan, terrorists have attacked a nuclear missile storage facility, a nuclear airbase, and one of the country’s main nuclear weapon assembly sites.
Although countries that perceive themselves as thoroughly ensconced within the U.S.-led security order might be the first to proliferate, they most certainly would not be the last. A range of regimes would be tempted to secure their futures with nuclear weapons, and the end result would be that everyone is significantly less secure.
It is well past time for the Trump administration to think strategically about U.S. interests, as well as of those around the world who have long benefited from the relative stability of U.S. security guarantees. If the United States continues to sow serious doubt about the credibility of its security commitments, however, regional organizations in Europe and the Indo-Pacific must step into the breach to create sustainable multilateral security frameworks. It is also important for potential proliferator states to consider that acquiring nuclear weapons may not make them any safer.
Even beyond the potential nuclear accidents and inadvertent escalation concerns, possessing nuclear weapons does not necessarily lead to a more stable or peaceful security environment. The experience of India and Pakistan demonstrates that conventional wars, military action, and sub-conventional attacks can still take place between nuclear-armed neighbors. This would be true of a nuclear Poland against Russia and a nuclear South Korea against North Korea, for example.
The Trump administration’s actions have stoked great insecurity across the globe. As a result, the world is a much more dangerous place than it was just a few weeks ago.
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