This year, as NATO marks its seventieth birthday, President Trump’s actions directed at dismantling the alliance raise the crucial question of whether this policy will hasten a nightmare scenario that has shadowed humanity since nuclear weapons were first developed: proliferation.
Ever since scientists realized the possibility of harnessing nuclear energy for weapons that could end the world, scientists and statesmen have argued about their future regulation. One camp argued that international control was the answer while another believed that the peril of proliferation would bring about world peace precisely because humanity would realize their destructive capability, back off using them, and work out a new international order. Events have disproven the latter theory, while international cooperation is in shambles thanks to the American president.
Since 1945, only a small number of nations have developed atomic weapons, but the technology for doing so is well known. Furthermore, once prohibitively expensive, producing such weapons is within the reach of the poorest countries, if their governments focus on spending their limited resources on making them. The experience of North Korea—a country whose per capita GDP broke $1000 only in 2015—confirms this unpleasant reality. However, it is not the building of atomic weapons by poor nations that is likely to concern us the most in the future, but the likely increased desire of rich ones to do so, spurred on by the collateral effects of the present administration’s policies.
Since the end of World War II, countries that have the know-how and wealth to produce nuclear weapons have refrained from building them. This is because the “American umbrella,” assures (or assured) them that if they are threatened by countries possessing atomic weapons the U.S. would defend them. This policy has kept the more advanced countries, NATO allies and Japan, from developing them: they had faith in the American promise. But what will happen if the technologically advanced countries of Europe and Asia that have voluntarily depended on the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” lose faith in their sworn protector, as seems likely? They are capable of building nuclear weapons, including the means to deliver them, in a matter of months, not years.
After seventy years—thanks to Trump—events have called into question whether the NATO nations can still trust the Americans. In the 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle argued that at some point the Americans would get tired of paying to protect their allies and would not come to their aid in case of war. The answer: the Europeans needed to develop their own nuclear forces. The French built the force de frappe, and partially withdrew from NATO. De Gaulle theorized “Europe of the Fatherlands,” in which the Europeans must become capable of defending themselves, in part by having their own nuclear forces. “Europe of the Fatherlands” was contested and defeated by the Kennedy Administration, but will the current revolution in American policy make De Gaulle’s notion more attractive, especially given Europe’s evolution into the EU? Eventually the Europeans will ask the question, if they haven’t already, “Where will we be if we are without an unconditional American guarantee and threatened or blackmailed by a nuclear-armed Russia?” The same is true for Japan threatened by an otherwise militarily insignificant North Korea, while in the Middle East the Trump administration seems to be favorable to helping Saudi Arabia become nuclear capable, perhaps setting up a nuclear arms race with Iran. Not surprisingly, planning for nuclear conflict has become normal in the strategic military and foreign policy considerations of even secondary nuclear powers such as Pakistan and India.
Unfortunately, the end of trust in the U.S. as a dependable ally is unlikely to be limited to the life of the Trump administration. The issue will not be not trusting Trump, but the loss of faith in the U.S. as an ally. Having elected an “American Firster” once, what assurances are there that the Americans will not do so again even when Trump exits the scene?
From this perspective the answer to the question, “What is to be done?” seems obvious—build your own nuclear deterrent and plan for nuclear wars; this will result in a new, more dangerous, international order in which nuclear-armed nations are the new normal.