Ankit Panda, Vipin Narang, and Pranay Vaddi | War on the Rocks
March 10, 2025
“If Trump wants to pursue a grand strategic project with the goal of keeping ‘America First’, nuclear nonproliferation — not just by adversaries but also by allies — is an essential pillar,” writes CNSP's Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi, with co-author Ankit Panda.
It is no coincidence that Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland openly raised the possibility that his country may need to arm itself with nuclear weapons. Both major parties in South Korea are doing the same. This is a response to what is happening in Washington, where the Trump administration is renovating America’s post-World War II grand strategy, tossing aside hard-built alliances, norms on global trade, and much else. Coercive tariff threats, territorial expansionist rhetoric, and expressions of trans-national far-right political solidarity are in. Liberal values and support for what American presidents once described as a “rules-based order” are out. Trump has openly said that allies can no longer reliably count on America, or its nuclear forces, as their ultimate security guarantor. Tusk’s willingness to consider a nuclear arsenal should therefore not be surprising. Indeed, other American allies around the world are considering the same, as well as alternative nuclear-sharing agreements that once seemed fanciful. This will be the potential price of gutting American extended deterrence commitments, the most successful nonproliferation tool the United States has had for three-quarters of a century.
Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, to friend and foe alike, has been a core bipartisan pillar of American foreign policy for decades. Perhaps some Trump administration officials greeted Tusk’s announcement warmly. Indeed, it is no secret that President Donald Trump himself and some of his prominent advisors have shrugged at the prospect of nuclear proliferation, despite the president’s open discomfort with nuclear weapons and his musings about nuclear disarmament as a part of a deal with Russia and China. To be sure, proliferation to American allies might mean big savings on the peacetime costs of forward deployed troops and avoiding entanglement in crises in far-flung theaters.
However, welcoming more nuclear-armed countries, even if they are friends of the United States, threatens core American interests. Trump’s “America First” instincts rely on and relish unrestrained American power and primacy. As such, Trump may find that the longstanding American interest in nonproliferation actually serves his worldview rather than compromises it. Allies with nuclear weapons will complicate America’s ability to exercise its power. They’re more likely to chart independent, possibly oppositional political and economic policies. And perhaps counter-intuitively, they might make it more likely that the United States gets dragged into a nuclear crisis or war.
From War on the Rocks