Ankit Panda, Vipin Narang, and Pranay Vaddi | War on the Rocks
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.
The Real Costs of Nonproliferation to American Power
While U.S. policy makers in the post-Cold War decades focused global nonproliferation attention on countries other than allies — notably India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran — the looming shifts in a U.S. grand strategy that may bring America home have, in recent years, put the focus on allies. Until now these allies, including South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Poland, have been able to forswear nuclear weapons because they were ultimately shielded by the American nuclear umbrella.
Early in the Cold War, following the advent of nuclear weapons, the United States did not intuitively grasp the reasons why nuclear proliferation to its friends would harm its interests. It was only in the early 1960s, after France sought a nuclear weapons capability to assert its independence from the United States and NATO’s nuclear deterrent mission, that Washington began to really introspect on the value of nonproliferation for its own interests.
The United States worked hard during the Cold War to prevent proliferation — not just by its adversaries but also its allies. A combination of security commitments, forward-positioning of U.S. conventional and nuclear weapons, and a lattice-work of dialogues, exercises, and information sharing agreements formed the heart of a U.S. strategy that “extended” deterrence to what is now more than 30 allies. Rendering this credible was a constant effort for the United States. This was especially true at the height of the Cold War and has become more pertinent recently amid growing threat perceptions in Europe and Northeast Asia alike.
This strategy, backed by a large U.S. nuclear arsenal, a flexible nuclear posture, and an explicit political commitment to extend these tools to the defense of Europe, let the allies safely focus on other ventures. European democracies focused on economic growth and trade and the well-being of their citizens, enabled by U.S. aid. In turn, these actions stimulated the U.S. economy, creating a massive long-term marketplace for U.S. producers. The commitments Washington undertook made nuclear weapons acquisition by allies and partners unnecessary, and rather than pursuing expensive, dangerous nuclear weapons programs, allies agreed to maintain a non-nuclear status and built wealth instead.
The origins of what became an enduring strategic preference for nonproliferation at the time had little to do with high-minded ideas about liberal internationalism, political solidarity with democracies, or values. It was good for American security interests. The spread of nuclear weapons, U.S. policymakers observed, would only serve to limit America’s freedom of action in the international system and endanger U.S. interests. Simply put: Nuclear proliferation to both allies and adversaries dilutes the privileges of power the United States enjoys.
From War on the Rocks