Nuclear nonproliferation in needed more than ever – and it’s slipping away

Robert Kaplan gives us a timely reminder of how important nuclear nonproliferation is:

A big reason why no one has dropped or fired a nuclear weapon in wartime in the 80 years since Nagasaki—a remarkable fact that almost no one would have thought possible at the time—is the fear of its consequences, aka Mutually Assured Destruction: If you blow us to smithereens, we’ll blow you to smithereens.
Yet in another sense, in the decades since, military officers and civilian strategists have tried to work around Truman’s warning—have tried to figure out how to turn the bomb into “a military weapon.” In the early days of the Nuclear Age, the top generals, like Curtis LeMay, the first head of the Strategic Air Command [the real-life version of Dr. Strangelove’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper], did so with a ruthless attitude: War was about killing people and destroying countries, so the bigger the bomb, the better. However, later on, some strategists thought about how to fight a nuclear war because they calculated doing so was the best way to deter such a war from happening. (1)

Through the 1990s, there was still a largely bipartisan understanding and assumption that nuclear arms control was a good and necessary element of national security policy.

But now, writes Ross Anderson, “The decades-long effort to keep nuclear weapons from spreading across the planet may be about to collapse.” (2)

Trump was very impressed with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during his first term. But Trump’s supposed efforts to get an nuclear nonproliferation agreement with his friend Kim – they wrote each other “love letters,” Trump said – just failed. And North Korea now has nuclear weapons. As Anderson notes, this is not something which South Korea has failed to notice:

Kim Jong Un has ruled as dictator in Pyongyang for 13 years, during which he has often threatened the South with reunification by force, and, more recently, outright annexation, just as Vladimir Putin has attempted in Ukraine. Kim is quickly expanding his nuclear arsenal. He already has dozens of warheads, and has threatened to use them not only as defensive weapons of last resort, but in a first strike that would turn Seoul into a “sea of flames.”

For decades, the threat of intense U.S. retaliation helped keep Kim’s father and grandfather from invading the South. But Kim rules at a time when Pax American looks to be winding down. Under Trump, the United States is now reported to be considering pulling troops out of South Korea, though administration officials have denied that. “The Korean people do not know if the U.S. commitment to them is real,” Heo told me. They may soon decide that to deter Kim, they need nuclear weapons of their own. [my emphasis]

The nuclear threat is not going to be maintained by Iraq War-style “wars of liberation” or by US-promoted revolutions against government controlling nuclear weapons.

And Trump in his first term just blowing off the effective arms-control agreement with Iran (JCPOA) virtually guarantees that Iran will develop nuclear weapons.

This is an issue where rational calculation and a realistic evaluation of their national interests on the part of countries like South Korea can lead to more proliferation. But the more countries that acquire nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that others will acquire them, as well. And the overall risk of nuclear war rises, even though it may be entirely practical and reasonable for South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons for the purpose of deterring North Korea, it exposes both countries to the risk of catastrophic levels of destruction that wouldn’t otherwise be the case.

But for nuclear arms control worldwide to be successful, the existing nuclear powers – particularly the US, Russia, Britain, and France will also have to consistently and permanently respect the national sovereignty of countries that agree to forego building their own nukes. At this point, the opposite has been the case for Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and now Iran.

Trump’s blowhard talk about abandoning NATO allies – and literally threatening two of them, Denmark and Canada, with military attack and annexation – also make US allies like South Korea ask questions about how reliable US support for them is in the case of a war with nuclear-armed North Korea.

One of the worst consequences of the “unipolar moment” of the United States in the post-USSR world that that it has created huge incentives for countries to accelerate the nuclear arms race. It didn’t have to be this way. After 1989, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and South Africa all agreed to dispose of their nuclear weapons. Now the proliferation train is up and running again.

Anderson also notes that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a cornerstone agreement against the spread of nuclear weapons, could fall apart:

Indeed, the entire Non-Proliferation Treaty regime could unravel altogether. When Israel, India, and Pakistan went nuclear, they were not part of the Non- Proliferation Treaty (nor are they today), but South Korea is a member in good standing and Japan is, in some sense, the treaty’s soul. If those two countries flout the agreement, it will have effectively dissolved. Jake Sullivan, the former U.S. national security adviser, told me that the risk of a global proliferation cascade wouldrise “considerably.” The initial regional cascades are easy to imagine. The American pullback in Ukraine has already made Poland and Germany a lot more interested in going nuclear. If the Iranian nuclear program survives Israel’s attacks and develops a weapon successfully, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will likely want arsenals as well. The number of countries that have nuclear arms could quickly double. [my emphasis]

And, as Eric Ross recently reminded us:

In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to two billion lives worldwide. (3)

Notes:

(1) Kaplan, Fred (2025): Eighty Years After the First Nuke Test, the World Is at a Dangerous Crossroads. Slate 07/17/2025. <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/nuclear-bomb-trinity-test-donald-trump.html> (Accessed: 17-07-2025).

(2) Anderson, Ross (2025): The New Arms Race. The Atlantic Aug 2025.

(3) Ross, Eric (2025): 80 Years After Trinity. TomDispatch 07/17/2025. <https://tomdispatch.com/80-years-after-trinity/> (Accessed: 197-07-2025).

Nonproliferation expert Joe Cirincione on the Iran nuclear program

Nonproliferation expert Joe Cirincione looks at why the Trump-Netanyahu policy on the Iranian nuclear program has been so bad and gives a lot of context on the Iranian nuclear program and its international context. (1)

As he notes on his Substack, part of the interview discusses “the unintended consequences of this 12-day war: the risk of dragging us back to the nuclear anarchy of the 1950’s, when many nations - friends and foes - sought nuclear weapons.” (2)

That retrogression has been going on since the Cheney-Bush Administration. The JCPOA was a major step back in the right direction. Trump 1.0 cancelled it, the Biden Administration couldn’t be bothered to renew it, and Trump 2.0 has brought it to this point.

And he gives a good broad review of the development of the nuclear nonproliferation program after the Second World War.

He appears in the video to misspeak in referring the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iranian nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the US, as having lasted for 25 years. Actually, it was finalized in 2015 during the second Obama Administration.

This is the speech President Kennedy gave in 1963 announcing the first nuclear arms-control treaty, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty: (3)

As he observed in that speech, “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms. Each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension.”

Notes:

(1) Iran’s Nuclear Future and Why Strikes Won’t Stop It. Secrets & Spies YouTube channel 07/09/2025. <https://youtu.be/IFJAPL9dg4A?si=uL5p7KG6QIlU0lYS> (Accessed: 2025-10-07).

(2) Cirincione, Joe (2025): Why the US-Israel Bombings Did Not Stop Iran's Nuclear Program. Substack 07/10/2025. <https://joecirincione.substack.com/p/why-the-us-israel-bombings-did-not> (Accessed: 2025-10-07).

(3) President Kennedy radio and television address on the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, July 26, 1963. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy YouTube channel 07/26/2020. <https://youtu.be/F1zoWjQ6wAI?si=8s9KdSM-2fUS9rQO> (Accessed: 2025-10-07).

Rumors of war over Ukraine

All of a sudden - or at least so it probably seems to most news consumers in the US and Europe - there's hair-raising talk in the press about a confrontation between the US/NATO and Russia over Ukraine.

BBC News provides this summary, Why tensions are rising with Russia 11/20/2021:

In the geopolitical jockeying among Russia, the US, and other powers in Europe, the rumors of war over Ukraine are happening simultaneously with the confrontation with Belarus and Poland, also along with Latvia and Lithuania, which haven't gotten as much attention as Poland in the international news.

There is a useful discussion on this between Emma Ashford and Matthew Kroenig, the latter of which is mainly taking a knee-jerk hawkish position (usually a very safe stance for people operating in the foreign policy Blob), while Ashford is notably more pragmatic: Is Russia Preparing to Invade Ukraine? Foreign Policy 11/19/2021.

Their discussion includes the key role that Russian energy business plays in this situation, which plays a key role in Russian relations with both Ukraine and Belarus, and which also gives both Russia and the EU (particularly Germany) an incentive to avoid political and especially military escalation in either place. But Putin's government also has practical reasons to see benefits in saber-rattling, as well.

Ashford notes:

... on the upside, [Belarusian President] Lukashenko is also his own worst enemy. In addition to the migration crisis [he staged on the borders to Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania], he started to suggest last week that he might cut off oil and gas shipments to Europe. This week, he announced an unplanned three-day “maintenance” stoppage on the Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian oil to Poland.

But I don’t think he’s going to get very far with this ploy. Putin’s response to this suggestion last week was to tell reporters that any move against pipelines carrying Russian energy to Europe would “risk harming ties between Moscow and Minsk [Belarus].” The Russian state depends on energy revenues — and on being a reliable supplier. If Lukashenko tries to disrupt that, I think he’ll find his support from Moscow drying up faster than the Polish oil supply. [my emphasis]

A lot of the mainstream commentary on Russia that I see doesn't give enough weight to Russia's status as a petrostate, a situation which is simultaneously a big blessing and a big curse.

Anatol Lieven of the pro-realism/pro-restraint Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote about the Ukraine issue of the moment in Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World The Nation 11/15/2021:

Since the Ukrainian revolution and the Donbas rebellion of 2014, successive Ukrainian governments have vowed to recover the Donbas — by force if necessary. Despite a ceasefire in 2015 that suspended full-scale war, probing attacks and retaliations by both sides have led to repeated clashes, as in March and April of this year. Successive US administrations have expressed strong support for the Ukrainian side and for future NATO membership (so far blocked by Germany and France), though they have stopped short of promising to defend Ukraine militarily. ...

Only the most insane of US politicians and commentators actually want to go to war with Russia in Ukraine. But as the outbreak of World War I demonstrated, leaders who do not intend to go to war may stumble into a situation in which they are unable to stop or turnback.

Do I need to add that in the era of Donald Trump, Paul Gosar, and Kyle Rittenhouse, the phrase "most insane of US politicians" is not empty hyperbole? After all, one of those three was still President this time last year, actively plotting a coup to remain in office after losing the Presidential election.

The consequences of a direct US-Russian clash in Ukraine would be catastrophic. A full-scale conventional war would have the strong potential to escalate into nuclear war and the annihilation of most of humanity. Even a limited war would cause a ruinous global economic crisis, necessitate the dispatch of huge US armed forces to Europe, and destroy for the foreseeable future any chance of serious action against climate change. China might well seize the chance to conquer Taiwan, leaving the United States to face a war with the world’s other two greatest military powers simultaneously. Finally, given the huge superiority of Russia’s armed forces over Ukraine’s, the very limited number of US forces in Europe, and the deep unwillingness of European countries to confront Russia militarily, the strong likelihood is that Russia would win a limited war in Ukraine, seizing much more Ukrainian territory and imposing a shattering humiliation on the US and the West. [my emphasis]

If the latter seems like a terrifying scenario, that's not least because the existence of nuclear arsenals in the US and Russia has the potential to make any direct military confrontation between the two powers a potential humanity-ending event. See Cuban missile crisis. And the lesser-known but probably even closer call, the Able Archer incident.

But this is also the kind of calculation that foreign policy analysts should be making, looking as realistically as possible at the threats, options, stakes, capabilities, priorities, and alternatives in a situation.

Even states that may be otherwise closely allied and sharing similar political and economic systems can't be indifferent to each other illegally seizing territory, as Russia clearly did by occupying and even annexing Crimea in 2014, which is legally part of Ukraine. Spain and the UK generally get along very well and are both members of NATO, but Spain still wants Gibraltar back. Argentina and Great Britain have generally good relations, but Argentina still claims sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands (Falkland Islands to the Brits). In both cases, the weight of international law is against Britain. But this doesn't mean that either Argentina or Spain are likely to go to war with the UK. Although Argentina made a disastrously unsuccessful attempt at it in 1982.

But Ukraine is not a member of NATO. And the US has no mutual-defense treaty with Ukraine. And it seems unlikely as a practical matter that Russia would accept NATO membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus. No less an authority than George Kennan famously warned in 1997, when the first post-Cold War NATO enlargement (outside the former East Germany) was being actively considered, "expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era." (A Fateful Error New York Times 02/05/1997)

But in 1997, Cold War triumphalism was in full bloom.

Speaking of nuclear weapons, it worth remembering that when the Soviet Union broke up, they had such weapons stationed in Ukraine. As Gerhard Wettig writes (Gorbatschow-Reformpolitik und Warschauer Pakt 1985-1991; 2021):

Die Unabhängigkeit des ukrainischen Staates schien sowohl durch das generelle Bekenntnis zur Unverletzlichkeit der Grenzen als auch speziell durch eine Garantie seines Territoriums gewährleistet, die Russland als Gegenleistung für die Übergabe der dort stationierten sowjetischen Kernwaffen zusagte.

The independence of the Ukrainian state seemed to be guaranteed both by the general commitment to the inviolability of the borders and specifically by a guarantee of its territory, which Russia promised in return for the transfer of the Soviet nuclear weapons stationed there. [my translation, my emphasis]

This is what made Russia's annexation of Crimea and the support of separatist mini-republics inside it a particular blow the nuclear nonproliferation. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the US/NATO armed intervention in Libya in 2011 sent a similar signal, since both had agreed to give up their programs to develop "weapons of mass destruction."

So why would the leaders of North Korea, India, Pakistan, or Israel agree to give up their nuclear weapons if they see that existing nuclear powers refuse to honor their pledges to respect their territorial integrity?

Climate change, "nuclear winter" version

The Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) is important because it's about nuclear arms control. And nuclear arms control and disarmament is extremely important. And urgent.

It's common to hear these days that our greatest danger is climate change. And that's true. But we also have to remember that the form of climate change that could literally make the planet uninhabitable for homo sapiens is that which would follow an all-out nuclear war, i.e., a nuclear war between the US and Russia. Because the immediate deaths from the explosion and the early effects of radiation pollution and the massive destruction of critical infrastructure aren't even the deadliest part of the effects.

It's a sign of how well the weapons industry at moving nuclear arms reduction off the top priorities of the American political agenda that the main research on "nuclear winter" effects was done in the 1980s. The Britannica Online article on it (07/20/1998) provides this summary:

The basic cause of nuclear winter, as hypothesized by researchers, would be the numerous and immense fireballs caused by exploding nuclear warheads. These fireballs would ignite huge uncontrolled fires (firestorms) over any and all cities and forests that were within range of them. Great plumes of smoke, soot, and dust would be sent aloft from these fires, lifted by their own heating to high altitudes where they could drift for weeks before dropping back or being washed out of the atmosphere onto the ground. Several hundred million tons of this smoke and soot would be shepherded by strong west-to-east winds until they would form a uniform belt of particles encircling the Northern Hemisphere from 30° to 60° latitude. These thick black clouds could block out all but a fraction of the Sun’s light for a period as long as several weeks. Surface temperatures would plunge for a few weeks as a consequence, perhaps by as much as 11° to 22° C (20° to 40° F). The conditions of semidarkness, killing frosts, and subfreezing temperatures, combined with high doses of radiation from nuclear fallout, would interrupt plant photosynthesis and could thus destroy much of the Earth’s vegetation and animal life. The extreme cold, high radiation levels, and the widespread destruction of industrial, medical, and transportation infrastructures along with food supplies and crops would trigger a massive death toll from starvation, exposure, and disease. A nuclear war could thus reduce the Earth’s human population to a fraction of its previous numbers. [my emphasis]

I'm sure there's some smirking Republican meme out there somewhere saying, "See, that would fix global warming by cooling everything off, yuck, yuck."

I guess rapidly wiping out the vast majority of the human race would really "own the libs", huh?

Just to be clear, one of the key aspects of our current climate crisis is that atmospheric temperatures are rising at rate not seen in millennia. Even smaller changes can have a great deal of impact.

The nuclear winter cooling described there would be a drastic sinking of temperatures in a few weeks time which would trigger disastrous weather events in a radically shorter time frame than what we are already seeing with intensifying hurricane strength, rising sea levels, and monster forest fires.

That's the context in which we need to see reports like this one on the still huge risks of nuclear war: Elizabeth Eaves, Why is America getting a new $100 billion nuclear weapon? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 02/08/2021.

America is building a new weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear missile the length of a bowling lane. It will be able to travel some 6,000 miles, carrying a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It will be able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot.

The US Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them.

On September 8, the Air Force gave the defense company Northrop Grumman an initial contract of $13.3 billion to begin engineering and manufacturing the missile, but that will be just a fraction of the total bill. Based on a Pentagon report cited by the Arms Control Association [...] and Bloomberg News, the government will spend roughly $100 billion to build the weapon, which will be ready to use around 2029.

Eaves also gives us this grim reminder of the calculations involved in planning and arming for nuclear war:

Deterrence is the main argument for having a nuclear arsenal at all. But America’s land-based missiles have another strategic purpose all their own. Housed in permanent silos spread across America’s high plains, they are intended to draw fire to the region in the event of a nuclear war, forcing Russia to use up a lot of atomic ammunition on a sparsely populated area. If that happened, and all three wings were destroyed, the attack would still kill more than 10 million people and turn the area into a charred wasteland, unfarmable and uninhabitable for centuries to come.

She also discusses the risks involved that the configuration of this new generation of global suicide missiles currently called the GBSD (Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent). would have to be fired off on a "launch on warning" basis, the implications of which she explains briefly. Including, "Whereas a bomber can be turned around even on approach to its target, a nuclear missile launched by mistake can’t be recalled."

Eaves' article runs to 47 printed pages, so it includes a lot of additional material on US nuclear strategy and the dangers of nuclear arms proliferation.

US foreign policy after the election

The quality of US foreign policy will continue to deteriorate and even more rapidly if Donald Trump is reelected - or otherwise remains as President for another term. I much prefer to think about how a Biden Administration might make some pragmatic improvements and repair some of the mess the current administration has made.

Either way, I've been thinking through some of the major themes under which I'm looking at both possibilities.

Nuclear nonproliferation (including nuclear arms reduction) and climate change are the two greatest threats not only to the United States but all of humanity. Those two priorities should frame the whole of US foreign policy.

As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted earlier this year (Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight 01/23/2020):

Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.

In the nuclear realm, national leaders have ended or undermined several major arms control treaties and negotiations during the last year, creating an environment conducive to a renewed nuclear arms race, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to lowered barriers to nuclear war. Political conflicts regarding nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea remain unresolved and are, if anything, worsening. US-Russia cooperation on arms control and disarmament is all but nonexistent. ...

This situation—two major threats to human civilization, amplified by sophisticated, technology-propelled propaganda—would be serious enough if leaders around the world were focused on managing the danger and reducing the risk of catastrophe. Instead, over the last two years, we have seen influential leaders denigrate and discard the most effective methods for addressing complex threats—international agreements with strong verification regimes—in favor of their own narrow interests and domestic political gain. By undermining cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, these leaders have helped to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later. [my emphasis]

NATO is an important alliance not least because it exists, and has a key institution in the world for over six decades. Whatever criticisms we want to make of its history, it was a key institution for a Europe that has not had a major war since 1945. And even if we think significant changes in the alliance may be needed, treating it like a Mob protection racket as the current President has done is clearly not a good way to handle it.

Foreign policy realists like George Kennan and Stephen Walt warned that expanding NATO after 1989 would be problematic because Russia would inevitably regard it as a military threat and act accordingly. The expansion of NATO to include Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of which were part of the former Soviet Union, was a particularly risky step. But to quote one of Trump's most infamous statements in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is what it is. A redefined NATO in the context of a larger strategic understanding with Russia would be very desirable. But incredibly difficult. Something way beyond the capability of a team of wreckers and grifters like the current administration.

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) President Richard Haass comments in Present at the Disruption: How Trump Unmade U.S. Foreign Policy (Foreign Affairs 95:5 Sept-Oct 2020) on "Trump’s reluctance to reaffirm U.S. fidelity to NATO’s Article 5, the treaty’s collective-defense provision." This is a strong sign to the NATO allies that bipartisan commitment to the NATO alliance has been at the least drastically reduced. While American pundits and Democratic consultants making campaign ads may want to pretend that the current President is some kind of bizarre aberration in an otherwise conservative and sensible Republican Party, NATO governments cannot afford to make that assumption. As Haass remarks, "Alliances are predicated on reliability and predictability, and no ally is likely to view the United States as it did before."

The reality that China is the most powerful rising world power and in future decades will have an economy significantly larger than any other country. And that means they will have a greater influence on the terms of world trade and their military clout will increase and that other countries around the world will have to make decisions about how to work with and balance against China's power. That much is not really in question, it's the way the international system works.

But the general political discussion in American politics is painfully superficial, dominated by vague ideas about trade policy and melodramatic rhetoric that sometimes sound like a rehash of primitive slogans out of the 1950s that even then were promoting a poorly-informed policy. So, for instance, we hear a lot about China's threatening moves in the South China Sea. Apparently every TV pundit knows there could be a confrontation of some kind between the US and China in the South China Sea. I doubt that many of them could say much more than that what the US interests there are. Haass notes in his essay that the Trump Administration "has been mostly passive as China has solidified its control of the South China Sea."

Vietnam is one of the countries bordering on the South China Sea. Which should be a reminder to Americans that misunderstandings, exaggerated fears, and blinding ideology on the part of American policymakers have produced bad results in that area in the past. Jacob Stakes in The Chinese Military Threat Is Real (Democracy Journal 08/14/2020) makes his case on how the US should regard the changing military power configuration in which China is now operating:

Beijing defines its sovereign territory expansively to include Taiwan, disputed islands and rocks in the East and South China seas along with the waters themselves, and land on the border with India. Therefore, even “defensive” goals seek to redraw the map, using force if necessary, with major implications for the United States and its alliance commitments, especially with Japan and the Philippines.

US Latin American policy has been chronically bad for most of the existence of the United States. In more recent times, both the Cheney-Bush and Obama Administrations followed policies that favored "business-friendly conservatives" like Maricio Macri of Argentina or (now) Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil over elected center-left governments from the Texas border to Tierra del Fuego. And it's been even worse under Trump, as the malicious but clownishly inept regime-change operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela dramatically illustrates. To put in in terms not usually encountered in Foreign Affairs, US Latin American policy should not give top priority to the narrow interests of financial buccaneers and extractive industries. A policy build on genuinely supporting democratic processes along with constructive trade relations and, where necessary, military cooperation would make a lot more sense for the country, however inconvenient it might be for some business lobbies.

American democracy, so long as we can keep it, is an important element of "soft power" that is not only of theoretical interest but also enhances American influence in very practical ways. But not every policy that the US justifies as democracy promotion is benign, much less those known as humanitarian intervention. See: the great concern professional neocon warmongers expressed for women's rights in places like Afghanistan and Iraq during the Cheney-Bush Administration.

But Ben Rhodes, a Deputy National Security Adviser for eight years during the Obama Administration, argues (The Democratic Renewal: What It Will Take to Fix U.S. Foreign Policy Foreign Affairs 95:5 Sept-Oct 2020):

A Biden victory in November would offer the temptation of seeking to restore the United States’ post–Cold War image of itself as a virtuous hegemon. But that would badly underestimate the country’s current predicament. The United States hasn’t just lost ground; the ship of state is pointed in the wrong direction, and the rest of the world has moved on. Global concerns about U.S. credibility aren’t simply tied to the calamitous presidency of Donald Trump—they’re rooted in the fact that the American people elected someone like Trump in the first place. Having seen Americans do that once, foreign leaders and publics will wonder whether the United States might do it again, particularly given the fealty of the Republican Party to Trump’s nationalist, authoritarian brand of politics.

He hopefully suggests that a Biden Administration might find ways to renew the soft-power assets of the US:

The extraordinary mobilization against structural racism and injustice offers an opportunity to renew the United States’ sense of purpose. A large part of the country’s claim to global leadership has been the evolutionary and redemptive elements of its story—the fact that the United States is a multiethnic, multicultural society that has, through constitutional democracy, chipped away at institutional racism and the lingering power of white supremacy.

War really should be the last resort in foreign policy. That's a classic part of historical Just War Theory. Every war presents complications of its own. Preventive war is already illegal in international law and for good reasons. It should not be the case for the United States to use "humanitarian intervention" as a fig leaf for reckless military interventions, like with Libya in 2011.

We need a fully functioning and professional State Department. See: Doyle McManus, Almost Half the Top Jobs in Trump’s State Department Are Still Empty The Atlantic 11/04/2018; Courtney Bublé, Watchdog Finds Serious Staffing and Leadership Problems at State Department Government Executive 01/23/2020; Diplomacy in Crisis: The Trump Administration's Decimation of the State Department (Democratic Staff Report for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) 07/28/2020.

Zombie ideas and attitudes can lurch around for a long time. Cold War triumphalism is one that the US should relegate to the past. And in many ways, that attitude has been swallowed by the events of the last 30 years. But the Republicans' current celebration of "American Exceptionalism" incorporates a version of Cold War triumphalism. But it was always a perilously superficial view of the period in which the Warsaw Pact ended, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the "state socialist" systems in them were replaced. David Singer wrote in 2000 (Triumphalism and Reality in U.S. Cold War Policies Peace Review 12:4):

[W]ith the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was awash in triumphal shouts of victory and success. But in the 10 or so years since, we have not only seen all of those dreadful chickens come home to roost, but we have also demonstrated that we still see them as indicators of national greatness. Actually, they are really signs of declining influence, global chaos, and the continuing erosion and destruction of those norms and institutions so essential to building a civilized human community. [my emphasis]

Looking back at Joe Biden's policy statement in Foreign Affairs

Joe Biden's version of the traditional Presidential candidate's Foreign Affairs article on his foreign policy views was published in their March/April 2020 issue, Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump.

It's a mostly safe statement that's pretty much standard Democratic foreign policy rhetoric of the last 30 years. Which of course is Better Than Trump.

But this is one thing that stands out, not strictly a foreign policy issue, which I take as a commitment on his part that I expect him to follow through on as President:

I will also take steps to tackle the self-dealing, conflicts of interest, dark money, and rank corruption that are serving narrow, private, or foreign agendas and undermining our democracy. That starts by fighting for a constitutional amendment to completely eliminate private dollars from federal elections. In addition, I will propose a law to strengthen prohibitions on foreign nationals or governments trying to influence U.S. federal, state, or local elections and direct a new independent agency - the Commission on Federal Ethics - to ensure vigorous and unified enforcement of this and other anticorruption laws. The lack of transparency in our campaign finance system, combined with extensive foreign money laundering, creates a significant vulnerability. We need to close the loopholes that corrupt our democracy. [my emphasis]

By "starts," I assume he means it's something he'll start pushing in a serious way at the first of his Administration. I look forward to hearing that in his Inaugural Address.

I'm being a bit sarcastic, of course, because this was not something he stressed during his campaign. It was almost certainly a line tossed in to respond to criticism that Sanders and many others - not strictly on the left - make of the current campaign finance system.

It's always important to pay attention to what Presidential candidates of the major parties say about their foreign policy. At the same time, there is a well-developed foreign policy jargon that requires some effort to interpret. So we have to look at pieces like this one as a general indication of policy preferences. And, despite our national narcissism and our country's actual enormous power, US foreign policy doesn't control the world. So to a significant extent, US foreign policy is aspirational, depending very much on the responses of other international actors. The Vietnam War and the Iraq War provide a couple of dramatic examples of those limitations.

It's hard not to notice that the two issues that are literally existential threats to the survival of humanity are only discussed in passing until near the end:

The United States must lead the world to take on the existential threat we face - climate change. If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter. I will make massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have a clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050. Equally important, because the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions, I will leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action. I will rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration and then convene a summit of the world’s major carbon emitters, rallying nations to raise their ambitions and push progress further and faster. We will lock in enforceable commitments that will reduce emissions in global shipping and aviation, and we will pursue strong measures to make sure other nations can’t undercut the United States economically as we meet our own commitments. That includes insisting that China - the world’s largest emitter of carbon - stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars’ worth of dirty fossil fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative.

On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated. From Iran to North Korea, Russia to Saudi Arabia, Trump has made the prospect of nuclear proliferation, a new nuclear arms race, and even the use of nuclear weapons more likely. As president, I will renew our commitment to arms control for a new era. The historic Iran nuclear deal that the Obama-Biden administration negotiated blocked Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Yet Trump rashly cast the deal aside, prompting Iran to restart its nuclear program and become more provocative, raising the risk of another disastrous war in the region. I’m under no illusions about the Iranian regime, which has engaged in destabilizing behavior across the Middle East, brutally cracked down on protesters at home, and unjustly detained Americans. But there is a smart way to counter the threat that Iran poses to our interests and a self-defeating way - and Trump has chosen the latter. The recent killing of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, removed a dangerous actor but also raised the prospect of an ever-escalating cycle of violence in the region, and it has prompted Tehran to jettison the nuclear limits established under the nuclear deal. Tehran must return to strict compliance with the deal. If it does so, I would rejoin the agreement and use our renewed commitment to diplomacy to work with our allies to strengthen and extend it, while more effectively pushing back against Iran’s other destabilizing activities. [my emphasis]

Nuclear arms reduction and nonproliferation are actually a more urgent threat than climate change. Because a nuclear war would inflict catastrophic destruction immediately. And it would induce massive and very rapid climate changes that would kill more people than the initial nuclear blasts. It could literally make the Earth uninhabitable for homo sapiens in a very short time frame. Nuclear proliferation is distinct from the longer-term global climate change. But the danger of nuclear war is also the single most serious aspect of the climate crisis. Eliminating fossil fuels entirely won't save humanity if there is an all-out nuclear war involving the US, Russia, and/or China. Even a "small" nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would have catastrophic and rapid global effects because of the huge clouds of particulates it would spew into the atmosphere.

I hope it doesn't take a new edition of the Cuban Missile Crisis for nuclear arms reduction and nonproliferation to g et the urgent priority they should be getting right now.

Biden on Foreign Policy (1 of 3): Nuclear arms proliferation and climate change

Joe Biden has an article on foreign policy published in the Mar/Apr Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), whose membership has long been largely been almost the definition of the US foreign policy establishment. The CFR has also been a stock bogeyman for far-right conspiracy theories, so the America First types that gravitate to Trump aren't particularly fond of them. (Fun fact: Foreign Affairs began publication in 1910 as The Journal of Race Development.)

It's a long-standing ritual for Presidential candidates to publish an article about foreign policy in this journal. Biden's is called Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump. It's a reminder of how a conservative Democratic Administration under Joe Bide can be expected to have a superior foreign policy to Trump's is pretty much all ways, or maybe literally in all. But it won't be the kind of transformative policy that is needed in many areas of US international affairs.

On the basics, we can reasonably assume that Biden would staff the State Department with competent professionals who would conduct normal diplomacy. That alone would be a significant improvement over the present. As we would expect from Biden, who is running on a Make American Boring Again program, the article is largely Democratic Party foreign policy boilerplate. But from his long career in politics and the Vice Presidency, he actually does know what the words mean. He wouldn't have to rely on FOX News blowhards for foreign policy advice.

Biden writes on nuclear arms control:

On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated. From Iran to North Korea, Russia to Saudi Arabia, Trump has made the prospect of nuclear proliferation, a new nuclear arms race, and even the use of nuclear weapons more likely. As president, I will renew our commitment to arms control for a new era. The historic Iran nuclear deal that the Obama-Biden administration negotiated blocked Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Yet Trump rashly cast the deal aside, prompting Iran to restart its nuclear program and become more provocative, raising the risk of another disastrous war in the region. I'm under no illusions about the Iranian regime, which has engaged in destabilizing behavior across the Middle East, brutally cracked down on protesters at home, and unjustly detained Americans. But there is a smart way to counter the threat that Iran poses to our interests and a self-defeating way - and Trump has chosen the latter. [my emphasis]

The danger of nuclear war is arguably the single most important issue the world faces. Climate change gets more public attention. But the damage done by climate change is more long-term. A nuclear war, even a "small" one like between India and Pakistan, would have catastrophic effects on the world: deaths directly related to the blasts, wide distribution of radiative fallout, and injecting massive dust clouds into the atmosphere. The latter could be seen as making nuclear war yet another climate change risk. The fact that the effect is known as a "nuclear winter" phenomenon shouldn't lead anyone to expect it would have a salutary impact in cooling off the planet. Such a change would be drastic and very sudden. I haven't seen a recent analysis of how a "nuclear winter" event would play out in the current state of climate change. But we can safely assume those implications would be very bad.

Biden does include this paragraph on climate change, which is okay so far as it goes, being safely reflective of the general approach of the Obama Administration:

The United States must lead the world to take on the existential threat we face-climate change. If we don't get this right, nothing else will matter. I will make massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have a clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050. Equally important, because the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions, I will leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action. I will rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration and then convene a summit of the world's major carbon emitters, rallying nations to raise their ambitions and push progress further and faster. We will lock in enforceable commitments that will reduce emissions in global shipping and aviation, and we will pursue strong measures to make sure other nations can't undercut the United States economically as we meet our own commitments. That includes insisting that China - the world's largest emitter of carbon - stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars' worth of dirty fossil fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative. [my emphasis]

It's not entirely encouraging that he winds up there framing climate change as a issue on which we need to push China around. But he does include the ritual reference in the essay to how we should "seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change, nonproliferation, and global health security." (my emphasis)

But there is every reason to believe that on climate change that a Biden Administration will be significantly better than Trump's. Trump has been accelerating in the wrong direction on both issues. These are major problems that endanger the whole world. Just the fact that Biden would listen to experts and experienced diplomats that have a realistic understand of the relevant issues would be huge progress compared to Trump.

Left assumptions in need of reformulation: Existential threats, nuclear and climatic

Back in the 2003 when I first started blogging, the notion of "counterintuitivity" was more often discussed as a position that establishment pundits used to shhow their supposed independence of mind. Actually, even by that time it mostly meant supposedly liberal pundits taking conservative positions.

But there are a couple of current tropes on the left/center-left that I find problematic. Both of them came up repeatedly at the Netroots Nation 2019 cofererence I attended in Philadelphia last week.

One is the now-common assertion that climate change is the biggest threat to humanity's future. I would call nuclear proliferation and climate change the biggest threats. Both are literal existential threats to humanity. But I do see nuclear war as still the more urgent threat.

As Max Tegmark noted a couple of years ago (Why 3,000 Scientists Think Nuclear Arsenals Make Us Less Safe Scientific America Online 05/26/2017):

Why is superpower nuclear war so risky? First of all, massive firepower: there are more than 14,000 nuclear weapons today, some of which are hundreds of times more powerful than North Korea’s and those dropped on Japan. Over 90 percent of these belong to Russia and the US, who keep thousands on hair-trigger alert, ready launch on minutes notice. A 1979 report by the US Government estimated that all-out war would kill 28-88 percent of Americans and 22-50 percent of Soviets (150-450 million people with today’s populations).

And he continues with the close link between nuclear war and climate catastrophe:

But this was before the risk of nuclear winter was discovered in the 1980’s.Researchers realized that regardless of whose cities burned, massive amounts of smoke could spread around the globe, blocking sunlight and transforming summers into winters, much like when asteroids or supervolcanoes caused mass extinctions in the past. A peer-reviewed analysis published by Robock et al (2007) showed cooling by about 20°C (36°F) in much of the core farming regions of the US, Europe, Russia and China (by 35°C in parts of Russia) for the first two summers, and about half that even a full decade later. Years of near-freezing summer temperatures would eliminate most of our food production. It is hard to predict exactly what would happen if thousands of Earth’s largest cities were reduced to rubble and global infrastructure collapsed, but whatever small fraction of all humans didn’t succumb to starvation, hypothermia or epidemics would probably need to cope with roving, armed gangs desperate for food. [my emphasis]

I haven't yet encountered it, but I'm sure there are climate-deniers out there somewhere cynically declaring that forecasts of "nuclear winter" show that them thar fancy scientists cain't make up their minds about whether the climate is heating or cooling.

Of course, outside the FOX News bubble, we know that a change of one or two degrees centigrade over decades can have huge effects on climate. The kind of radical, very rapid changes nuclear winter would bring would be dramatically faster and more severe. Even though it would result from cooling of the atmostphere rather than heating.

In this way, nuclear war is a part of the climate problem. Because the greater loss of life in an all-out nuclear exchange would result from the climate repercussions.

But that doesn't mean that nuclear risk and climate change can be completely identified with each other, either. Eliminating fossil fuel emissions won't get rid of the nuclear weapons stockpiles or solve the proliferation problem. And eliminating all nuclear weapons won't make fossil fuel emissions any less destructive. Both are urgent dangers and both deserve far more serious and responsible attention than they currently get.

The study on nuclear winter which Tegmark cites is Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 112: D13107 (July 2007).

Nuclear 2019

Ploughshares President Joe Cirincione writes about how The Biggest Nuclear Threats of 2018 Will Follow Us into the New Year DefenseOne 12/29/2018. And are on track to get worse.

He opens with this:

The New Nuclear Arms Race is the clear winner as the greatest global nuclear threat of 2018. Each of the nine nuclear-armed states is building new weapons and the United States, instead of strengthening the global nuclear safety net, is actively shredding it.

In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced five new nuclear weapons he said Russia was building in response to the U.S. decision to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. All are designed to circumvent defenses. Russia has also deployed a small number of ground-based cruise missiles whose range exceed that permitted by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that President Ronald Reagan negotiated. In October, President Donald Trump said he would pull out of this arms elimination pact, despite the objections of NATO allies.

Destruction of the INF Treaty is likely a prelude to allowing the New START treaty to die. This pact, negotiated by President Barack Obama, limits long-range strategic forces. If both go, it will be the first time since 1972 that U.S. and Russian nuclear forces have been completely unconstrained.

“The untimely death of these two agreements would add fuel to a new arms race and further undermine stability and predictability between Washington and Moscow,” warned former National Security Council senior director Jon Wolfsthal. [my emphasis]

In the narrow sense, any one country could view it in their national interest to modernize and expand their own nuclear arsenal. But that only works if all the other nuclear powers do not do so. In practice, it leads to further nuclear arms competition and increases the risks of nuclear war for all parties involved.

The prospect for a country newly acquiring nuclear weapons is somewhat different. Nuclear nonproliferation has been based on the idea that non-nuclear powers would not acquire such weapons. And, in return, the existing nuclear powers would not only show restraint but move forward with overall disarmament. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was first signed 50 years ago, in 2018.

But here, the two main nuclear powers, the US and Russia, have behaved irresponsibly. Iraq gave up their programs to develop nuclear weawpons and other "weapons of mass destruction," i.e., biological and chemical. Afterward, the US with its "coaliton of the willing" invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew the Saddam Hussein government that made those decisions and Saddam himself was captured and executed. And Iraq was thrown into a civil war and longterm instability.

Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya also agreed to give up their "WMD" programs in 2003. The Cheney-Bush Administration kept the agreement confidential until after the invasion of Iraq so they could use the announcement for propaganda purposes to claim their toughness toward Iraq intimidated other countries into backing off WMD programs. The Obama Administration in 2011 along with France and Britain intervened militarily in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi's government. Gaddafi himself was anally raped with a bayonet and murdered by a mob.

The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons stationed not only in Russia but in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. All three of the latter agreed to give up the nukes stationed there, which had become their own sovereign territory once they became institution. Mariana Budjeryn reports in Ukraine and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Wilson Center 10/15/2018:

A successor of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine acceded to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state in December 1994. This meant not only relinquishing the right to develop nuclear weapons in the future, but also physically dismantling and removing the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal that Ukraine had inherited from the Soviet Union: 1,240 nuclear warheads arming 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) including their extensive launch control infrastructure, 700 nuclear cruise missiles arming 44 strategic bombers, and nearly 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons, including artillery shells, gravity bombs, and mines.

While Ukraine lacked key elements of a fully-fledged nuclear weapons program, and Moscow retained operational control over the ICBMs in Ukrainian territory, recent research reveals that, due to the inherited defense industry and technological expertise, Ukraine had a much greater capacity to establish independent control over these weapons systems than has been previously assumed.

Ukraine’s ultimate decision to forgo nuclear weapons and join the NPT was a great boost for the nonproliferation regime ... [my emphasis]

And, of course, in 2014 Russia sent troops into Ukraine to establish two separate enclaves on Ukraineian territory, Donetsk and Luhansk, and annexed the Ukrainian territory of the Crimea in blatant violation of international law.

The lesson for all countries in the world is pretty straightforward. If you have nuclear weapons, it gives you a powerful deterrent from being invaded by powers like the US or the Soviet Union. If you give them up, neither the US nor Russia will refrain from invading your country.

This is bad, bad policy for both the US and Russia. And for the rest of the world, too.

Nuclear arms control is in the interest of the whole world. And the United States and Russia have a majority of the world's nuclear weapons. Those two countries have to work together to reduce this menace to themselves and the world. And that is the case even when they are adversaries in many other ways. It's a serious responsibility for both countries and for all political parties in both countries.