A New Nuclear Order
The Trump administration has been clear-eyed about the shift from a unipolar, hegemonic American-led global order to a multipolar one in which the United States will be, though still the strongest, one of many poles. In recognition of this strategic reality, the administration has affected dramatic changes in domestic and foreign policy: its efforts at reform have encompassed world trade, military preparedness, relations with allies and adversaries, and internal governance. Untouched thus far in this raft of policy rewrites, however, has been America’s approach to great power nuclear negotiations. This is partially due to the multitude of fixed attitudes that need to be revised in any shift from one paradigm to the next; inevitably, something is changed last.
Nuclear weapons were present at the very beginning of the Cold War, and negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union shaped the entirety of the period. The specter of the superpowers hung over every treaty signed, nuclear or non-nuclear. Every potential spark—from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to random Soviet satellite glitches—could have ended in annihilation. The pattern of great power nuclear negotiations that emerged from this period was essentially repeated so often that it became entrenched, generating its own momentum: the United States and the Soviet Union (later Russia) bilaterally negotiating to reduce offensive or defensive armaments. These negotiations were occasionally accompanied by treaties restricting proliferation on a global scale, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
This pattern, which made sense amid the stark bipolarity of the Cold War, persisted long after 1989. It was carried on in bipartisan fashion by successive post–Cold War American presidential administrations desperate to hold onto the architecture (and the certainty and comfort that came with it) that had fostered decades of U.S. hegemony. But in extending this architecture, and specifically, this nuclear negotiation strategy, they made a series of mistakes that have damaged America’s national interest and put it in a weaker position entering into the era of multipolarity.
Yet multipolarity will bring chaos to the global order, rendering obsolete the rigid assumptions and relative strategic clarity of the old bipolar world. Now is the time, therefore, to alter America’s nuclear strategies, both as they relate to great power negotiations and to nonproliferation. The vastly changed circumstances of the post–Cold War world, to which American leadership is only belatedly reacting to, will require bold and somewhat out-of-the-box adaptations, ones that will be in line with the spirit of institutional reinvention embodied by President Trump.
Accordingly, in this essay, I will recommend the withdrawal of the United States from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a piece of international law which, while highly useful in the Cold War context, no longer serves the interests of the United States in the multipolar twenty-first century. I will further argue for the replacement of the NPT with a new foundational, trilateral nuclear treaty.
Read more in American Affairs.
