America Needs the Western Alliance More Than the Western Alliance Needs Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump’s scaling-back of joint military exercises with South Korea is the latest impulsive and thoughtless decision in an accumulation of foreign policy insults that is leading to the U.S.’s abandonment of the world’s democratic community. These include Trump’s drastic cut in support for Ukraine in deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin and similar cutbacks in arms sales to Taiwan in deference to Communist Party Politburo Chair Xi Jinping, besides the inexplicable effort to assuage the feelings of terrorist dictator Kim Jong-un. These are coincidentally the countries with the three largest nuclear arsenals aimed at and capable of reaching the continental United States. Kim Jong-Un treated Trump like Trump treats U.S. allies when North Korea fired a barrage of ballistic missiles in response to a U.S. gesture of appeasement.

There is nothing wrong in principle with Trump’s use of impulsive bargaining, eschewing of the entrenched leftist deep state, or pursuit of industrial and energy autarky for America. An unperturbed one-third of Trump’s electorate supports his policies of isolationism plus a close alliance with Israel. For too long Americans have borne the disproportionate costs of defending the international liberal order with free-riding wealthy allies. Trump’s foreign policy has prioritized securing acquiescence to the Abraham Accords, especially with countries like Brazil and Indonesia, and targeted countries like the UK and South Korea for not supporting his poorly conceived and executed war on Iran, rather than fostering the pivot to the Pacific. Trump is unaware of how complex and fragile deterrence is, as explained in 1958 by Albert Wohlstetter.

However, the U.S. does need military alliances to block other major powers from interfering in its American sphere of influence. University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer in his Tragedy OF Great Power Politics (2001) demonstrated that regional hegemons (like the U.S.) pre-emptively deploy their military instruments into the spheres of influence of their main potential competitors on other continents to distract them from global ambitions. U.S. forces in Japan and Taiwan deflect China, Australia deflects Japan, Ukraine deflects Russia, the UK deflects Germany, India deflects China, Pakistan deflects India, Israel deflects Egypt, and Saudi Arabia deflects Iran. Imperial German investments in Latin America; Nazi German associations with Brazil; Soviet involvement in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada; arms sales to Peru; and more recent Chinese investments into the Panama Canal and South America represent failures of U.S. deflection policy. Without Soviet-backed Cuban support, there would not have been the long and costly civil wars in Central America in the 1980s. The U.S. Civil War was not fought simply to end slavery but to keep the United States from fragmenting like Europe and being abandoned to foreign encroachment and division in on itself. As U.S. President Abraham Lincoln himself said on August 22, 1862: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” Canadian and British support to the Confederacy was a warning of things to come and is the reason the U.S. twice invaded to detach Canada from the British Empire in 1776 and 1812.

The humiliation and domestic turmoil, and subsequent mass amnesia following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam in 1972, led Washington to declare a military withdrawal from its allies in the Pacific littoral of Asia. The response was swift: Krypton-85 gas, a decay isotope of the process in the manufacturing of plutonium for miniaturized nuclear warheads, was detected in South Korea, and Taiwanese interest in proliferation-related reprocessing technology rose in the mid-70s. Tokyo demanded and received U.S. support in the pursuit of its Rokkasho uranium reprocessing plant by the early 1980s. Responding to these credible signals almost immediately, U.S. President Gerald Ford recommitted the U.S. to remain engaged in Asia. In an earlier period of American policy intransigence in the late-1950s, newly independent Germany threatened to obtain nuclear weapons technology from France, and Sweden and Yugoslavia embarked on their own nuclear programs until clandestine promises of intelligence sharing and protection were offered by Washington. 

It is not simply that U.S. President Donald J. Trump is at ease interlocuting with the dictatorial leaders of Russia, Communist China, and North Korea, who may paradoxically have a greater than 33% support in their own populations. During the Cold War, endlessly hopeless efforts to engage the dictators, Bonn’s Ostpolitik with East Germany, U.S. President Richard Nixon’s détente with Moscow, and Seoul’s cyclical attempts to engage with Kim Il-sung were tolerated by Washington. The problem lies in that Trump’s administration has swaggered physical threats against allies Denmark, Canada, Mexico, and Oman and permitted Israel to bomb U.S. ally Qatar.

Trump has abandoned the liberal grand strategy of spreading wealth-promoting commerce in order to create the middle classes necessary for the creation of the liberal democracies that vote against initiating war and deter war through collective security. Trump is blind to the frantic race between nuclear proliferation and its only antidote, democratization. Nuclear weapons are not unusable, as demonstrated by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s decision to nuke Hiroshima and Kokura, and there are innumerable circumstances where desperate or simply inconvenienced decision-makers will find an opportunity to fire one off. Professor Barry Posen warned that nukes would likely first be used to chase submarines at sea, far from human habitation, but that these would eventually find coastal targets such as habited ports that support the submarines. In a war over Taiwan, the U.S. would very likely have made hunting down China’s six Jin-class ballistic missile submarines a high priority.   

The now-deceased Professor Kenneth Waltz proposed letting Iran obtain nuclear weapons on the logic that more may be better: the idea that states that obtain nuclear weapons acquire moderate foreign policies because they feel more secure with a deterrent, because the disciplined scientific process of acquiring and safeguarding nuclear weapons matures even a radical leadership, and because they suddenly come under the permanent and close scrutiny of the ruthless leaders of the great powers. The logic continues that since nuclear weapons are unusable, a world of nuclear powers would be a peaceful one. Many observers reify the nuclear taboo against the use of nuclear weapons when it is mere hesitation. Would Adolf Hitler (or Harry S. Truman) have hesitated to use nuclear weapons? Leaders of nuclear-armed countries do not share nuclear weapons precisely because they know that nuclear weapons are eminently usable: inexpensive, reliable, precise, practically unstoppable, and unprecedentedly destructive. 

The selfish logic for a policy of non-proliferation is that no country is more vulnerable and has more to lose than the U.S. in a world of multiplying nuclear-armed states. As naval historian Bernard Brodie pointed out, there is no assured defense against incoming nuclear warheads. The sensors of missile interceptors, like the Patriot or THAAD, can be blinded by the ionization of just a few high-altitude nuclear detonations, which is almost certain to accompany any nuclear attack. While individual interceptors are cheaper than intercontinental ballistic missiles or hypersonic cruise missiles, the latter two platforms can carry up to ten thermonuclear warheads, which have no theoretical upper limit to their megatonnage. While a life extension typically costs $10 million per U.S. nuclear warhead, individual warheads may cost just a few million when mass-produced, a fraction of the cost of the missiles, submarines, and bombers that carry them. The proliferation of space launch capabilities is making it possible for even developing countries to make use of FOBS (Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems) technologies to loft warheads into multiple orbits to drop onto terrestrial targets on command or by pre-programmed trajectories. It is no longer a possibility for Americans to choose to be isolationist against even medium-sized powers.

Trump’s progressive abandonment of the Western alliance means that the world’s liberal democracies are coming to the realization that they will have to defend themselves. Normally the nuclear strategists would invoke Nobel Prize-winning economist Mancur Olson’s Collective Action Theory to explain the difficulty of establishing leaderless alliances (Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos call to arms notwithstanding). A more useful theory is the Coase Theorem, by another Nobel Prize-winning economist, Ronald Coase, who argued that in the nuclear context, among independent nuclear arsenals, the more capable force possessed by a country would provide assistance to the countries with the weaker stockpile. Often it is thought that because inter-state cooperation is so difficult, only a state powerful enough to punish free-riding can achieve unity. However, the Coase theorem shows that a wealthier state can alleviate concerns of safety in a smaller arsenal by providing an affordable side payment. This was visible in U.S. President Richard Nixon’s nuclear technology assistance to Gaullist France, at a time when the two countries were publicly quarreling.

The initial problem of any nuclear breakout is avoiding a preventive attack, like that proposed by the U.S. to the USSR on China in the early 1960s, that proposed by the USSR to the U.S. in the late 1960s, or the Israeli attacks on Iraq’s Osiraq reactor in 1981 or Syria in 2007. In Europe, France’s sea-based nuclear arsenal can provide that cover. Germany is likely to form one nuclear weapons production core, closely integrated with Sweden, Italy, Belgium, Czechia, and Canada. A second independent core is likely to be Poland and a third Turkey. It is expected that these efforts would be politically coordinated within a NATO framework to exchange technologies, standardize political permission procedures, ensure high standards of secure storage, and reassure non-NATO neighbors. Greece and Spain are likely to receive warheads on loan from Germany. The UK, which with the U.S. jointly owns the corporation that manages its Trident sea-launched ballistic missiles with the U.S., is dependent for its nuclear arsenal on the U.S. and will thus not likely play a strategically significant role.  

In Asia there is a problem that there exists no non-U.S. umbrella to protect Japan, South Korea, or Australia from North Korean, Chinese, Russian, and even U.S. pressure to desist from developing nuclear arsenals. However, the redeployment of a French SSBN or nuclear warheads to Japan could enable this cover. Joint Japanese-South Korean cooperation would have a significant impact in improving mutual understanding and assuaging historical grievances. The window of vulnerability in Asia may last up to two years, after which the significant uranium deposits in Australia (28% of proven reserves) would push Asia ahead of Europe in fissile material production.

This broad democratic nuclear breakout will undoubtedly signal the end to the voluntary policy of non-proliferation. Brazil and Argentina, Taiwan, Israel and Iran, and India and Pakistan will see opportunities to enhance their own arsenals. However, the capacity to mass-produce thermonuclear weapons, as opposed to the boosted fission devices of India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea, or simple atomic warheads of South Africa, is still only resident with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the U.S., Russia, France, China, and the United Kingdom. Thermonuclear weapons have no upper limit in detonated firepower, unlike boosted fission weapons, which peak at 50 kilotons, and single-stage gun and implosion nuclear warheads, at 20 kilotons. The major powers also have the means to operate ballistic missile submarines (the five permanent UNSC members plus North Korea and India, with semi-capacities held by Israel and Pakistan) and intercontinental ballistic missiles (held by just the U.S., Russia, China, and North Korea).   

If Putin strikes Ukraine with a nuclear weapon, or Kim Jong-Un detonates a warhead on Daeyeonpyeongdo Island, or Xi Jinping fires a hypersonic missile, detected by NORAD, at a Canadian city, will Donald Trump retaliate or abandon America’s allies? This is the world Trump and his primarily isolationist political base are brazenly provoking into realization. It is a collective action problem because nuclear proliferation will produce a net loss of collective security for even those countries with the best-equipped nuclear arsenals. Trump has forgotten that the essential crisis of the post-1945 period is to spread liberal democracy, which is an antidote to poverty and war, faster than nuclear proliferation.