Under Trump, More Countries Could Get Nukes
By undermining trust among allies that they’re safe under the US nuclear umbrella, the next president could mortally wound the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Better yet, keep nukes away from everybody.
Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
As world leaders come to grips with the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House, they should weigh immediate but also second-order scenarios. The first category includes hot wars already blazing (in Ukraine and the Middle East, say) or threatening to ignite (in the Taiwan Strait or on the Korean peninsula): Will Trump douse them, as he promises, or inadvertently fan the flames?
The second category — of delayed changes whose consequences may become clear only after Trump’s presidency — is just as important. Topmost on my list is what Trump, with his “trash-talking” as much as his actual polices, will do to a tenet of American foreign policy for the past six decades: to limit, and eventually to reverse, the spread of nuclear weapons. My fear is that he’ll unwittingly undo the meager achievements of his predecessors and accelerate the descent into a dystopia of ever more leaders wielding ever more nukes, with an ever greater risk of Armageddon.