19fortyfive.com
March 15, 2025
Will Allies Embrace Nuclear Weapons after Trump’s Retreat?: It was a bad month for democracies under siege. First, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance not only dressed down Ukrainian President Volodyrmyr Zelensky in the Oval Office but also drew moral equivalence between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This would be akin to blaming South Korea for North Korea’s 1950 invasion and Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion four decades later. It also ignores ideology. Prior to invading Ukraine, Putin published an article on the Kremlin website denying not only Ukraine’s right to be an independent nation but also Ukrainians’ right to their own culture.
Ukraine was not alone. Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of Defense for Policy, has made his career arguing the United States must maintain a laser focus on China even at the expense of its involvement in Europe or the Middle East, stunned senators when he stated at his confirmation hearing that defense of Taiwan may no longer be an “essential” U.S. national interest. The Republican Party has become more the personification of April Glaspie than Ronald Reagan. Such statements by Trump, Vance, and Colby are manna to dictators and revisionists.
Trump’s willingness to authorize direct talks between the United States and Hamas, legitimizing a designated terror organization that has killed Americans, holds an American hostage, and unrepentantly calls for genocide in its foundational document represents a blow to a different democracy under siege. Trump may look at Hamas as just another group and the ceasefire as just another deal, but he is wrong. When Israel acceded to a previous lopsided hostage deal to win the release of Gilad Shalit in 2011, releasing more than 1,000 terrorists and security prisoners for a single kidnapped Israeli soldier, it sowed the seeds for the October 7, 2023 bloodshed.
After all, among the prisoners then released was Yahya Sinwar, who 12 years later would plan the largest single day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. That Hamas planned and launched its pogrom during a previous ceasefire to which it committed is an inconvenience U.S. officials ignore. As isolationism, moral equivalency, and retreat infuse both Republicans and the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, U.S. allies must recognize Washington’s commitments are now ephemeral.
It would be foolish for any U.S. ally to believe the problem was just Trump. The same Oval Office drama that saw Zelensky all but frog-marched out of the White House could easily occur with a different cast of characters: A President Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom, a Secretary of State Chris Murphy or Richard Blumenthal, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Nor is U.S. betrayal new. In 1994, Ukraine signed onto the Budapest Memorandum. The deal was simple: Ukraine would forfeit its legacy Soviet nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees. There was no dispute about Ukraine’s borders. Under terms of the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration, the successor states of the Soviet Union including both Ukraine and the Russian Federation agreed upon “each other’s territorial integrity and the inviolability of the existing borders.” Yet, when Russian forces invaded Crimea in 2014, neither the United States nor the United Kingdom, came to Ukraine’s defense. In hindsight, Ukrainian authorities must recognize that their willingness to forfeit nuclear weapons combined with the fecklessness of the commitments Washington and London made condemned tens of thousands of Ukrainians to their deaths.
Nor is Ukraine alone. For decades, successive U.S. administrations sought to dissuade nuclear proliferation among Arab states by promising that the United States would never allow the Islamic Republic of Iran to develop nuclear weapons. There was never a treaty, but senior diplomats repeated the pledge so often that Arab leaders and Israel considered it intertwined with American credibility. That trust shattered in 2009 when, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed a nuclear umbrella for America’s Arab allies should Iran develop nuclear weapons. “We want Iran to calculate what I think is a fair assessment: that if the United States extends a defense umbrella over the region… it is unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer because they won’t be able to intimidate and dominate as they apparently believe they can once they have a nuclear weapon,” she explained.
Her attempt to reassure allies did the opposite. After all, how could they trust a U.S. nuclear umbrella when for years the United States had assured them that the Pentagon would never allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons in the first place? In a crisis would Clinton or any successor simply violate U.S. commitments again? After all, would the sovereignty and independence of Bahrain or Kuwait be worth nuclear war? The same pattern was long at play in East Asia, where decades of U.S. commitment to prevent a nuclear North Korea fell by the wayside during the George W. Bush administration.
Betrayal of allies is now acceptable among both Democrats and Republic; the chief difference between the two is the degree to which presidents relish and seek to score domestic political points from that betrayal. Both that dynamic and the reality that Trump’s insistence that allies take responsibility for their own defense will likely outlast his administration means the age of counter proliferation is over. Democracies and allies need increasingly to acquire their own nuclear deterrence regardless of what the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty might say. If rogue regimes can depart the Treaty and many other nuclear states—India, Pakistan and Israel, for example—do not join, then why should Taiwan’s 24 million people or South Korea’s 51 million face invasion, repression, or annihilation for what has essentially become a monument to wishful thinking whose utility is past?
The idea that Taiwan is part of China is both historically and legally incorrect; Washington has a more credible claim to rule Taiwan than does Beijing. Taiwanese leaders would do themselves and their country a disservice if they did not recognize both that China seeks to conquer Taiwan to snuff out its democracy and that the United States will not lift a finger to stop it.
There can be no question about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s intentions. He abrogated the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration to eviscerate Hong Kong’s freedom a quarter century before its special status was set to expire. His industrial-scale imprisonment of China’s Uyghur minority could be a dry run for the mass incarceration of the Taiwanese. China’s artificial island-building in the South China Sea and its farcical claims to the “Nine-Dash Line” perhaps the greatest example of maritime imperialism since the 19th century. It treats Philippine islands and atolls as a dry run for attacks on Taiwan’s offshore islands. Beijing views the lack of pushback and meaningful deterrence as a greenlight for further aggression. This will only accelerate as China’s population declines imperiling its economy. Xi will be desperate to distract Chinese citizens from the failures of the Chinese Communist Party. One problem with a one-hundred-year marathon is the tendency for the runner to be a wheezing shell of its former self by the time it nears the finish line.
Chinese officials signal that an attack on Taiwan is on the horizon. In May 2020, Li Zuocheng, chief of the Joint Staff Department and member of the Central Military Commission, said, “We do not promise to abandon the use of force, and reserve the option to take all necessary measures, to stabilize and control the situation in the Taiwan Strait.” Senior Communist Chinese leaders have only accelerated their threats since then. Colby cited the current military imbalance along the Strait of Taiwan to justify his assessment that defending Taiwan may no longer be a U.S. interest. The U.S. intelligence community has estimated that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could come as soon as 2027. Trump’s pivot toward Moscow may accelerate that timeline.
As the People’s Republic of China continues to shred the rules-based order, and the United States becomes more reticent to defend it directly, the only alternative for countries like Taiwan is increasingly to become a nuclear weapons power. In 1968, Taiwan—then recognized at the United Nations—as signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and enjoyed International Atomic Energy Agency membership. When the United Nations shifted recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing, the People’s Republic took over Taiwan’s membership in the Treaty, in theory relieving Taiwan of its responsibilities. During the first decade after the United States flipped its recognition, Taiwan pursued a nuclear capability only to have the Reagan administration covertly sabotage them. In hindsight, this was a Reagan error on par with the retreat from Beirut after the 1983 embassy and Marine barracks bombings, an episode that inspired Usama Bin Laden to believe terrorism worked. Taiwanese leaders must do what is in their national and existential interest.
The question then becomes how Taiwan should acquire weapons. Starting from scratch might precipitate Chinese aggression, but if the Trump administration or some other power—Israel, perhaps—gifted Taiwan medium range nuclear weapons—Taiwan might end forever the threat of Chinese invasion. Certainly, China would become much less aggressive” It is one thing for Xi to covet a territory mainland China has seldom controlled over the last 500 years; it is another to possess it at the expense of Beijing or Shanghai’s existence. It may sound dangerous, but nuclear brinkmanship works when all other deterrence breaks down or, in Trump and Colby’s case, are deliberately removed.
Taiwan and post-ceasefire Ukraine may not be alone in their need for a nuclear deterrent. If South Korea is to defend its existence in an era of uncertain U.S. commitment, it too should have its own nuclear arsenal. A nuclear umbrella will not reassure for the same reason Gulf Arab states questioned Hillary Clinton’s commitment. As South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol explained, “In the past, the concept of a nuclear umbrella was preparation against the Soviet Union and China before North Korea developed nuclear weapons. What we call extended deterrence was also the U.S. telling us not to worry because it will take care of everything, but now, it’s difficult to convince our people with just that.” Japan may not be a nuclear state and, as the world’s only victim of wartime nuclear use, it has moral standing in the debate. That it quietly has assembled the capability to assemble a nuclear weapon in weeks if not days is perhaps the best barometer of the decline of deterrence.
Trump is right that the United States contributed disproportionately to security in the post-World War II-era. He can also argue this is unfair. Where men like Trump, Vance, and Colby go wrong, however, is to assume that democracies will simply march themselves to the slaughterhouse.
Deterrence works. It contributed to stability during the Cold War, though it is not fool proof: During the Berlin Crisis, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the 1983 Korean Air 007 downing, the world came closer to nuclear Armageddon than many contemporaries realized. Still, if Americans were unable to sacrifice their freedom, does the White House belief Ukrainians, Taiwanese, or Koreans will? Will the United Kingdom and France, both of which maintain their own deterrent, voluntarily disarm? Israel’s doomsday nuclear program likely contributed to President Richard Nixon’s decision to airlift conventional supplies to the Jewish state against the backdrop of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was a valuable addition to global security so long as superpowers like the United States were willing to prevent wars of conquest and annexation. As the White House abandons that responsibility, aggressors salivate, and potential victims will do what is necessary to defend themselves. The age of non-proliferation is over. If Ukraine survives the onslaught, it would be foolish not to develop an ability to vaporize Moscow. Taiwan’s survival depends on the ability to kill tens of millions of Chinese, though hopefully that ability will not translate into action. Germany ponders nuclear weapons. Poland wants nuclear weapons stationed on its territory. South Korea and Japan, Saudi Arabia, Greece, and even smaller states like Rwanda and Guyana may one day need nuclear deterrence to protect themselves from the predations of larger neighbors.
Trump says he wants peace, but his actions may usher in a dangerous new era of nuclear brinkmanship.