The coverage of every British president since Harry S Truman, who made the decision to use the A-bomb against Japan, has been to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons.
They have not always been productive. The world’s most potent weapons spread, with nine states then possessing them. But no United States president has deliberately sought their more spread, as the angry laws of Donald Trump are now set to perform.
In 2018, during his first term as president, Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal, which had safely placed restrictions on the advancement of weapons-grade elements in exchange for restrictions pleasure.
Iran has since accelerated its nuclear weapons program. Quotes now put Iran within months or even weeks of producing some weapons.
A short time after, after a series of escalating risks, Trump suggested that North Korea had agreed to reunify. Discussions ensued, but a package never materialized.
In reality, Trump failed to stop, let alone move up, North Korea’s optimistic nuclear weapons programs. North Korea is now said to possess at least 50 weapons as well as the means to deliver them.
Not longer an alliance
Under the following Trump presidency, the planet is facing a fast growing development threat of a different sort, one that is found not only among the usual suspects in Iran and North Korea, but also among a long list of US allies who previously basked in American security guarantees.
Only two months into Trump’s next term, America’s Western allies grew extremely concerned that the US was never more a reliable ally.
That’s due to his suspension ( and then reinstatement ) of weapons transfers and intelligence sharing with Ukraine; an directly prioritized reconciliation with Russia; open disparagement of NATO friends, with suggestions that the US would never come to their security in case of attack; and his lively and repeated threats to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Canada, Greenland and Panama.
Against this landscape, Trump’s guiding Project 2025 rules advocate escalating nuclear tests, breaking a long-held illegal.
When protected by the US nuclear overcoat, America’s closest friends are now threatened by it. Europe’s loss of confidence in the US is so intense that finding solutions has now become part of serious discussions in capital across the globe. France and the United Kingdom are poised to fill the void by sharing their nuclear deterrent with the likes of Germany and Poland.
The landscape in Asia
The risk of development is greatest in East Asia. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump mused that Japan and South Korea might need to develop nuclear weapons. “It’s just a matter of time, ” he said.
That time, however, is today.
While Trump has been active burning roads in Europe and North America, his supporters in East Asia — South Korea and Japan — have been watching with despair the destruction of the US-led international purchase. They have no option to relying yet on the British nuclear umbrella, except to create their unique deterrent abilities.
Surveys now show that more than two-thirds of South Koreans support their state ’s acquisition of nuclear arms independent of the US. Important figures across the political spectrum as well as a growing chorus of scientists and journalists have even boldly floated the idea of nuclearization.
To handle South Korea’s growing anxiety and test its nascent nuclear passions, the preceding Joe Biden presidency launched a diplomatic effort called Nuclear Consultative Group in 2023.
It established a regular process between the two places to discuss the state of the nuclear umbrella and do shared security tasks. This measure went a long way to quiet the voices calling for South Korean nuclearization — until Trump returned to the White House.
South Korea
Trump’s so-called America First foreign policy has given every reason for South Korea to once again question the reliability of US security guarantees. If the Trump administration is willing to throw its oldest and closest allies in the North Atlantic under the bus, there is little reason for South Koreans to place their continued faith in the US.
As important as South Korea has been to an American grand strategy, it has always been a second-tier ally and its bilateral alliance with the US was never as important as NATO or as special as the Canada-US relationship. South Korea is much more vulnerable to abandonment, and it now appears to be expendable in the second Trump administration.
Going nuclear is not a question of means for South Korea. It has one of the most advanced civilian nuclear industries in the world, with 24 reactors in operation and more than enough scientific know-how to churn out weapons in a short time, estimated at six to 12 months.
The question has always been one of political will, the absence of which has rested on American security assurances. With the Trump administration actively demolishing security guarantees to its closest allies, South Korea may conclude that the only viable path to its continued existence in the post-American world is acquiring nuclear weapons.
Japan, Taiwan
South Korea’s nuclearization likely would lead to a domino effect, triggering a new wave of nuclear proliferation across the region. If South Korea makes a dash for the bomb, Japan will have no choice but to follow suit.
Japan has a full nuclear fuel cycle, including a uranium enrichment plant, spent-fuel reprocessing facilities, nine tons of plutonium and 1. 2 tons of enriched uranium that can be easily fashioned into thousands of nuclear bombs in as little as six months.
While the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long served as a guardrail against nuclearization in Japan, that moral taboo was sustained by a credible U. S. nuclear umbrella.
And once the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, Taiwan will have every incentive to resurrect its earlier clandestine nuclear weapons program and seek its own deterrence capability.
Catastrophic dangers
While going nuclear may be individually rational for the East Asian countries, the collective outcome for the region and beyond is fraught with catastrophic risks.
The world is now grappling with the most dangerous collective action problem because the solution that has worked so well for decades — credible American security assurance — is eroding.
In upending the very international order that the US established, the Trump administration is not merely chipping away at the global security architecture underpinned by myriad American security guarantees. It’s imploding the post-Second World War security order from within and the moral, political and institutional bulwark against nuclear proliferation.
In this predatory, zero-sum world of Trumpian foreign policy, putting America First necessarily means putting everyone else last — and, along the way, inadvertently fueling nuclear proliferation.
Jamie Levin and Youngwon Cho are associate professors of political science at St. Francis Xavier University ( Nova Scotia, Canada ).
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.