South Asia (Page 5)

” People don’t care what’s on Television. They merely care what else is on TV”. — Jerry Seinfeld

N S Lyons is a popular author in the “national liberal” history. His Substack, &nbsp, The Upheaval, is recommended studying, even though I agree with less than half of what he writes.

He is well-read and well-informed, he integrates info from across many regions, and he isn’t afraid to think seriously about the great issues of background in real time. Reading him does help you better understand the values of the current Right. On many issues, for as&nbsp, the risk of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, his information is one that people in the Mag world urgently need to learn.

In a recent article entitled” American Solid Gods”, Lyons identifies what in my opinion is a profound truth about our existing historical moment. He writes of the close of the” Long Twentieth Century”, a time that was defined by democracy ( social, political, and economic ), and anchored by refusal of Adolf Hitler:

I believe that what we’re seeing now really is the end of an era, an epic upholding of the world as we knew it, and that the whole import and relevance of this haven’t actually struck us already.

More precisely, I believe Donald Trump marks the premature end of the Long Twentieth Century…

Our Long Twentieth Century had a late stop, fully solidifying only in 1945, but in the 80 years since its heart has dominated our civilization’s full understanding of how the world is and if be… In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe rightly made “never again” the core of their conceptual universe. They collectively resolved that authoritarianism, war, and murder had never again be allowed to threaten society…

The anti-fascism of the twentieth century morphed into a&nbsp, great crusade…By making “never again” its ultimate priority, the ideology of the open society put a&nbsp, summum malum&nbsp, ( greatest evil ) at its core rather than any&nbsp, summum bonum&nbsp, ( highest good ). The singular figure of Hitler didn’t just lurk in the back of the 20th century mind, he dominated its subconscious, becoming a sort of secular Satan…This” second career of Adolf Hitler”, as&nbsp, Renaud Camus&nbsp, jokingly calls it, provided the parareligious&nbsp, raison d’etre&nbsp, for the open society consensus and the whole post-war liberal order: to prevent the resurrection of the undead&nbsp, Führer…

The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind.

Like all good essays, this overstates its case. The American-led liberalism of the postwar order was not a purely defensive project. The UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were not motivated by fear of Hitler’s return, but by a desire to expand the boundaries of human freedom and dignity beyond anything seen in the prewar period. Ronald Reagan didn’t need Hitler as a bogeyman to&nbsp, proselytize his vision of American freedoms&nbsp, as a universal ideal.

And yet there is an important sense in which Lyons is right. The spectacular horrors and the spectacular failure of Hitler’s regime provided a moral anchor that liberals could always use to argue for greater liberalism. Advocates of the Civil Rights Act and other liberalizing laws in the US and Europe often used Nazi Germany as a rhetorical foil.

Anticommunism provided the Right with an alternative Satan for a while, but it never quite had the same power, because America had been Stalin’s ally in World War 2, after the Soviet Union fell, anticommunism was quickly forgotten, but Hitler and the Nazis were not.

Lyons is right that the Trump Era marks the end of Hitler as the&nbsp, summum malum&nbsp, of Western culture— at least in the United States. &nbsp, Joe Rogan&nbsp, and&nbsp, Tucker Carlson, the two most popular media figures on the American Right, have invited Darryl Cooper — a revisionist historian who&nbsp, downplays Nazi atrocities&nbsp, and views Winston Churchill as the true villain of World War 2— to speak on their shows. Here is one of Cooper’s ( since deleted ) tweets, just to give you an idea:

This tweet, I think, is illustrative of the thinking on the American right. It would be wrong to say that the Trump movement, or modern National Conservatism, represents a wholehearted endorsement of Nazism. But it should be uncontroversial to say that the American Right views wokeness as a greater threat than the potential return of Hitler.

Why has the legend of Hitler lost its terror? There are several reasons. The generation that fought and defeated the Nazis has largely passed away, meaning that for most Americans, Hitler only exists as a character in movies and books, as with Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, the fear of a mass murderer fades as the centuries pass.

The Palestine movement has effectively removed Jews from the Left’s list of protected minority groups whose rights might be defended with riots. Social media has led to the overuse of the Nazi label, leading to the popular phrase” Everyone I don’t like is Hitler”.

Lyons is far more sanguine about this shift than I am. Personally, I think it was a&nbsp, good&nbsp, idea to vilify Hitler. As a general moral principle, “don’t be Hitler” honestly seems pretty solid. And even if your only concern is the might of Western civilization, a man whose ideologically-motivated military campaigns led to the end of European global empires1, slaughtered over 20 million Slavs, ended Germany’s status as a great power, and cemented Soviet rule over half of Europe seems like he&nbsp, should &nbsp, probably serve as an example to avoid.

But Lyons believes that the end of anti-Nazism as the West’s guiding principle will pave the way for the return of morality, community, rootedness, faith, and civilizational pride — the kind of things conservatives like:

Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the” closed society”. Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs” strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies”.

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism …

Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.

I’m not quite so sure about Lyons ‘ reading of history here. After all, as Robert Putnam chronicled in his book&nbsp,” The Upswing“, the postwar decades in America saw the greatest surge in church attendance, civic participation, family formation, and social solidarity since the early days of the Republic. Here’s church attendance, which surged after World War 2 and remained high for people over 40 until the 2010s:

And here’s Putnam’s index of social solidarity, which combines measures of civic and religious participation and family formation:

The New Deal and the postwar period even saw a huge upswing in the use of the word “we” instead of the word” I” in American books:

The” strong gods” were never stronger than they were among the generation of Americans who grew up listening to FDR preach liberalism on the radio and who went on to crush Adolf Hitler into the dust. Nor is it difficult to draw a causal line between the unifying struggle of the Second World War and the great American unity that followed.

The Greatest Generation believed with all their hearts that Hitler was Satan on Earth. But they did&nbsp, not&nbsp, believe that family, community and tradition were little Hitlers that needed to be crushed in order to uphold the open society.

Indeed, their society was both open&nbsp, and&nbsp, deeply rooted. My grandparents knew the names and the life stories of every one of their neighbors until the day they died, how many “national conservative” intellectuals and diehard Trump fans can say the same?

But in any case, the” strong gods” did eventually wane in America. Lyons believes that Trump is bringing them back:

Mary Harrington recently&nbsp, observed&nbsp, that the Trumpian revolution seems as much archetypal as political, noting that the generally “exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his ‘ warband’ of young tech-bros” in dismantling the entrenched bureaucracy is a reflection of what can be “understood archetypally as]their ] doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such”. This masculine-inflected spirit of thumotic vitalism was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back…

Today’s populism is…a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed&nbsp, action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth …

This is what Trump, in all his brashness, represents: the strong gods have escaped from exile and returned to America…Trump himself is a man of action, not rumination… He is…an embodiment of the whole rebellious new&nbsp, world spirit&nbsp, that’s now overturning the old order…The very boldness of]Trump’s ] action reflects more than just partisan political gamesmanship – in itself it represents the stasis of the old paradigm being upended, now “you can just do things” again.

The word” thumotic” here refers to Harvey Mansfield’s use of the Greek word” thumos” to mean a sort of political passion and drive. Francis Fukuyama spelled it” thymos”, and even&nbsp, predicted in 1992 &nbsp, that Donald Trump might be the perfect embodiment of Americans ‘ thymotic urge to tear down the liberal establishment.

Lyons thus sees Trumpism as a sort of&nbsp,” Fight Club”-style reassertion of wild, unapologetic, masculine drive — only instead of directing it toward anarchism like Tyler Durden, Lyons sees Trump and Musk indulging their manly passion in the dismantling of the civil service.

But Lyons never explains exactly how this destructive impulse will bring back the return of the” strong gods” he yearns for. He sees the civil service and other American postwar institutions as&nbsp, obstacles&nbsp, to the revitalization of rootedness, family, community, and faith, but he doesn’t really look beyond the smashing of those supposed obstacles toward the actual rebuilding. He just sort of assumes it will happen, or that it’s a problem for another day.

I believe he’s headed for disappointment. Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood Trump associations or Trump business clubs.

Nor are Trump supporters flocking to traditional religion, Christianity has &nbsp, stopped declining&nbsp, since the pandemic, but both Christian affiliation and church attendance remain&nbsp, well below&nbsp, their levels at the turn of the century. Republicans still&nbsp, have more children&nbsp, than Democrats, but&nbsp, births in red states have fallen&nbsp, too.

In Trump’s first term, the attempts at organized civic participation on the Right were almost laughably paltry. A few hundred Proud Boys got together and went to brawl with antifa in the streets of Berkeley and Portland.

There were a handful of smallish right-wing anti-lockdown protests in 2020. About 2, 000 people rioted on January 6th — mostly people&nbsp, in their 40s and 50s. And none of these ever crystallized into long-term grassroots organizations of the type that were the norm in the 1950s.

For a very few people, the first Trump term was a live-action role-playing game, for everyone else, it was a YouTube channel.

And in Trump’s second term so far? Nothing. Even&nbsp, the rally numbers are way down. National conservatives who might have gone out to meet each other in 2017 are hunkering at home alone in their living rooms, swiping back and forth between X and OnlyFans and DraftKings, pumping their fists in the air as they read about how Elon Musk and his band of computer nerds are firing people or Trump is cutting off aid to Ukraine.

” You can just do things”, except almost zero of Trump’s supporters are actually doing anything except passively cheering for their notional team. Unless you’re one of the tiny group of nerds helping Elon Musk dismantle the bureaucracy, the thumos is all secondhand.

The MAGA movement, you see, is an&nbsp, internet thing. It’s another&nbsp, vertical online community&nbsp, — a bunch of deracinated, atomized individuals, thinly connected across vast distances by the notional bonds of ideology and identity. There is nothing in it of family, community, or rootedness to a place. It’s a digital consumption good. It’s a subreddit. It is a&nbsp, fandom.

N S Lyons and the national conservatives have entirely misapprehended the cause of America’s abandonment of rootedness, community, family and faith. We didn’t abandon those” strong gods” because liberals went too hard on old Adolf. We abandoned them because of&nbsp, technology.

The 1920s saw the beginning of mass affluence in America, along with the creation of technologies that gave individual human beings unprecedented autonomy and control over their physical location and their information diet.

Car ownership allowed Americans to go anywhere, any time, freeing them from their ties to a specific place. Telephone ownership let people communicate over vast distances. Television and radio exposed them to new ideas and cultures, and the internet exposed them to even more.

Then came social media and the smartphone. Suddenly,” society” didn’t mean the people in the physical space around you — your neighbors, coworkers, workout buddies, etc. First and foremost,” society” became a collection of avatars writing text to you on a little glass screen in your pocket. Your phone was where you met and conversed with friends and lovers, where you argued about politics and ideas. People’s roots changed from physical space to digital space.

There is a slowly building mountain of evidence connecting phone-enabled social media to&nbsp, feelings of isolation and alienation, to&nbsp, solitude and loneliness, to&nbsp, declining religiosity, to reduced family formation and&nbsp, lower birth rates.

American society became somewhat disconnected by the introduction of the 20th century technologies of the car, the telephone, the TV, and the internet, but it managed to partially resist and preserve some remnant of rootedness.

But phone-enabled social media broke through those last walls of resistance and turned us into free particles floating in a disembodied space of memes and identities and distractions. The strong gods turned out to be weaker than the new gods made of silicon.

The people who did this were more or less the same people N S Lyons is now cheering on. It wasn’t Elon Musk himself, of course, he just made cars and rockets. But it was Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, Zhang Yiming and a bunch of other entrepreneurs who followed their thumos toward vast riches by building the virtual world that has become our truest home.

I am not saying they were evil to do this. Technology has a way of progressing, especially in advanced societies, if it&nbsp, can&nbsp, be done, it probably&nbsp, will&nbsp, be done. And no one could have known about the downsides ahead of time. But it is a bit ironic that the class of people whom N S Lyons now believes will usher in a new age of rootedness and community is the exact same class of people who destroyed the old one.

But anyway, yes, this thing will fail, because nothing is being built. Yes, every ideological movement assures us that after the old order is completely torn down, a utopia will arise in its place. Somehow the utopia never seems to arrive. Instead, the supposedly temporary period of pain and sacrifice stretches on longer and longer, and the ideologues running the show become ever more zealous about blaming their enemies and rooting out the enemies of the revolution.

At some point it becomes clear that the promises of utopia were just an excuse for the rooting out of enemies — thumos as an end in and of itself.

Already, Trump’s Treasury Secretary is telling us that the economic pain Trump is causing is&nbsp, just a “de-tox period”, Trump is&nbsp, blaming “globalists” &nbsp, for the fall in the stock market, and Trump’s Justice Department is&nbsp, blaming egg prices&nbsp, on hoarders and speculators. If you don’t recognize this plot line, you must not read much news or much history.

Smashing the old order does not, in itself, create anything at all. The Visigoths and the Vandals built nothing on top of the ruins of Rome. They indulged their thumos and scampered away to feast for a while on the wealth they looted, and then they disappeared into myth and memory.

Over the past decade and a half I’ve watched in dismay as the real-world communities and families I knew in my youth got ripped up and replaced with a collection of imaginary online identity movements. I’m still waiting for someone to figure out how to put society back together again — how to do what FDR and the Greatest Generation did a century ago. Looking at the Trump movement, I’m pretty sure this isn’t it.

Notes:

1 The fact that Hitler effectively brought down the British Empire explains his&nbsp, strangely enduring popularity&nbsp, in parts of South Asia.

This&nbsp, article was first published on Noah Smith’s Noahpinion&nbsp, Substack under a different headline and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion&nbsp, subscriber&nbsp, here.

Continue Reading

According to official readouts and media reports, Iran’s Chabahar Port appeared to be off the two leaders ‘ broad agenda when Indian Prime Minister Narendra met with US President Donald Trump at the White House.

While Modi and Trump agreed to de facto restore diplomatic relations, including India’s pledge to develop broad trade links and buy more American goods, including weapons, oil, and gas, India’s continued involvement in Chabahar has the ability to turn into a major sticking point. &nbsp, &nbsp,

The interface, which India is developing and running under a 10-year deal signed in 2024, is crucial to New Delhi’s effort to bypass Pakistan’s foe Gwadar interface and open trade with Central Asia and the Middle East.

China has made significant investments in Gwadar and continues to do so in the name of trade protection, giving Beijing a foothold in the Indian Ocean area, where India has long enjoyed corporate influence.

In the run-up to Modi’s journey to Washington, in a surprise walk, Trump issued an executive order on February 6 instructing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “rescind or change restrictions discounts” on Chabahar.

The order obviously aims to begin Trump’s past administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign on the Islamic Republic but will also push India’s vital strategic interests.

India’s efforts to expand its influence in Central Asia are at the heart of Chabahar, which is situated in southeast Iran, by avoiding Pakistan’s standard land-trapping and facilitating communication to Afghanistan and above.

The Port &amp, Maritime Organization of Iran and Indian Ports Global Limited ( IPGL ) signed a deal last year in Chabhar, under which IPGL agreed to invest about US$ 120 million. An additional$ 250 million in financing will bring the contract’s total value to$ 370 million, the two sides said last year.

According to an American government official who was quoted by Reuters, IPGL initially took over the port’s operations in 2018 and has since handled container traffic exceeding 90 000 Posting and large and general cargo exceeding 8.4 million tonnes.

A railroad and free trade zones are also included in the large project, which includes India having already invested billions of dollars and plenty of political capital.

The port is more than just a financial lifeline for India: it is a strategic asset that balances China’s growing influence in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East with strengthening economic ties to a historically volatile neighboring region.

The inclusion of India in the International North-South Transport Corridor, which promotes trade between India, Iran, Russia, and other countries, reinforced its strategic significance for New Delhi. &nbsp,

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. However, the first Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018 and reimposed severe sanctions, though some were waived for Chabahar projects because of the port’s prior contribution to facilitating Afghanistan’s reconstruction while it was de facto under NATO control.

The waiver made it possible for India to carry on its port investments without incurring sanctions. Trump’s decision to modify or revoke these waivers, however, poses a risk to undermine both India’s strategic position in the region and the dynamics of the Quad security partnership.

The Quad, which includes Australia, Japan, India, and the US, was established to counterbalance China’s ascendancy in the Indo-Pacific, but has been rendered ineffective by India’s neutrality regarding the Ukraine conflict and its crucial role in helping Russia dodge Western sanctions on its energy exports.

Significantly, at a time when Trump is disengaging the US from various multilateral commitments, bodies and fora, Rubio met with Quad counterparts during the president’s first day in office and reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to the format and its goals. In this way, they suggested that India hold a new Quad summit this year. &nbsp,

On one level, the sanctions waiver move is a clear reaffirmation of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. It comes as Iran is rumored to have plotted to murder Trump, who has already voiced strong support for Israel, its archrival. Iran is being isolated and forced to engage in new negotiations on its nuclear program by the punitive sanctions policy.

The immediate goal may be that, but the wider effects of terminating the waivers could conflict with US strategic objectives in the area.

India’s reaction to the waiver decision, so far muted and not mentioned during Modi’s February 13 press conference with Trump in Washington, is still a wildcard. That may be because Modi’s emissaries are negotiating the waivers for its specific investments and activities in Chabahar from the inside out.

If those negotiations fail, New Delhi will likely react to what it perceives as unwarranted US interference in a crucial and important regional strategy.

India has long given its non-aligned autonomy precedence in its foreign policy, and New Delhi has placed a high value on the development of the port, particularly in light of its regional security concerns, such as those posed by Pakistan’s conflict, and China’s great power struggle.

Indeed, India might have to reevaluate its options as a result of the revocation of sanctions waivers. India might have to reconsider its long-term commitment to a project in which it has made a sizable investment, both diplomatically and financially, if the waivers are completely revoked without modification or compromise.

In turn, this could reduce India’s standing in the Central Asian region and undermine its ongoing cooperation with the US in light of its wider Indo-Pacific strategies, including balancing and checking China’s expansionist designs.

The Quad might be impacted by the waivers being revoked, too. By protecting trade routes and encouraging rules-based stability in the region, one of the Quad’s main goals is to create a free and open Indo-Pacific.

India’s strategic position in the Indian Ocean region, where the Chabahar Port is crucial, helps ensure India’s security and trade access in Central Asia, is underlined by its strategic positioning in that region.

By nipping India’s Chabahar ambitions, Trump risks torpedoing the Quad. The US may argue that reaffirming Iran’s sanctions policy is necessary to restrain its ability to exert power across the region, but the long-term cost of weakening India’s strategic position may outweigh any advantages in the short run.

The Quad’s success relies on maintaining a unified front against China’s growing assertiveness, and any discord within the partnership, especially between the US and India, would shake its cohesion at a crucial juncture. &nbsp,

Many in New Delhi believe that China will ultimately benefit from Trump’s de facto support of India’s role in Iran, Central Asia, and the Middle East as a whole.

Additionally, it will give Pakistan’s Gwadar port, which has been inactive for a while and where China has invested comparative amounts of billions, a comparative boost. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor ( CPEC ), part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is a key counterpoint to India’s initiatives in the region.

Trump’s decision to impose a ban on Chabahar thus runs the risk of erupting a string of cascading events that could ultimately reset the region’s balance of power to China’s and India’s favor.

A weaker Quad and strained US-Indian relations will be the immediate results of undermining India’s strategic interests. At a time when the US is supposedly pivoting from Europe to Asia in order to challenge China’s influence, the long-term outcome will be a more powerful, not less, China in Central and South Asia.

Trump’s decision to punish Iran has also negatively impacted a key partner in India, potentially putting the future cohesion his administration will ultimately need to effectively check and balance China across the wider Indo-Pacific and beyond.

The University of AJK is enrolling Haris Gul in an international relations program. He may be reached at [email protected].

Continue Reading

In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and Russia to respect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty.

In 2022, Russia violated that agreement, launching an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’s borders, claiming pieces of its territory. In 2025, US President Donald Trump held talks with Russian leaders, falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war, and reportedly offered a “peace deal” that would endorse Russian conquests of Ukrainian territory.

Contrast this with the experience of North Korea. In 2006, the country tested its first nuclear weapon and is now reckoned to have about 50. Despite being impoverished and surrounded by hostile powers and questionable allies, North Korea has never been seriously threatened with war in the years since it went nuclear. Indeed, during his first term, Trump went out of his way to accommodate and befriend North Korea’s leader.

The moral of these stories and others1 is painfully, uncomfortably clear. The modern world is a place where nuclear-armed great powers, led by authoritarian leaders, often feel the impulse to bully smaller nations.

If those smaller nations lack nuclear weapons, they lie prostrate and vulnerable at the feet of the bullies. But if they have nukes, they are much harder to push around. This doesn’t mean they’re impervious to attack — Israel has been struck by Iran and its proxies — but having nukes dramatically improves a small country’s security.

There are at least three smallish nations for whom this lesson is especially urgent right now. In Europe, Poland is menaced by Russia, which seeks to dominate Poland as it did under the Tsarist Empire and again under the USSR.

Trump is frantically appeasing and trying to befriend Russia, and the West European nations are not yet willing to fill the gap. If Ukraine falls, Poland will be next on Russia’s menu — and Russia will have plenty of newly conscripted Ukrainian troops to throw as cannon fodder against Poland.

In Asia, meanwhile, Japan and South Korea confront a bully far more powerful than Russia. China is the world’s manufacturing superpower, with industrial capacity far exceeding the US and all its Asian allies combined; even if Trump’s America decides it wants to defend Asia against a Chinese takeover, it’s not clear it has the ability to do so.

And as Palmer Luckey eloquently pointed out in a recent interview, there’s every indication that China wouldn’t be satisfied with the conquest of Taiwan — it’s building a case to claim Japan’s island of Okinawa, and might support a North Korean takeover of South Korea in order to turn the whole peninsula into a Chinese satellite state.

Poland, Japan, and South Korea need something to replace the failing deterrence of their alliances with the U.S. Almost exactly one year ago, I made the case that that “something” is nuclear weapons of their own. I usually wait at least two years to “rerun” a post of mine, but in this case the situation seems rather urgent and the message is painfully timely.

I don’t like nuclear proliferation any more than you do, but in the new terrifying world of authoritarianism and great power conquests, it’s probably inevitable; best to do it in a way that preserves as much as possible of the stability and freedom that Europe and Asia have rightfully come to treasure.

Anyway, here’s my post from last year:

---

I am, to put it mildly, very unhappy about the need to write this post. I’ve been putting it off for a long time. And yet I’m going to write it, because it’s true, and someone needs to say it, and warning people about unpleasant geopolitical realities has kind of become one of my roles as a blogger over the past year.

I wrote about how the US isn’t psychologically or economically prepared for war with China, about the US’ withered defense-industrial base, and about the vulnerability of world commerce to area-denial strategies. But today it’s time for me to write about the scariest of these topics — the need for controlled nuclear proliferation. Japan and South Korea, and possibly also Poland, need to create their own nuclear deterrents.

For my entire life, it’s been an article of faith among most of the people I know that nuclear proliferation is a bad thing. And that makes sense because nuclear weapons are truly terrifying weapons. The US and USSR had many close calls during the first Cold War; if even one of those had resulted in a nuclear exchange, much of human civilization would have been laid waste.

The more pairs of countries are staring each other down with nukes, the greater the chance that one of those pairs will have a false alarm or accidental launch. That simple math should make us terrified of nuclear proliferation.

Furthermore, from 1990 through 2010, nuclear disarmament made the world a lot safer. U.S. and Soviet/Russian nuclear stockpiles dwindled from over 60,000 between them to fewer than 10,000:

And fewer than 4,000 of those are actually deployed; most are kept in reserves or have already been retired.

So why on Earth would we turn our back on a successful strategy of disarmament and actually recommend that more countries build their own nukes? Isn’t that pure stark raving world-destroying insanity?

Well, no, for several reasons. First, I’m not recommending that countries go back to keeping tens of thousands of nukes on hair-trigger alert like the US and USSR did; instead I’m recommending that a couple of countries develop modest nuclear deterrents along the lines of France’s, the UK’s, or India’s.

Second, countries outside of the U.S. alliance system have been engaging in nuclear proliferation for half a century now, so to simply do nothing in the face of that strategy will not stop nuclear proliferation from occurring; it will simply make it one-sided.

Third, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s threat to invade Taiwan signals a new expansionism on the part of the totalitarian great powers, which will be difficult to deter conventionally. Fourth, internal political divisions mean that Japan, South Korea, and Poland can’t rely on the US nuclear umbrella like they used to.

Fifth, evidence from South Asia suggests that modest nuclear deterrents can act as a stabilizing force at the regional as well as the global level. And finally, breaking the one-sided taboo on nuclear proliferation will probably make it easier to set up an effective new global nonproliferation regime.

In other words, Japan and South Korea getting nukes is not a good thing, but it’s probably the least bad option available at this unhappy juncture.

Nuclear proliferation is already happening

The original five nuclear powers, as defined in the nonproliferation regime set up in the 1960s, were the US, the USSR, China, the UK, and France. These were also the countries with permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and they were the victors of World War 2. So the original list of approved nuclear powers made sense as an extension of the postwar global order.

Those states generally tried to keep nuclear weapons to themselves, but not always. It’s an open secret that China helped Pakistan build nuclear weapons:

In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Urumqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, according to accounts written by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and provided to The Washington Post.

The uranium transfer in five stainless-steel boxes was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power, according to the accounts by Khan…

According to Khan, the uranium cargo came with a blueprint for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself kit that significantly speeded Pakistan’s bomb effort. The transfer also started a chain of proliferation: U.S. officials worry that Khan later shared related Chinese design information with Iran; in 2003, Libya confirmed obtaining it from Khan’s clandestine network.

France, meanwhile, helped Israel build a nuclear reactor to produce material for nuclear bombs.

Pakistan, once it had nukes, had few reservations about proliferating them. It helped Iran, which doesn’t quite have nukes yet, but is close. And it did succeed in helping North Korea to go nuclear.

Meanwhile, although China isn’t exactly happy that North Korea has nukes, it has steadfastly refused American entreaties to take strong action to force North Korea to denuclearize.

Chinese aid kept the North Korean economy and military afloat in the face of US sanctions, allowing it to build up its nuclear arsenal and its missile capabilities. And China has never showed much interest in helping to curb Iran’s nuclear program, buying a large amount of Iranian oil and enabling the Iranian economy to stay afloat in the face of US sanctions.

So nuclear proliferation is happening, and it’s mostly being done by China and its allies. Increasingly, this means that U.S. allies are facing nuclear-capable enemies without nukes of their own. India has nukes to balance Pakistan’s, and Israel has nukes to balance any future Iranian arsenal. But three key US allies are in a very perilous situation right now: Japan, South Korea, and Poland.

The US nuclear umbrella is no longer reliable

Japan, South Korea, and Poland have been staring down the teeth of nuclear-armed China, North Korea, and Russia for decades now.

But in the past, they could always rely on the US nuclear umbrella to protect them from those enemies. The US nuclear umbrella is an explicit or tacit agreement with an ally. The US promises that if someone nukes that ally, the US will use its own nuclear weapons in retaliation. In exchange, the ally agrees not to develop nuclear weapons of its own.

In the 1990s or the 2000s, the US side of that bargain was a credible promise. But under Donald Trump, the solidity of the nuclear umbrella was called into question. During his presidency, Trump demanded that South Korea and Japan pay the US to provide them with nuclear protection, implying that the nuclear umbrella was conditional.

Trump has consistently shown hostility toward NATO, threatening to withdraw from the alliance, and recently declaring that if he won the presidency again, he would encourage Russia to conquer any US allies that didn’t spend enough on their militaries.

Meanwhile, US politics has now developed a “MAGA” faction — loyal to Trump, but not dependent on Trump — that is openly friendly to Russia and hostile to NATO. House Speaker Mike Johnson has blocked aid to Ukraine, resulting in the momentum of the war shifting to Russia. A pro-Russia online media ecosystem, including Tucker Carlson and others, has gained influence on the Right.

In this situation, allies should not be confident that America would come to their defense with nuclear weapons if they were attacked. If a Democrat is President, the nuclear umbrella is probably still in place (barring Congressional stonewalling), but a Democrat will not always be President.

If Trump is rejected in 2024, a Republican will still probably win in 2028 or 2032, and that Republican will have to at least placate the “MAGA” wing that wants to support Russia and withdraw from NATO.

In other words, the US’s domestic political divisions mean that it’s no longer a reliable nuclear protector. It might still come to the aid of Japan or South Korea or Poland with nukes, but betting the continued existence of your country on what America might do is an incredibly risky strategy.

Attack of the Slow Empires

America’s descent into unreliability comes at the most perilous possible time for Japan, South Korea, and Poland. China and Russia are on the march, led by personalistic totalitarian dictators and emboldened by both US weakness and by China’s manufacturing dominance.

Russia has, of course, invaded Ukraine. But there’s no indication that swallowing it would satisfy Putin’s appetite. Estonia and Moldova are probably next on the menu, since the former has a large population and the latter has a Russian-controlled enclave. (Estonia is in NATO, but if Trump refuses to come to its aid when it’s attacked, NATO is a defunct alliance.)

But Russia’s real prize is Poland, which Russia views as its ancient and most dangerous rival for influence in the Slavic world. Russian government mouthpieces regularly issue threats against Poland:

In general, it’s clear that Putin wants to restore some sort of Russian control over all of the lands that were part of the old Russian Empire. Whether he has the capability to do that is another question.

Technology has shifted toward the defense, and drones, mines, and portable missiles are now fairly easily able to stop fleets armored vehicles in their tracks. Putin’s initial attempt to take Ukraine by blitzkrieg failed for this reason, and an attack on Poland wouldn’t go any better.

But Putin may not need a lightning victory in order to keep on rolling. He’s reoriented Russia’s entire economy around the Ukraine war and mobilized all of its manpower. With robust oil revenues, Chinese manufacturing support, and a demographic advantage over the other East European states, there’s no reason Putin can’t just keep on attacking and attacking for decades.

Renard Foucart believes that Russia is so committed to the Ukraine war that its economy basically now depends on continuing that war:

Russia’s economy has not collapsed. But it does look very different, and is now entirely focused on a long war in Ukraine – which is actually driving economic growth…Put simply, the war against Ukraine is now the main driver of Russia’s economic growth…

A protracted stalemate might be the only solution for Russia to avoid total economic collapse. Having transformed the little industry it had to focus on the war effort, and with a labour shortage problem worsened by hundreds of thousands of war casualties and a massive brain drain, the country would struggle to find a new direction…The Russian regime has no incentive to end the war and deal with that kind of economic reality.

Russia thus seems to be trying to invent a new kind of empire — a “slow empire”, for which perpetual war is a way of life instead of a means to an end. It may never execute the kind of rapid, lightning conquests that empires of the past hoped to achieve, but it will relentlessly grind forward for decades on end.

China hasn’t launched any major attacks yet, but it does seem to be moving in a bit of a Russia-like direction. In addition to its threat to conquer — excuse me, “reunify with” — Taiwan, China has been trying to slowly slice off bits of territory from India, the Philippines, and Bhutan. And it’s also now pushing a claim to the Japanese island of Okinawa — not some small outlying island, but an important Japanese province.

Thus, while Xi Jinping might not be quite as reckless or aggressive as Putin, he clearly seems to want to carry out a similar policy of continuous slow expansion. And China’s economic and population advantages over its neighbors are far larger than Russia’s; China can continue a “slow empire” strategy for many decades.

If you’re in the path of a “slow empire”, how do you defend against it? You can’t out-manufacture China or a China-supplied Russia. You can’t throw more bodies into the fray than China and Russia can. What do you do? Other than surrender, you basically have two choices:

1. Get the US, West Europe, or other external powers to protect you, or
2. Develop nuclear weapons.

For Japan and South Korea, the choice here is very clear. The US is their only external protector against China, and the rise of MAGA politics (and the shriveling of the US defense-industrial base) means that the US is no longer reliable.

Nuclear weapons are the only real possibility of an enduring security guarantee for Japan and South Korea. And that’s not even taking into account the need to deter the loose cannon of North Korea, whose nuclear-capable missile arsenal is growing more deadly by the day.

For Poland, the case is less clear. It has another potential protector besides the U.S.: the European powers of Germany, France, and the UK. Those countries can theoretically outmatch Russia in terms of both population and manufacturing, even if Russia gets Chinese help. And the UK and France have nukes of their own. And there’s no loose cannon like North Korea in the neighborhood.

The main danger for Poland is that Germany, France, and the UK, like America, will remain mired in political paralysis, and that their defense-industrial bases will remain moribund, and that they will fail to come to Poland’s aid against Putin.

Even if its manufacturing base allowed Poland to hold out against Russia by itself, a non-nuclear Poland might be cowed into submission by Russian nuclear threats. If West Europe allows Ukraine to fall, Poland will almost certainly strongly consider scrambling for nukes.

So for Japan, South Korea, and possibly Poland, getting nukes is the obvious strategy for dealing with the expansionist empires next door. If these countries went nuclear, it would draw “hard boundaries” past which Xi and Putin could not pass, even if they succeeded in gobbling up Ukraine, Taiwan, and other small nations in the area.

Japanese, South Korean, and Polish nukes would freeze the battle lines of Cold War 2, potentially stopping it from turning into World War 3.

Nuclear weapons have restrained conflict in South Asia

Of course, as I mentioned, Japanese, South Korean and Polish nukes could also start World War 3, in case of an accidental launch. And some people might worry that if they possessed nukes, these three countries would themselves become more aggressive.

In the case of Japan and South Korea, I’m not so worried. These are peace-loving, non-expansionist countries with zero interest in starting wars with their neighbors. Furthermore, they would not be able to win a nuclear confrontation with China, only to make China pay a very high price for any victory. So even if they wanted to be aggressive, they couldn’t.

And both Japan and South Korea are known for highly competent civil servants and well-functioning national institutions; the danger of accidental launch isn’t zero, but it’s probably less than for the US, China, Russia, or other existing nuclear powers.

I can’t think of any countries on the planet more capable of maintaining a nuclear deterrent safely and using it wisely. I have a bit less confidence in Poland, since it escaped communism and endemic corruption only recently, and its technocratic elite has been in power for a far shorter time.

But there’s another reason I’m not so worried about Japanese or South Korean nukes, which is that nuclear deterrence seems to have had a salutary effect on war in South Asia. India and Pakistan have fought each other four times (with India winning all four contests).

Their fourth war, the Kargil War of 1999, came right after both had developed nuclear weapons. But although there were some nuclear threats, the nuclear factor is part of what made Pakistan eventually back down. Ultimately, casualties in that war were very low — probably less than 2000 deaths all told.

An India-Pakistan standoff in 2019, meanwhile, fizzled in part because of worries over nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s President Imran Khan famously declared: “With the weapons you have and the weapons we have, can we afford miscalculation? Shouldn’t we think that if this escalates, what will it lead to?” Ultimately, both countries backed off of hostilities.

This is a very encouraging outcome. India and Pakistan are much poorer countries than Japan or South Korea, and have a recent history of warfare. And yet nuclear weapons very clearly acted as a restraint on war between the two bitter enemies. Obviously, the possibility of a nuclear war between the two remains, and people are right to be scared of it.

But South Asia offers a glimmer of hope that nuclear deterrence can stop or prevent conventional war between major powers, just as it stopped the superpowers from going to war with each other during the first Cold War.

Where does nuclear proliferation stop?

So while I think Japan and South Korea getting nukes would reduce the risk of major conflict, there’s one more issue to consider: Where does it end? Every instance of nuclear proliferation prompts other countries to think “Why not us, too?”.

If Japan and South Korea get nukes, why not Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia? If Poland gets nukes, why not Hungary, Armenia, or Azerbaijan? A world where every country has nuclear weapons will almost certainly see them used at some point, after which their use could become normalized.

What we need in order to prevent this is a strict internationally enforced nuclear nonproliferation regime. Right now, we don’t have that; China and Russia are happy to help Iran and North Korea thrive under US sanctions, allowing their nuclear programs to continue.

What we have right now is a unilateral nonproliferation regime, where Chinese and Russian allies get nukes, and U.S. allies don’t. This is kind of like trying to implement gun control by giving up your guns and expecting your enemies to follow suit.

The only global nuclear nonproliferation regime that will work is one that China and Russia both buy into wholeheartedly and work to enforce. And they will only do that if they see a threat of proliferation on the opposite side of the global divide. Right now, China and Russia have no incentive to enforce nonproliferation, because they know US allies will refrain from getting nukes unilaterally and voluntarily.

If Japan and South Korea go nuclear, this immediately changes. At that point, China and Russia know that democratic countries are going to play by the same rules they are, instead of a different, more restrictive set of rules. Which means China and Russia become just as worried about nuclear proliferation as the US and West Europe are.

Right now, Japan and South Korea’s lack of nukes represents a glaring hole in the global balance of power, and an invitation to China and Russia to expand. It may seem paradoxical to think that new countries getting nukes would lead to a fundamentally more secure world, but in this case, I think the alternative is clearly worse.

Notes

1 The non-nuclear Iran, unlike North Korea, has suffered regular Israeli and US attacks. Nuclear Pakistan’s sovereignty is regarded as inviolable. And despite the popularity of “Death to Israel” chants, other Middle Eastern countries don’t seriously think about launching a major war with it, because Israel has nukes.

This article was first published on Noah Smith’s Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.

Continue Reading