Will Trump’s Strikes on Iran Unleash a Global Arms Race?
Since World War II, nonproliferation efforts have limited the number of countries with nuclear weapons. That may be about to change.
Will Trump’s Strikes on Iran Unleash a Global Arms Race?
Since World War II, nonproliferation efforts have limited the number of countries with nuclear weapons. That may be about to change.
by Matthew Cooper
It’s been 80 years since the first nuclear summer when the U.S. unleashed the power of the atom on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Four score later, we’re in another war, despite yesterday’s declaration of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
Few in the summer of 1945 and fewer still during the Cold War years that followed would have imagined that no nuke would be used on a civilian population for 80 years. The close calls during the long, twilight struggle—as John F. Kennedy described the Cold War—were chillingly numerous. Despite the Berlin crises, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, not to mention the fall of the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe, the hideously elegant logic of deterrence proved ironclad. Nuclear powers would be mad to fight directly. So, they have not, even as proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia and, sometimes, China have cost millions of lives from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the frozen Chosin Reservoir to the jungles of Bolivia and the sands of Sinai.
But the logic of 20th-century deterrence that kept the nuclear peace for 80 years, combined with 21st-century events, means the desire for nuclear weapons among the nuke-less has gone up, not down. That is especially true this week, and why more countries will want nuclear weapons, not only because of recent history, Iran’s deadly ambitions, and the wild oscillations of the 45th and 47th presidents of the United States, Donald Trump.
There are 195 members of the United Nations. Only nine have nuclear weapons—the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Democratic nations that might occasionally daydream about acquiring nuclear weapons but have heretofore forsworn them—such as Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea, to name a few—have shown restraint either because of their fraught histories and, more importantly, because they enjoy (or enjoyed) nuclear umbrellas, specifically American atomic prophylaxis.
One irony of Trump’s second term is that while he’s helped Israel’s effort to set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the showman’s erratic temperament and manic ability to shred once sacred alliances has made it much more likely that Seoul, Warsaw, Taipei, or even Berlin and Tokyo will want to consider spinning centrifuges. Can anyone count on the American nuclear umbrella when the president is mercurial and mendacious, when he seems more likely than not to jettison NATO? French President Emmanuel Macron has not only returned to Gaullist ideas of French nuclear independence, with its force frappé, but has also offered to bring other European nations under Paris’s nuclear protection. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made similar moves. They would be foolish not to do that.
That is the sober thinking among American traditional allies. Imagine what it is in the minds of America’s enemies and frenemies. Think of the view from Caracas. If you’re Nicolas Máduro, the Venezuelan strongman, and the U.S. has vowed regime change and told the U.S. Supreme Court that your country is currently invading America thus allowing mass deportations (read: immigrants escaping your destruction of a once-prosperous economy) how would you assess the situation in Iran this week and the events of last 25 years? The lessons of the 20th century are that deterrence works between nuclear powers: the U.S./USSR, India/Pakistan. Tensions may flare, but everyone steps back from the brink. The lesson for 21st-century dictators like Máduro is that you can be invaded/thrown out of power if you do not have a nuke.
Iraq (which feigned having one but did not), Ukraine (which gave them up under Bill Clinton’s administration), Libya (which gave up its weapons of mass destruction program under George W. Bush), Iran (which tried to build one and got bombed), Syria (which tried to build one and got toppled) are cautionary tales. North Korea’s regime survives because it has nukes and a mammoth conventional army. Why wouldn’t Máduro want nuclear weapons? It’s unlikely he can get them, but not impossible. What’s important is that the calculus of risk and reward has made nukes seem more attractive to many leaders. That may sound counterintuitive given the degree to which American administrations have gone to keep the Mullahs of Tehran from joining the nuclear club, especially this week. But not all countries are Iran, and most could anticipate a very different reaction from this president.
If you are an intelligence official in Riyadh or a defense planner in Taipei, the events of the last week only confirm why you would want a nuke. And unlike Máduro, these prosperous nations have the means. Taiwan may or may not be able to count on an American defense of the island but given the chip maker’s strategic importance and a bipartisan consensus in the U.S. opposing Chinese hegemony, it probably can. Probably. These days, the famed “strategic ambiguity” of what the U.S. would do in the face of a Beijing assault, promoted by presidents since Richard Nixon went to “Red China,” is ambiguous. Acquiring a nuclear weapon would have risks for prosperous Taiwan, but it could also add to its deterrence.
Likewise, will Trump keep American forces on the Korean peninsula, where they have provided a nuclear tripwire for more than 70 years? Will the new center-right government in Seoul be able to rely on it, or will it want its own deterrent?
The Saudi ambitions to cut a nuclear deal with the U.S. and Israel, while perhaps moribund given the disaster in Gaza, still have a compelling logic behind them. Whatever shape Iran is in right now, Tehran’s very public and very proud national project of building a large nuclear sector—celebrated in postage stamps and holidays, begun during the era of the Shah—cannot be utterly obliterated any more than Riyadh’s can. The smarts and know-how of the Persian nation with 90 million citizens, mountains taller than the Alps, and a capital more populous than London will not be evaporated by Mossad commandos or U.S. bunker busters. If you are Mohammad Bin Salam, MBS, you still want a Saudi nuclear sector—weapons to repel the Shia, power for when the oil runs out. Who is to say Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, eager for wins, won’t find a way to get him one?
The grand irony is that Trump brought us to this moment where nuclear non-proliferation, always a struggle to enforce but mostly a successful one, is threatened globally by the effort to eliminate one nation’s nuclear capacity. (See this excellent NBC News piece by Alexander Smith, citing proliferation experts from Seoul to Washington, D.C.) “The signs are that a new arms race is gearing up that carries much more risk and uncertainty than the last one,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Director Dan Smith said Monday as his group unveiled its 2025 yearbook.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) forged during the Obama administration wasn’t perfect, nor intended to be so. It did what it was supposed to, as did arms agreements during the Cold War. The agreement between Iran and the five members of the United Nations Security Council—the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, and China (plus Germany) did not seek to contain Iranian proxies in the region or its Medieval oppression at home. The JCPOA limited Tehran’s nuclear possibilities, not its conventional ambitions, just as Cold War arms treaties contained the arms race without challenging Soviet oppression at home and abroad. Limiting nukes is quite enough.
While conservatives sounded alarms over allegations of Iranian cheating on enrichment, just as they often pointed to violations during decades of American-Soviet arms control pacts, Tehran was basically in compliance. The West not only had eyes and ears on the ground in Tehran but an unprecedented inspection regime and a formula for snapback sanctions. To quote Yiddish, today the West has bubkes in terms of inspection. There have been some International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground since the JCPOA collapsed, but the Iranians are unlikely to let them back in to what remains of the nuclear program. And if Iran withdraws from the global nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), even that cursory accounting will be gone.
An insider deeply familiar with the Mullahs’ regime told me it could have fallen had the U.S. kept up with the JCPOA instead of unceremoniously withdrawing from it during Trump’s first term.
It would have been one thing if Trump had withdrawn from the JCPOA with a consistent hardline approach like the one long touted by John Bolton, the Bush-era arms-control official and U.N. ambassador, who became Trump’s National Security Adviser before being fired. Today, the delicate, honest-broker role of the National Security Adviser as envisioned in the post-World War II world has been upended by Trump putting Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an Iran Hawk, in the position, precisely the kind of scale-tipping in policy-making that the National Security Act of 1947 was designed to prevent. Bolton did not believe an inspection regime would work with the Iranians, and their nuclear program had to be destroyed, and Rubio’s views are more Boltonesque than not.
However, in his second term, Trump seemed to abandon Boltonism and the views of the hawkish Rubio, at least for a time. Trump literally abandoned the mustachioed Bolton himself by withdrawing the Yale diplomat’s security detail, which President Joe Biden never let lapse even after Bolton returned to private life; such is the nature of Iranian threats against him.
Instead, in his second term, art-of-the-deal Trump opened the souk, he saber rattled Iran but was, unlike Rubio and Bolton, seemingly eager to cut his version of the JCPOA, much as he cut his own NAFTA deal, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, that bore a striking similarity to the 1990s agreement he’d long denounced as a betrayal of American workers. Given his TACO reputation (Trump Always Chickens Out), the 47th president probably would have cut a far weaker deal than the JCPOA engineered by Secretary of State John Kerry had the Iranians played him more adroitly. No wonder Netanyahu, whose belli needs no casus, acted to box Trump in by striking Iran. (The Likud prime minister had that ability because President Joe Biden had armed Israel so heavily since October 7, 2023, and coordinated the extraordinary regional defense of Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles last year.) Trump took Bibi’s bait and dispatched the B-2s, which, in fairness, may have been the least bad option at that point. But the JCPOA abrogation, one of Trump’s original sins from his first term and Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons, brought us to this.
It’s too early to know much, my contact and many others say—what damage was done to the Iranian program, what Trump will do next, what the regime will do (we know about Iran’s performative Qatar attack and the ceasefire), and what, perhaps most importantly, the Iranian people will do. Will they overthrow the 46-year-old theocracy, rally around the flag, or continue grumbling to themselves? We can’t know what was buried or unleashed by Sunday’s American bombing of Fordow, Natanz, and other Iranian sites, except sadly, a growing desire in many of the world’s capitals for a nuke of one’s own.
Matthew Cooper is Executive Editor Digital at the Washington Monthly.
Find the Washington Monthly on Social
We're on BlueSky @washingtonmonthly.com
We're on Twitter @monthly
We're on YouTube @washingtonmonthly9554
We're on Threads @WAMonthly
We're on Instagram @WAMonthly
We're on Facebook @WashingtonMonthly