13 Dec

“A House of Dynamite”

“The risk of a doomsday event is rising.” – The Lonely Realist

In January, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the second hand on The Doomsday Clock forward from 1 minute and 30 seconds before midnight to 1 minute and 29 seconds before midnight. Can there be any doubt that risks, including the risk of nuclear war, have increased over these last 11 months? The Doomsday Clock therefore is likely to continue counting down the seconds. As George Will wrote this past August, “[it’s been] 80 years since Hiroshima. How much longer can the world’s luck hold?” You might well ask why the world’s luck held for the last 8 decades.

The reason is Pax Americana. The U.S. for 80 years ordered world peace by managing alliances with nations that shared its interests. It created strategic partnerships that opposed America’s enemies in return for reciprocal security commitments. Those alliances included virtually all European countries, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others. The American security (and nuclear) umbrella protected those who supported America against those challenging American hegemony, whether military, mercantilist or commercial, including the Soviet Union, Iran, China, North Korea and others (e.g., Iraq, Cuba, Afghanistan, Panama, al Qaeda, ISIS). However, as TLR observed last March, President Trump is reorganizing the world order by dispensing with Pax Americana, making it clear, as Vice President Vance confirmed, that conflicts between nuclear powers are “fundamentally none of our business.”

The Trump Administration updated its reorganization plan in its recently released National Security Strategy, which notes that Europe is “in decline” with the prospect of “civilizational erasure … in 20 years or less” (adding that, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies” and requires American policy to encourage the growing influence of MAGA-oriented “patriotic European parties”), advocates close commercial ties with Russia (which, the WSJ reported, “Flips History by Casting Europe—Not Russia—as Villain”), and proclaims that American policy in the Western Hemisphere will follow a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” whereby America will “be preeminent … as a condition of our security and prosperity, a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.” The “Trump Corollary” is the most consequential statement in the NSS. It casts the Western Hemisphere (including South America, Greenland and Canada) as America’s hegemonic protectorate where the U.S. has the unfettered right to do whatever it wants. The corollary to the Corollary is that America’s adversaries are likely to treat the NSS as an invitation to divvy up the world into similar sacrosanct spheres – Russia in Eastern Europe and the Stans, and China in Southeast Asia and the Near Pacific. Why not? In its advocacy of America First principles, the NSS presents China as primarily a commercial rival, Russia as a seeker of security and stability, Iran as a menace defanged by American action, and jihadism, North Korea, etc., as vestiges of history (Trump 1.0 having asserted 7 years ago that “there is no … nuclear threat from North Korea”).

Mainstream media have treated the NSS as a repudiation of Pax Americana, The Economist noting that the NSS articulates a “naked assertion of power that owes more to the 19^th century than the world America built after the Second World War.” That’s an accurate assessment. TLR asks two questions, however. First, wasn’t this the expectation? Isn’t the NSS simply a restatement of America First policies? Second, isn’t the content of the NSS reflective of Trumpian rhetoric that may, or may not, accurately presage what President Trump will do?

Let’s begin with the origins of the NSS. Although the NSS historically was a carefully worded statement of broad policy goals, this NSS is an ideology piece with specifics put together by successive layers of Trump-appointees who cumulatively added their thoughts without cohesive editorial oversight…, including by a President who doesn’t read policy statements. The product patched together by those appointees therefore reflects the full panoply of MAGA sausage (spiced up by Vancian isolationism). As sausage, the NSS accordingly did not need to limit itself to foreign policy, and it doesn’t – it condemns, for example, “the cynical manipulation of our immigration system to build up voting blocs loyal to foreign interests within our country” and “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly … threatened the United States and subsidized our adversaries.”

And then there is, of course, the question of whether President Trump will decide to follow the NSS’s words with deeds. The answer is that “sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t.” Commentators have pointed to those portions of the NSS that address peace in Ukraine together with President Trump’s apparent siding with the Russian formula for peace over its European-Ukrainian counterpart as conclusive on this point. The NSS, after all, states that its highest priority for Europe is establishing “strategic stability with Russia,” which necessarily will require absolving Russia of war crimes and ceding Ukrainian territory to an expanding Russian Empire. Yet President Trump’s peace proposals have made grudging headway and may eventually bring the two sides to agreement. President Trump’s ultimate actions are unknowable.

Nevertheless, with all that is said in the NSS, it is impossible to conclude that the world isn’t heading in dangerous directions – that is, towards further seconds being lopped off The Doomsday Clock. India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, are at each other’s throats…, with America’s Vice President asserting that this is “none of our business.” North Korea, a nuclear power willing to sell its knowledge and materials to the highest bidders, continues to advance in its production of bombs and the technology necessary to deliver them…, yet “is not a nuclear threat.” The Middle East remains a tinder box with Iran having produced the material necessary to make bombs, Israel an existing nuclear power, and Saudi Arabia and others (including Japan and South Korea) now interested in obtaining their own nuclear arsenals (Saudi Arabia having sought nuclear protection from Pakistan as well). Russian-American weapons’ agreements have been discarded, Russia has threatened to move nuclear weapons to its satellites (e.g., Belarus), China has more than doubled its nuclear force since 2020, and the world no longer is led by America in a policy of non-proliferation. Moreover, it now is accepted that AI will lower the technical and informational barriers for accessing and developing biological weapons. What possibly could go wrong?

Finally (from a good friend)