Japan, South Korea, and Poland Don't Need Nukes

Noah Smith doesn't know what he's talking about.

Noah Smith is a very good writer and a very bad analyst of international affairs. He seems to spend a lot of time huffing and puffing himself into a fit about the notion that there is a “New Axis” of unmitigatedly belligerent totalitarian powers cartoonishly hell-bent on overturning the U.S.-led liberal international order and unleashing tyranny on the people of the world. The main thrust of his writing over the past several years seems to be that the United States needs to totally reorient its economy and society in order to fight “Cold War 2” against the New Axis.¹

You can generally ascribe Smith’s errors to either of two common perceptual biases in U.S. national security thinking:

1. The Fundamental Attribution Error: Smith tends to impute the malfeasance of U.S. adversaries to their inherent nature, while chalking up U.S. and allied behavior to circumstance.

2. Threat Inflation: He treats any challenge to U.S. hegemony or international security from a U.S. adversary as if it’s the end of the world, and when evidence is ambiguous, he interprets it to that effect.

Yesterday, Smith reposted an article he wrote last year, “Japan, South Korea, and Poland need nuclear weapons immediately,” that illustrates both of these errors very well. He argues that, although it is unfortunate that more democratic countries would need to acquire nuclear weapons, it is necessary for them to proliferate because they face intolerable threats to their security from the insatiable revisionist Sino-Russian Axis and they can’t trust the United States to defend them. Moreover, because U.S. adversaries are already developing nuclear weapons with the help of Russia and China, controlled proliferation to U.S. allies would not be exceedingly costly to the international order.

Smith is wrong on both counts. There is no evil Axis, and it does not pose a looming threat to the survival of U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. There is also no Russian or Chinese conspiracy to undermine the global nonproliferation regime and spread nuclear weapons to U.S. adversaries — more of a paranoid delusion than a serious assessment of the facts about international security.

The Myth of the Evil Axis

I’ll begin by giving Smith credit where it’s due. He is correct that U.S. security guarantees are no longer credible and that the possession of nuclear weapons deters challenges to a state’s survival. If anything, Smith understates the case that other countries can no longer rely on the United States for extended nuclear deterrence, since he attributes the decline in U.S. credibility solely to Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing nationalism.

This is only half true — Trump has made U.S. alliances less credible, but the bigger issue is the United States simply doesn’t have the relative material capabilities it needs to maintain a globe-straddling system of alliances anymore. Since the end of the Cold War, according to any measure, U.S. economic and military power has declined slightly as a share of world power and precipitously relative to China. If the United States faced the prospect of fighting China (in a potential nuclear war) or allowing one of its allies to fall, it would probably opt not to fight.

What Smith gets wrong is that he assumes there is an existential threat to U.S. allies posed by the “New Axis” that can be defended against only by relying on the protection of a powerful third party like the United States or by developing a nuclear arsenal. There is no such threat, and even if there was, those aren’t the only two options to address it.

Smith warns that China and Russia “are on the march, led by personalistic totalitarian dictators and emboldened by both U.S. weakness and by China’s manufacturing dominance.” He cites Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s threats toward other countries in Eastern Europe, and Chinese territorial disputes with India and the Philippines and threats toward Taiwan. He describes Russia and China as “slow empires” for which “perpetual war is a way of life instead of a means to an end.”

This is an absurd way to describe Russian and Chinese foreign policy. Russia is an aggressive actor, but its ambitions are not unlimited and its capabilities are not infinite. There is merit to the idea that the war in Ukraine is a security dilemma and Putin believed he had to invade to prevent NATO from using its forces there to threaten Russia’s security. Putin has actually maintained his legitimacy in Russia by cultivating a reputation as a restrainer toward the West, so domestic explanations for the war don’t make a lot of sense. And for all the histrionics in the media and Eastern European capitals about the restoration of the old Russian Empire, it’s difficult to come by any reliable evidence that Putin imagines himself going any further than Ukraine.

Even if he wanted to, it’s not clear how he would do it. Smith acts like the Russian war machine is an unstoppable economic juggernaut, but military Keynesianism can only work for so long. Inflation in Russia is already nearing double digits and civilians are feeling the pinch, the fiscal situation only looks sustainable because the government is offloading its debt to corporations, the military is running out of weapons, and all parts of the economy are suffering a labor shortage as increasingly scarce human capital gets devoured by the war machine. In total, Russia has spent at least $200 billion and suffered at least 700,000 casualties since 2022. It now has more retirees than workers and its population has been declining for 30 years. Regardless of whether it wants to invade Poland, it’s not happening anytime soon.

Describing China as a “slow empire” is even more ridiculous. With the exception of the status quo in Taiwan, China is largely satisfied with the international order and supports most of the post-1945 international norms and institutions — often with more consistency than the United States. It has not fought a war since 1979. And its nuclear strategy is remarkably restrained. Even countries in Southeast Asia don’t seem to be very concerned about Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Smith raises the prospect of China threatening the survival of Japan and potentially “support[ing] a North Korean takeover of South Korea in order to turn the whole peninsula into a Chinese satellite state.” But this is idiotic. Japan has one of the largest economies and militaries in the world, and it’s protected from invasion on every side by large bodies of water. China also arguably enjoys better relations with South Korea than North Korea, and the last thing it wants is a hot war and a humanitarian crisis along its border.

Admittedly, China’s threats to “reunify” with Taiwan are concerning. But they never seem to amount to anything. Analysts predicted that China would invade by 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023 — now they’re saying 2030 or 2049. Just like the end of the Pax Americana, it’s something that always seems to be five years away. I give it a good chance that by 2050, we’ll still be hearing the same thing.

But let’s say I’m totally wrong: China and Russia are, in fact, “on the march,” and they have Japan, South Korea, and Poland in their sights. Smith says the other countries can’t out-manufacture them. But why not? Modern military technology favors the defense over the offense, especially in maritime environments like East Asia. That’s why China would likely be able to prevent the United States from deploying to the region to protect its allies. Why can’t U.S. allies develop asymmetric defenses of their own? According to the RAND Corporation, anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems like surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, and drones are incredibly efficient: “Excluding cruise missiles versus surface ships (because it skews the results even more in favor of A2AD), the average cost of an A2AD capability is about one-fiftieth of the cost of the force-projection capability that it could neutralize in a combat operation.”

Unless you expect China’s long-run GDP to be 50 times greater than the other states in the region, or Russia’s GDP to be several times greater than the rest of Europe (it is currently one-tenth as large), it seems that U.S. allies should be on solid footing to defend themselves without needing the United States to back them up or resorting to nuclear proliferation. It would be a problem in the near-term if the United States abandoned its allies without first getting them to take their own defenses seriously, but the Trump administration finally seems to be putting the fear of God into them. Besides, China and Russia don’t yet have the sort of power projection capabilities that would be needed to seize control of large amounts of territory, and producing the necessary platforms at scale would require decades of sustained investment in the defense-industrial base that China has only recently begun to make.

The Myth of the Proliferation Conspiracy

I am willing to excuse Smith’s misreading of Russian and Chinese interests and capabilities as an honest mistake. But his history and analysis of the global nonproliferation regime is so utterly wrong that I have a hard time giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Smith says that it would not be a critical blow to the international order or the nonproliferation norm for the United States to encourage its allies to acquire nuclear weapons because Russia and China are already doing the same thing:

What we need in order to prevent [widespread proliferation] 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 U.S. 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.

If you know anything about the politics of nuclear proliferation, you know that this is wrong. Nuclear-armed states have extremely strong incentives to prevent any other states from acquiring nuclear weapons, including their allies. In fact, some political scientists refer to the nonproliferation regime as a nuclear “cartel” because it involves close cooperation by states that are otherwise bitter enemies. States don’t want their allies to acquire nuclear weapons because it leads to them losing influence and leverage over their allies, raises the risk of accidental or deliberate nuclear escalation which may draw the state into war, and potentially sets off “nuclear dominoes” in which other states rush to proliferate as well.

Smith cites five supposed cases of nuclear-armed states helping other states acquire nuclear weapons. But these are all either blown out of proportion or not analogous to present-day Russia and China. The first — France’s gift of the Dimona nuclear reactor to Israel in 1957 — occurred before the nuclear taboo was crystallized in 1962 and the Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1968. And French nuclear assistance was cut off soon after it was offered, long before Israel acquired the bomb. The second — Chinese assistance to Pakistan — occurred after the NPT, but the historical record is shoddy and it’s unclear to what extent China actually helped Pakistan proliferate.² It is also unclear whether the third example — Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan’s proliferation network, which assisted Iran, Libya, and North Korea — was state-sanctioned or not. Even if it was, Pakistan was never a great power and did not face the same nonproliferation incentives decades ago as China and Russia do today.

The fourth and fifth examples — Chinese and Russian support for North Korean and Iranian proliferation — are a total fabrication. North Korea turned to the Khan network only because it was first denied nuclear support by China and the Soviet Union. Ever since North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, China and Russia have acceded to and helped enforce countless U.N. Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions against North Korea; they’ve only “kept the North Korean economy and military afloat,” as Smith puts it, because they don’t want a failed state along their border. As for Iran, there is no Iranian nuclear weapons program today and there has not been one since 2003. To the extent that Iran poses a proliferation risk, it is because the United States withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal that Russia and China helped negotiate and have been calling for the United States to rejoin at least as recently as 2021.

The most charitable explanation for why Smith gets such an elementary point so terribly wrong is that he wants to believe (like Fox Mulder of The X Files) that China and Russia are purely, cartoonishly evil actors who only care about undermining freedom worldwide, and the United States needs to resort to extraordinary measures to address the threat they pose. The uncharitable explanation is that he lazily reached for an argument outside of his field of expertise to support a conclusion that he already believed in, and didn’t bother to think about it more carefully because he didn’t need to. In either case, he has failed to do his due diligence to make sure he actually knows what he’s talking about.

For God's Sake, Stop Thinking Like a Hawk

Japan, South Korea, and Poland acquiring nuclear weapons is a very bad idea. There is no good reason for them to acquire nuclear weapons, and there is no good reason to think it would be good for the international order if they did. Breaking the taboo on allied proliferation would lead to countless states attempting to build their own arsenals and significantly increase the risk of accidental or deliberate nuclear use. On a long enough time horizon, unless states disarm or nuclear risk is continuously decreased, the probability of nuclear war approaches certainty. Every step toward unnecessary proliferation is a step toward global annihilation.³

The type of reflexively hawkish and stereotypical thinking about U.S. adversaries that dominates most mainstream national security discourse today is among the greatest acute threats that humanity faces. The idea that there is a creeping totalitarian “New Axis” that seeks to upend and remake the world order in its image has already raised the risk of great power war, undermined international norms and institutions, precluded cooperation over some key transnational issues like climate change, begun to reverse economic globalization, driven scarce resources away from their highest valued ends and into military expenditures, fueled the rise of illiberal nationalist movements across the West, and ironically driven Russia and China closer together. Prophecies of international gloom and doom unfortunately are not easily discredited because they are often self-fulfilling.

It is curious that Smith considers himself a stalwart defender of the international order — supposedly in contrast to the Trump administration — when both Smith and Trump’s advisors apparently see the order and its norms and institutions as unfairly disadvantaging the United States and advantaging its adversaries. Smith says we should dispense with the nonproliferation regime as it exists today because it favors Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran; Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the “post-war global order” is “not just obsolete, [but] a weapon being used against [the United States]” by rogue states and great power competitors. Smith says we need to rebuild the “war economy” and get ready for a hot war with China; Rubio says we need a “whole-of-society” effort to beat back the Chinese colossus.

This is the new consensus, and it is an exceedingly dangerous one. If there is a revisionist axis, it consists of the various factions in the United States — left and right — that seek to undermine the pillars of international peace that have kept the great powers from fighting each other directly since World War II. I’ve suggested before that the second Trump administration is doing almost everything you would want to do if you wanted to provoke a great power war, but you could say the same thing about the liberal hawks:

Let us grant this conspiracy of über-nationalist boobs an undeserved benefit of the doubt: say they don’t consciously want a war. How else is this supposed to end? Since 1945, the peace has been kept by American economic and military preponderance — ironically sustained by the United States restraining itself to avoid provoking allies and adversaries into militarization — unprecedented commercial globalization, norms of territorial integrity, and mutually assured destruction. […] You cannot remain preponderant by estranging your allies while antagonizing your enemies. You cannot maintain globalization by further weaponizing the international trade and financial system. You cannot uphold international norms by trampling them with impunity. You cannot preserve the balance of terror and pursue nationwide missile defense at the same time.

Donald Trump swore his oath of office for the second time a month ago today. A week after that, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. American policymakers and commentators would ideally have seized this opportunity for some perspective-taking and a hard, deep reflection about the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Not so, however. Smith may have gotten it wrong as to who the members of the New Axis are, but he got one thing undoubtedly right: The Axis is not to be reasoned with.

1. This is wrong for many reasons. Among the least of them is that it implies the original Axis was part of “Cold War 1” and not World War II.

2. It is revealing that Smith does not cite alleged U.S. support for Pakistan’s nuclear program during the same time period (or for Israel or South Africa’s nuclear program). The evidence of U.S. support for Pakistani proliferation is both stronger and better documented than the evidence of Chinese support, but it is still weak and unconvincing.

3. For an example of what necessary proliferation might look like, see the late Kenneth Waltz’s article “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.”