Networked Nonproliferation with Michal Onderco

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Today we have a very special guest, Dr. Michal Onderco, who is an associate professor of international relations at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the author of a very new and interesting book, Networked Nonproliferation, Making the NPT Permanent.

Michal Onderco 0:34

How are you doing? Hi, thank you very much for having me. Are you actually joining us from Rotterdam? I live in The Hague, so about 20 kilometers away.

Jeffrey 0:45

I used to have friends who lived in The Hague, and I found it a really fun place to hang out. I love, what is it, bitterballen?

Michal 0:54

Yes. Well, not very healthy, but very tasty.

Jeffrey 0:57

You know, life is short. I really like the book, and in general, I really like a lot of things you've written recently, so I'm very happy to have you on. Thank you very much. I think I want to start by talking a little bit about the book itself, and then maybe get a little broad in terms of the whole body of research that you've done.

You have, I think, a very interesting take on how foreign policy gets made in different countries. And I think the place to start is I don't think people understand what a momentous event and how difficult it was to permanently extend the NPT in 1995. Because it's 25 years ago. I think we just take it for granted. But, like, I'm not sure I would have believed it was possible even a year before it happened.

Yeah.

Michal 1:54

That's a very good take, and I think you would be in a majority of scholars at that time, and not only majority of scholars, but also what I would call a broad consensus also among the diplomats and in the intelligence community. Throughout the 1990s, but already in late 80s, people started to think about the NPT's upcoming extension in 1995, and very early on, There has been a realization that most of the countries were not in favor of the indefinite extension.

And so people were doing different calculations, expectations, and there was this growing realization that this treaty is not going to get extended indefinitely because most of the countries would be opposed to it.

Jeffrey 2:47

Now, do you think that's something that we failed to understand just because it was an unlikely event? Or is it that we didn't really understand the nature of power in a diplomatic setting? Because if there's one thing I'm sort of taking away from the book, it's that often the way that we talk about how countries get their way internationally is maybe a little impoverished and not necessarily as nuanced as it should be.

Michal 3:09

That's a fantastic question. I think many of these assessments underestimated the role that Pivotal players other than the United States could play in the conference. And in the book, I speak about mainly three of them, but I think especially the role of South Africa gets underestimated. And also the role that European countries by persuading many in the region played in promoting the NPT, making sure that countries actually showed up to the conference, making sure that others understood how important this treaty is.

I think that gets a little underspecified.

Jeffrey 3:52

Yeah, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. And maybe you could do it in the context of talking about some of the different players. It's really true that I think we often deny agency and ignore domestic politics, and we don't pay attention to diplomatic coalitions. So maybe if you could specify that a little bit more.

I'm particularly interested in the role of South Africa, but I think the discussion about Egypt and the discussion about Europe are both equally interesting.

Michal 4:23

I'm happy to talk about the role of South Africa because that's one case that is very close to my heart. And South Africa was ahead of the NPT review and extension conference, broadly seen as this really important country. As you may recall, South Africa just recently before that announced that it destroyed its own nuclear weapons. It also transitioned from apartheid to a democratic regime.

And it was broadly seen as this towering actor and a very pivotal actor in the MPD politics. And as I show in the book, actually South African diplomats for a long time were not particularly fond of the option to extend the MPD indefinitely. And they actually had other ideas and goals in mind. But because South African Vice President Thabo Mbeki traveled to the United States, he became acquainted with how much attention the United States put on the NPT extension.

And he realized that supporting an indefinite NPT extension was something that would improve South Africa's standing, especially with the Western world. He decided to go ahead with it. And the way that South Africa went ahead with it meant that it brought along not only a number of African countries, but it also managed to break the consensus within the non-aligned movement against the indefinite extension of the treaty.

And through that, it made it possible to actually build the momentum towards the indefinite extension.

Jeffrey 6:12

Well, that's one of the things that I really, really like about the book, which is there's this whole idea of networks and how networks function and how networks can be used. And I think often when we're talking about an NPT review conference or some kind of nonproliferation dispute, we imagine – That these alignments are very static and that they're very rooted in particular conceptions of national interest.

And I think one of the things I kind of like about the work that you've done is to really ask this question, how do networks function? So I hope you would talk a little bit about that, because I think that's kind of, at least for me, the conceptual key that helps me unlock how we get to an extension when we're not really expecting one.

Michal 6:59

That's basically the key of the book when I explain that the key element to understand is not that the US was able to build the biggest coalition or that the US was able to pursue the most countries, but the US was able to find a small number of key friends in key regions of the world who then managed to bring their friends along To the indefinite extension, either to support the indefinite extension or at least not to oppose it.

That's the case with Egypt. And so this is where this logic of networks really become important because it's not only who your friends are, but also who your friends' friends are. And this is basically the US had the best group of friends and the US's friends had the best friends. And this is why the non-aligned movement, for example, in the end was not able to oppose the indefinite extension.

Jeffrey 8:04

Yeah, I think I'm really sympathetic to this argument because I often find, and this is me editorializing, I don't, you know, I'm not, you know, say this to the book, but this is kind of my emotional reaction is I often look at the non-aligned movement and I'm constantly curious why it's coherent. Because when I think about the NPT, I think about the beneficiaries by and large being relatively small countries that could never build nuclear weapons.

But it's always strange to me that they cede authority to countries like Iran. Because if Iran were to build a nuclear weapon, the countries they would threaten are not really the US. If Libya had built a nuclear weapon, that thing would have been aimed at Chad. And so it's always interesting to me that the nonproliferation It's always interesting to me that the non-aligned movement exists as a coherent body of thought about the non-proliferation regime.

And what struck me about the analysis was it sort of opened up conceptually this idea that you can realign networks. And moving South Africa was such an enormous achievement. So would you say, without asking, you could... Agree, disagree, but I mean, this doesn't happen without South Africa, right?

Michal 9:23

Yes, basically. It would be difficult for this to happen without South Africa. And actually, if I can do a small page, I have I have a different paper where I basically map these networks in the NPT regime since the beginning up until today. One of the things that we see that is really special about the review conference in 1995 is that it really led to realignment of cooperation networks within the NPT regime in that conference.

It was different than before, it was different than after. If we look at the non-line movement as this monolith, and in this work I basically talk about the non-line movement as a monolith of countries that interact very extensively among each other, but very little with the rest of the NPT regime, breaking that monolith happens only once, and that's in 1995.

Jeffrey 10:24

Yeah. Is that collaboration networks in conference diplomacy? Is that the paper you're thinking of? Yeah, it's a great paper. So one reason I especially like this, and I want to bring this conversation a little bit into the present, is that often when I'm talking to American diplomats about the NPT review conference, they seem to have a very fatalistic view about what's achievable based on these existing alignments that they see as being essentially And even when the Obama administration was looking at the nuclear security conferences, one of the big arguments they gave is they wanted to keep the politics of the NPT out of that process.

And often when I talk to people about the TPNW, again, there's a sense that no good can come of engaging with these people Debate. And all of this is predicated on the idea that we don't have the power to build different networks. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the insights you have at the end of the book about if we understand the NPT extension in this different light, what does that tell us about the prospects for the NPT regime today?

And then how do you think about that in terms of how it relates to the TPNW? A small question that could easily be answered in 20 or 30 seconds, I know.

Michal 12:00

So I 100% agree with the premise of your question, which is that these MPT networks, they are not immutable, and they can actually be changed. And one thing that Was very different in 1995, was that people really put a lot of attention and political value and political power and political weight into these negotiations. When one reads, for example, the archival documents, you can find out that there are meetings between a Pakistani president and a German chancellor And what do they talk about?

They talk about the NPT conference, even though Pakistan was not a party, but Germany still thought it was important to talk to Pakistan about this because it's part of an online movement. And, you know, when Thabo Mbeki travels to South Africa, Bill Clinton brings him to the Oval Office and according to first person witnesses tells him, you know, this is my number one foreign policy priority and I need your help.

And we would find it very difficult to replicate today because I would find it difficult to think that President Biden would, for example, consider a success of the NPT conference his number one foreign policy priority today. So this is one thing that really makes it special. The second thing that makes it special is that you find also on the other side.

So on one side of the aisle, there are politicians who don't particularly pay attention to these things. On the other side, We often find people who realize they have bigger fish to fry than just the NPT. So this is not about the posturing, but this is about building relations with other countries. And this is also something that we may often forget.

Now, translating to the TPNW discussions, I think that there is nowadays increasingly more and more actors, whether those are countries Who realized that this positioning of, you know, don't talk about the TPW, don't engage with them, it's not going anywhere, and that there needs to be some sort of a new way of at least engaging some of the ideas.

And this is probably also where... The engagement with the PPNW is going. But that, of course, again, presupposes that the other side also realizes that in the NPT regime, there is a bigger fish to fry other than just nuclear disarmament. Nuclear disarmament is very important. It's been neglected for a long time, but there's also bigger fish to fry.

Jeffrey 14:40

Yeah, just to push back, I mean, I think you're Well, I find it perfectly compelling that you're right. There's no chance that a president is going to treat the NPT review conference the way that Clinton treated the indefinite extension. And I think that's inarguable and you're totally right. I think the place that I feel disappointed or I feel like there's an opportunity lost is, you know, we did have this opportunity where Barack Obama said nuclear weapons were his highest priority.

And he invested in this very high level personal diplomacy. But their attitude was, we want to keep this away from the NPT because we want it to work. And so I I feel like if I understand your argument correctly, there's a sense that I have that this was perhaps a missed opportunity where we did have a president who cared a lot about nonproliferation, or at least purported to, was willing to invest high-level efforts in it, but that the cynicism about doing big things led them to just push the NPT kind of away.

I mean, that's me editorializing and debating. You don't have to agree with it. But just as a pitch for the book, I mean, what I liked about it is it inspires those kinds of thoughts. It causes me to look at something that I thought I understood and think differently about it.

Michal 16:01

I think it's perfectly possible that I mean, when you talk about the NPT regime today, very often people talk about the regime somehow ossifying and being divided internally and nothing being possible in it anymore. And I think that that gives in too easily to fatalism and that there are actually very practical options for cooperation. And one of the things that is important then is The good not to be the enemy of the perfect.

Jeffrey 16:40

Okay, there are two slightly self-indulgent things I want to ask you about. Go ahead. So the first of them is you did some work with the Southampton Archive. What was John Simpson's outfit called?

Michal 17:00

The Program for Promoting Nuclear Nonproliferation.

Jeffrey 17:05

And I love this, partly because I remember meeting John Simpson, but also because I have a deep and abiding interest in successful NGO efforts. And there haven't been too many things that those of us on the outside have been able to do that were consequential and important and that you look back at and think, gosh, I wish I could have been part of that.

So it's like the Black Sea experiment that NRDC did when the Nautilus Institute went into North Korea and started building wind turbines. And that Southampton effort really was impressive. Yes, it was. And you're the guy who knows about it, other than John Simpson.

Michal 17:49

Yes, and Ben Sanders, who was the other one. Yes, so this was also, actually, I came across the work on the PPNN, Program for Promoting Nuclear Nonproliferation, when I was doing research for the book, because John Simpson acted as a scientific advisor to the British delegation to the FPT Review Conference. And I wanted to do an oral history interview with him.

And so I politely sent him an email and he politely replied and he said, oh, I thought you wanted to talk to me about the PPNN. And so I felt like, oh, what is this PPNN thing? And then I, because I traveled to Southampton the day before, I basically went to the archive of the University of Southampton and found out that there are dozens upon dozens of boxes of materials from this period.

And so I spent quite a bit of time reading these materials and also then Traveling to visit Ben Sanders, who was the other man behind this. He lives in rural Connecticut. And so I went to visit him and read all the materials that he had in his guest bedroom.

Jeffrey 19:07

Yeah, I mean, I shouldn't overemphasize John Simpson over Ben Sanders, but it I have such a happy memory. I was in Sedona, Arizona at a conference and I was standing next to John Simpson and the late Larry Scheinman. And the two of them were just regaling me with stories about the NPT extension. And I'll never forget Larry just sort of dryly saying, you know, this is one of those cases where Actually, knowing the people makes a difference to understanding it.

It really was amazing to me what a personal thing it was. So how would you characterize the...

Michal 19:47

If I can just interrupt, Larry Scheinman was initially turned down for membership in PPNN. He was? Yes. Because they didn't want to have too many Americans on board. He wasn't particularly happy about it. So in the... In the paper where I talk about PPNN, I recall this anecdote that he sent a memo to Sanders, and he said that his exclusion from the group was unconscionable.

Jeffrey 20:23

Well, he and Simpson seemed to have patched it up by the mid-2000s. That's amazing. So how would you characterize... The success of that effort. And is that a model for those of us working on the outside? That's a fantastic question.

Michal 20:39

So I think what PPNN was really successful in was that it filled in this gap in the demand for knowledge. And this is something that Ben Sanders and John Simpson sort of realized. Very early on that if you have a diplomatic system where diplomats are generalists and they come and go in and out of the job every two years, then you're every two to three years, you're going to have people who don't have too much expertise, but they come and work on these nuclear topics where they actually, there is a lot of historical knowledge, but they also need some technical expertise to succeed.

And so they filled in that gap by providing workshops all over Europe and all over the world to diplomats from different countries with funding from Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Funds and W. Elton John and so on and so forth.

Jeffrey 21:43

None of whom remain in the field anymore, he says bitterly.

Michal 21:48

That's true, yes. And they all actually left the field because they considered this not to be particularly fruitful line of funding.

Jeffrey 21:59

It's really remarkable that we sit around and we ask this question, why can't we do big things? And yet when we do a big thing and indefinitely extend the NPT, we don't even appreciate all of the things that went into it. I mean, there are so many people who played important roles that some of that was on the outside, but we just don't, When you don't know how you succeed, it then becomes very hard to sustain the practices that led to the success in the first place.

Michal 22:27

Yes. And actually, just to be clear, I mean, the PPNN was very broadly satisfied. So, for example, Sanders traveled in 1990s to Tehran. And they were so impressed by the PPN activities that they asked him to copy everything that PPN had ever published and send them a copy so their diplomats can read up on it. They have produced a news brief, which was a quarterly magazine on basically anything that happens in the nuclear world.

Sanders himself spoke, I think, speaks, he's still alive. Speaks like six or seven languages. So he would read newspapers really, really broadly. And if he didn't speak language, he would solicit contributions. It was really a very powerful network. And CNS today does some of these works, like providing these trainings in Vienna to diplomats and so on and so forth.

But I think it's also more difficult to fundraise activities for this and also to sort of provide the momentum.

Jeffrey 23:38

Yeah, I will stop rattling the little tin cup. But again, it just goes to my enormous love of successful non-governmental efforts to make the world a better place. And this is just, it's really one of them. Okay, the last indulgence, and then I will let you go, but I'm having such a good time. You wrote a wonderful paper about how conspiracy theories track or don't track with foreign policy preferences in Slovakia.

Michal 24:14

Yes.

Jeffrey 24:17

And this is incredible because I am someone who spends a lot of time, because I do so much open source work, I care a lot about disinformation and the role that disinformation plays. And I find the role of conspiracy theories, which are, I think, quite common, so interesting. And it was really, maybe this is my bias showing, but it was a very surprising result.

Michal 24:44

Yeah, so this was, we, I wrote this paper together with my friend Florian Stückel, who is at the University of Exeter. And we started, Florian is an expert in conspiracy theories, and he knows basically way more about conspiracy theories than me. I became interested in this topic a few years ago when I realized that people in my home country are really, first of all, they are really big fans of Russia, even though all the history and baggage.

And second, that there is a huge belief in conspiracy theories. About half of the population believes in different surveys shows that they believe in at least one of the conspiracy theories. And one of the things that we find is that The more people believe in conspiracy theories, the less they are likely to be supportive of the alignment of the country with the West.

And the more they are supposed to say that the country should go on its own and without alignment with other countries. But surprisingly enough, we don't really find that the country should be more favorable towards Russia. And we use the data from a survey where The question was in the conflict between the West and Russia, should we lean more with Russia or should we more lean towards the West?

Jeffrey 26:09

Yeah, I just, I found that so interesting because there is so much disinformation and, and I, you know, I, I won't say that the US government never engages in false statements, because I lived through the run up to the Iraq war. But disinformation has been such a common aspect of Russian foreign policy. And working on the open source side, it's like a deluge.

And I always wondered sort of, you know, well, what's the like, what's the mechanism? You know, how does that connect to a tangible foreign policy interest? And so I was also surprised that it didn't lead to more support for alignment with Russia, but it does look like it has a tangible effect on support for being West leaning.

Yes. And that to me was just really interesting. So that's an indulgence. But in general, I think it's a characteristic of your work that I like very much, which is that states are not the primary actor in your work. Human beings are, and that's just very appealing to me.

Michal 27:14

Yeah. I try to sort of find that the more and more I find that there is a law that happens below the level of state that actually matters greatly for international politics. And it's also, I mean, we live in democratic societies. And so what happens and what our fellow citizens think and what they vote for, that matters for how our countries then are going to behave.

Jeffrey 27:45

It's a great place to end it, but I have to ask you, is there anything else you'd like to say? I've had a great time.

Michal 27:49

I really enjoyed this and thank you very much for having me. I'm a huge fan of your podcast, so it's a great honor to be on it.

Jeffrey 27:56

Well, I'm a huge fan of yours. And let me again encourage everyone. The book is called Network Nonproliferation, Making the NPT Permanent. Michal Onderco, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you very much for having me.