2 Donald 2 Nuclear

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

Either president of South Korea or the head of FIFA.

Aaron Stein 0:05

So he's either corrupt or corrupt-er-er.

Jeffrey 0:15

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I am Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in the very famously foggy bit of California.

Aaron 0:32

And I'm Aaron Stein, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Ropey Career Center for the Middle East in a very gray and starting to get cold Washington, D.C.,

Jeffrey 0:40

Now, Aaron, is that metaphorically post-election gray or is it actually gray? Can it be both? So we're going to talk about Trump and the bomb. I guess we're going to be talking a lot about the Donald and the nuclear over the next four years.

Aaron 0:54

He did make multiple appearances in our recent podcast, including one from Las Vegas.

Jeffrey 1:00

Ah, yes. Well, the Queens-born casino magnate is the president-elect of the United States. We can't do all of the things he has said, but I think over the next four years, we'll be talking about his views on nuclear weapons quite a bit, and today I wanted to focus on allies, extended deterrence, and non-proliferation.

Aaron 1:22

Are you ready to do this, Aaron? I am ready. I'm ready. He's now our president-elect, and we've got to dive in and engage him.

Jeffrey 1:29

Hey, first I want to give a word of caution, though, because I think it's a little strange. Like, what we do is important, and nuclear war would be terrible. But nuclear issues are one of these things where we have this huge impact, but it's actually a very low risk. And I feel a little bit... I feel a little bit uncomfortable because of all of the bad things I think that people are afraid of for a Trump presidency.

There's been this focus on nuclear issues, and I feel like that often crowds out kind of everyday harms like the surge in hate crimes or someone losing their health insurance. And so as bad as we say things are going to be, I would feel worse if we weren't giving appropriate attention to To, I think, the core reason that lots of people voted against Mr. Trump.

Aaron 2:24

I think that's right. For the listeners of this podcast, and even just by virtue of my own title, I focus very much on foreign policy. But I think a lot of people... Voted against him for concerns about domestic policy, things that we only talk about on this podcast within the context of nuclear weapons issues, or nuclear weapons, missiles, WMD issues, to where probably in our day-to-day lives, most of our conversations about President-elect Trump will be his impact on social policies or changes to our everyday life.

Jeffrey 3:02

Which you have, unfortunately, already begun to experience.

Aaron 3:05

Right, and so... I happen to be married to a Muslim from Turkey, and we have a young child. The podcast went away on hiatus because I was on paternity leave. And it was slightly before the election, but nevertheless within a couple of days of the polls. And my wife only speaks Turkish to our kids so we can learn it because we find that to be important to raise a multicultural kid.

And we had people in the Pennsylvania-Philadelphia airport, you know, Snapping at her a little louder than under their breath, so enough to be heard, about to speak English. And that's just not something I want to deal with, to be completely honest with you, and it makes you feel helpless, and you have no idea what to do when you experience these things.

And so I get why people are upset, and I'm white with blue eyes and blonde hair. I look fine.

Jeffrey 4:00

Right. So, you know, I think we're going to try to take apart some of the things that Trump has said about allies and extended deterrence and nonproliferation. And we're going to try to give him the benefit of the doubt and try to treat these ideas seriously and subject them to scrutiny as we would anyone else. But at least from my perspective, I just think it's important that we not lose sight of the fact that, you know, We're probably not all going to die in a nuclear war, and if there are arms that come along, it'll probably be that kind of stuff.

And that stuff is important, because we're going to talk about hypothetical dead people.

Aaron 4:33

Right. It'll only take 30 minutes for them to get here anyway, so you wouldn't have that much time to be concerned.

Jeffrey 4:42

It reminds me of Brzezinski when he got the false alarm, decided not to wake up his wife because he figured if it was an attack, it was better to let her die in her sleep.

Aaron 4:50

That's right. So, you know, it'll be a quick death. It'll be cool. But we're not going to have a nuclear war because we're going to be winning. Right. And they're going to be listening to our podcast.

Jeffrey 5:02

Aaron, we're going to win so much, you're going to be tired of all the winning. That's right. I don't know what to say. Well, you know one of the ways we're going to win? How? We're going to get our allies to pay their fair share. You don't. And if they don't, guess what? What? They could build nuclear weapons.

And guess what will happen if they build nuclear weapons?

Aaron 5:28

The world will be a merrier and safer place?

Jeffrey 5:30

They'll all die in a nuclear war, so guess what?

Aaron 5:33

They're going to pay up. They're going to pay up. Yep. Before we start, you know, because we're going to talk about this, the shaking down and running your foreign policy, at least extended deterrence, like a mafia state, to extract rent from those that are ostensibly under the protection of the United States, largely in exchange for the MPTs, it just doesn't strike me as a good idea.

Jeffrey 5:57

He's a Queens-born casino magnet.

Aaron 6:00

Right. I mean, yeah. And...

Jeffrey 6:05

What do you think?

Aaron 6:06

What were you expecting? Well, not much. But I think what makes me slightly uncomfortable, and I'm going to be completely honest about this, is that, you know, like, As the campaign was unfolding, you began to see stories that the way he ran his campaign mimicked those of the way he ran his casinos, which is that he would shake down a lot of his contractors to not pay them for services rendered.

He did the same with his pollsters. And then you see that replicated at the international level with our allies on extended deterrence. And I just wonder if he's applying the same sort of logic to our allies as he is to the guys who installed the drapes at Taj Mahal.

Jeffrey 6:51

Yeah, I think the place I want to enter this conversation is this question of whether or not Donald Trump supports more countries building nuclear weapons. Because actually, I think it is a really rich and interesting discussion. One of his... First tweets as president-elect was a response to an article that our friend Max Fisher wrote. Friend of the pod.

Yep, friend of the pod. Friend of the pod, Max Fisher, now at the New York Times, wrote kind of, I guess you'd call it a tick-tock of Trumpian foreign policy positions. And as Max ran through them, he said one of the things Trump said is that more countries should get nuclear weapons. And Trump sent, you know, a very typically Trumpian tweet back out.

You know, this is a very dishonest and he never said it. But he kind of did. And I had a little tweet storm where I think I started off by saying he said it. I understand why he thinks he didn't say it. But it matters, right? And so I thought that would be a good place to start because of all of the questions I'm getting, right?

I'm getting a lot of questions from countries, from people in countries that are allies, like what does this guy mean, right? And I think there is this very interesting insight into his approach to foreign policy if we access this idea of like, why is it that he on repeated occasions have said more countries should build nuclear weapons?

Because I actually don't think it's that simple.

Aaron 8:21

Yeah, and I'm going to challenge you on one part of that, is that nothing about your tweet storm was little. You geared up a 25 tweet storm about this topic, but particularly applicable to South Korea. And I read it this morning, and it reminded me... Actually, the first, and listeners will not believe this, but the only time you and I have met in person was at...

The Carnegie Conference in 2013, the last one. That's true. And one of your tweets that day were epic because you were talking about the amount of white men in the audience, which I think is applicable to our current status quo.

Jeffrey 9:08

Hey, you know how many white men were on that panel?

Aaron 9:16

All I can remember is you in the balcony. All of them.

Jeffrey 9:19

Yeah, no, you're right. I was up in the balcony counting, not just the number of white men, but the distribution where people chose to sit. Turns out white men, not afraid of sitting up front.

Aaron 9:31

No, no, no. And as a white man, I was down below, but in the back. So I think that was more of my junior status at the time, a struggling PhD student trying to network. But one of the speeches was something I think that you referenced in your tweetstorm, and it's I mean, that's what it sort of made me think of, because as somebody who deals with the Middle East every single day, my brain doesn't jump over to South Korea or Japan, where I think yours does.

Jeffrey 10:01

So at that conference, MJ Chung, who is the scion of the Hyundai fortune, and a man who would very much like to be either president of South Korea or the head of FIFA. Right? Right. Yeah, this is true. Those are his two passions. So he's either corrupt or corrupt-er? Well, he ran as the reform candidate in FIFA.

But he funds something called the Asan Institute. And at the 2013 Carnegie Nonproliferation Conference, he gave a speech at which he called for South Korea to temporarily withdraw from the NPT and build nuclear weapons. Which, you know, to go before a nonproliferation conference and suggest a startling act of proliferation, that takes something.

Aaron 10:57

Yeah. And this links back into what Max was talking about. It's just in the articulation of Donald Trump's foreign policy as we know it. And one thing I want to be clear about is because I'm getting the same questions you are. But just take out South Asia and then put in place Syria or Turkey or Iraq. And I struggle.

I don't know about you. I struggle to come up with a clear and coherent answer to his foreign policy because in his various long interviews about it, they're all over the place, and it's entirely contradictory. And we've talked about this previously. In previous podcasts about Donald and the nuclear, is that he, at various times, when speaking about nuclear weapons, inadvertently, because he doesn't know policy speak, really bluntly says some things that actually aren't all that crazy.

It's like, if we have nuclear weapons, why can't we use them? But at the same time, he then, you know, talks about running foreign policy as a mafia shakedown racket and seems to encourage proliferation. And those policies, to me, are at odds with one another. And I think he's going to have to have to figure out which one exactly he wants as he begins the position of governor.

Jeffrey 12:24

Well, one of the things I found that was really interesting about these times when he talked about other countries building nuclear weapons is how contradictory the things he said were. And I mean contradictory from sentence to sentence to the point where the interviewer is saying, you know, well, you just said this and now you're saying the opposite.

Right. And so I read through all of these things really carefully to address this question of like, well, Like he did say we would be better off if Japan and South Korea and other countries built nuclear weapons. And yet he denies it. Right. And he's denied it repeatedly. And the question is, like, why doesn't he think that he said it?

And I have, I think, an explanation. And it gets to this idea of a shakedown every single time that Donald Trump has talked about the. Possibility that other countries would build nuclear weapons. And he's done it. He did it basically. It came up in an interview with David Sanger and Maggie, is it Haberman at the New York Times?

Yeah. And he said it there. Right. And then he got asked about it. Right. And so then I think he said it to Anderson Cooper, who asked him about it. And then he like riffed on it at one of his, you know, Triumph of the Will style rallies in Wisconsin. Right. Go ahead and laugh at that. That was funny.

Aaron 13:52

It was sad, but... That's the state that... Wisconsin was... When it was falling, I went to bed because I couldn't watch the end. But anyway.

Jeffrey 14:02

So at the rally, he kind of riffs on it, right? And... He only brings up the idea of other countries building nuclear weapons as the second part of a two part argument. Right. The first part is always, as you say, this idea that our allies need to pay more. And so he's always starting this conversation by saying – and often he'll say, no, I don't think it's good for nuclear weapons to spread.

And then the interviewer is looking now confused because – but you said we're better off. And then he'll attempt to clarify. And in this kind of Trumpian discursive manner, he will say – The Allies need to pay more. We can't be the world's policemen. They have to pay more. And if they don't pay more, we won't protect them.

They'll have to protect themselves. And so I think what he's doing is he's doing this shakedown. If you don't pay more, we won't protect you. And I think he is then... Mm-hmm. And I think really you see it at the rally in Wisconsin, which is where he says he goes from talking about the spread of nuclear weapons to the possibility of a nuclear war in Northeast Asia.

Right. And he says, enjoy yourselves, folks. Right. So I actually think. In his mind, he thinks he's calling a bluff. He doesn't think he is saying it's good for proliferation. I think in his mind, he's saying, I'm running this shakedown. I'm going to get these allies to pay more. And when people point out that, yeah, well, that's not...

Realistic, like they're not going to pay more, and and at some point you know you're offering them such a bad deal, they'll just build nuclear weapons, and you know basically take the burden of defending themselves at the cost of our leadership, and and he thinks he's calling that bluff, right? Like, oh yeah, good luck, you know that'll probably end up with South Korea getting nuked. So you know, no, they'll pay up, right? He's running, at least I think the logic training behind it. I agree with you.

Aaron 16:37

Is the same way he applied at least one anecdote from the campaign, which was about his pollsters. You know, we're outstanding bills, and of course, which he will try and draw down or negotiate down the price of the polls that he commissioned, although inverted. And he says, you know, begin to negotiate to increase the amount of money people pay into this collective sort of mythical pot that the U.S. then reallocates back out to the defense of allies.

And my problem with it is not sort of at the abstract level, let's just take NATO, is that the Allies should not have their feet held to the fire to pay the 2% quota. It presupposes that the U.S. doesn't get any benefit out of these bases abroad. You know, and that is if they're just sort of chess pieces we should be playing with to try and extract more rent out of the countries that in a hypothetical scenario where we would have to go to war with a near peer adversary, you would want to bandwagon with at the very least have access to bases close to the places you are theoretically going to go to war in.

It is independent of nukes.

Jeffrey 17:51

Right. And so, you know, to me I mean, I should be clear. I think this is a fantastically terrible idea.

Aaron 18:00

I hope that was clear on my own topic.

Jeffrey 18:02

No, no, it is. It is in yours. But I feel like as I'm explaining his logic chain, I run some risk of sounding like I think any of this makes any sense. And I don't. But I think one of the nicer things somebody said on Twitter was when I put out this giant tweet storm is it was like, Oh, so this thing he said, it's bad, but it's not bad in the way you think it is, right?

It's bad in this other way. And that's really where, you know, I think we want to sort of draw people's attention. It's not that he is sitting there saying, you know, that he's some kind of Ken Waltz pro-proliferation academic, right? Like, that would be bad, right, if he were saying, like, no, no, we should give everybody nuclear weapons because that's stabilizing.

That would be bad but in some strange way intellectually respectable. I actually think it's this worst case where he's saying we need to shake our allies down to get more money out of them. And if the risk of that is that they build their own nuclear weapons, they'll regret it. And so chances are they'll pay us. And if they don't, you know, that'll be a lesson for the other ones.

Now, what I think is interesting about that is, you know, you do a lot more NATO. You know, in Japan, the Japanese government reimburses us. Well, I shouldn't say reimburses, but they offset the cost of U.S. military forces in Japan by about 70%. Which is a really substantial contribution to the cost of defending Japan. Those forces, if you brought them home, would be more expensive.

You know, yeah, we do pay something for the defense of Japan. And, you know, it seems odd to me that people would expect that we would like turn a profit off that. Right. Because the reason we do it is it's in our interest to have Northeast Asia be democratic and free and open to trade.

Aaron 20:00

And, you know, like the four U.S. security is the most naked power projection.

Jeffrey 20:05

Right, like that's a profound interest, and so there's nothing wrong with paying to defend your interests. It is nice that the Japanese, well, it's more than nice. It is important that the Japanese share the burden, but they do. There's this wonderful report that DOD used to produce, and they don't produce it anymore, and I don't know why.

It's called Allied Contributions to the Common Defense.

Aaron 20:29

I saw it. It was in your 25-megatweet store, not your little tweet store.

Jeffrey 20:33

Yeah. Do I keep calling it a little tweet storm? I don't know.

Aaron 20:36

I'm going to just bust you a little bit because 25 is pretty good.

Jeffrey 20:41

Well, someday I'm going to get up to 100. And, you know, that has how much countries spend on defense and foreign aid relative to their GDP and also has numbers for reimbursement rates. And so the Japanese – I keep calling it reimbursement rate. I shouldn't. It's an offset rate. And the Japanese rate has always been high. Now, what I think is really interesting – Is that the South Korean number has always been lower.

The Japanese offset to about 70%. Historically, the Koreans offset to like 40%. But... That number recently went up. Before Trump began criticizing the Obama administration about South Korea not paying enough, the Obama administration got South Korea to pay more. And now the offset is, I think, about 50%, according to U.S. Forces Korea. So, like... We are kind of already shaking them down.

I mean it's not actually a shakedown. There's a bunch of other stuff going on and I want to talk about that relationship. But I think it's – first of all, it's crazy to think that we're going to get more money out of these countries. But second of all, like I don't know – like it doesn't matter, right?

Like it's not that much money.

Aaron 22:05

It's not a deal to get curtains in your hotel. And I think that's my fundamental problem with it. And it's something that I thought about when reading your 25-part mega Twitter tweet store, was breaking this down into a cost calculation, even in that report that you tweeted this morning, sort of misses the broader picture about a lot of the intrinsic value of...

Again, U.S. forward positioning, the U.S. spearheading a very loose, let's call it, coalition, but nevertheless pretty robust. And I believe this was in the Petraeus piece in Foreign Affairs, about 60-odd countries where the U.S. can have some sort of basing rights around the world, and what that actually represents in addition to just the simple dollars and cents.

And then what I think is interesting Going back to my original comments about him being a wild card and not being able to clearly articulate how he would actually govern, is I think a lot of his comments on these are built upon profound ignorance of these topics because two things. One, it didn't fit his sort of populist message as he was campaigning.

But two, during that campaign, Nobody, except for those two foreign policy pieces, really pushed him to articulate policy. It was a negative attack on him in that you don't want him to have the nuclear codes, he's unfit to be president, rather than he's unfit to be president, but let's push him on his policy proposals, other than the wall, which was easy to articulate.

So I'm not sure how he will begin to approach these issues as he begins the challenge of actually governing.

Jeffrey 23:55

Yeah, I mean, I do think that and I think your experience on on the NATO side is maybe more useful here. But the purpose of burden sharing isn't just to make it financially feasible to defend allies. I mean, there is some element of that. Right. But really, the purpose of burden sharing is to. I mean, I hate this term free rider, right?

Because it's not exactly the nature of the problem. What you really need is you need your allies to be committed to the common defense. You need them to be willing to make the political argument to their own populations that, you know, working collectively to ensure security is an important thing, right? It's not just that countries might be free riders in the sense that they might, you know, not contribute enough money, right?

It's that they aren't contributing the Political support for the cohesion of the alliance. And I think the thing that bothers me about the shakedown approach is you're showing up in Japan or South Korea where It's not a straight, like they pay and we protect them deal. Like they have constituencies in those countries that find it humiliating that they have to be in an alliance and would prefer to be more independent.

And, you know, I think that's, I think that's a distinct minority in Japan. It's not ever likely to be the dominant view in Japan, but it absolutely could be the dominant view in South Korea. I mean, the South Koreans, I think, on a day-to-day basis, it is a question about whether a majority of people in the South Korean government Would prefer the alliance with the United States, all the good things that provides, but also all of the ways they feel constrained versus having none of that, but also none of the constraints.

So, you know, my what I really wanted to get at in the tweet storm is like, I think, you know, he's shaking them down for money and thinks he's calling their bluff. I don't think the South Koreans are bluffing.

Aaron 26:13

No.

Jeffrey 26:15

And I guess my question to you is, so Aaron, what I wonder about you is, he gets asked about Saudi Arabia at one point, right? And what he says about Saudi Arabia is, oh, no, no, no, they can't build the bomb, but they do have to pay more or protect themselves, right? And I, you know, Middle East expert, does it work like that?

Because it doesn't work like that in Asia.

Aaron 26:38

No, it doesn't work like that. Obviously, and what I detected in the differences between the South Korean and the Saudi argument was something that's not limited to Trump. But we talked about in the previous podcast, I think about Fareed Zakaria, and this is an analogy that because the Saudis can't manufacture cars, they can't manufacture the bomb. It was something along that line.

So I actually found his comments on Saudi to be sort of reflective of his own anti-Islam biases. But you've had this very weird dynamic in the Middle East. And I can talk about Turkey, but most of the Gulf countries is this odd sorts of pleasure at Trump's election because of the inherent sort of anger at the Obama administration.

I shouldn't say all the Gulf, but a lot of the Gulf, over their policy in Syria. And so... The Turks were applauding Trump. I believe the Saudis were, let's just say, not unhappy with the results. But all of that goodwill goes away if you begin to treat the alliance as a shakedown. Right? And they're going to be asking a lot of him on recalibrating his approach to, say, Iran.

And And again, it just remains to be seen how he handles this once he begins the process of governing, because his positions on, say, Saudi were all over the place. They have to pay more. They have millions of dollars and billions of dollars in oil revenue. They should be giving more of it to us. In the wake of his election, you hear murmurs that one of his first policy proposals is going to be working closer with the GCC.

On rolling back Iranian influence in the Middle East. These are inherently contradictory policy proposals. And again, I hate to sound like a broken record, I don't know which one he's going to pursue.

Jeffrey 28:42

Yeah, I found that a really interesting dynamic. I remember at the time that some Gulf states were publicly supportive of the JCPOA, but with gritted teeth, right? So they supported the Iran deal, but you could tell that there was a certain amount of aggravation. I remember saying to a friend from the region, look, you surely don't want to see this thing collapse, and you surely don't Want to see...

I can't remember if Trump was on the scene yet, but it was kind of like... I get that there's this incredible frustration with Obama over Syria, but... Blowing things up would be worse, right? And this is a very sophisticated person who made a very sensible, I think, observation, which is like, right, there are interests, and those interests are constraining.

But there is this aggravation, right? And so people might— Have these kinds of self-destructive short-term impulses. And I think, you know, we see a little bit of that, which is that there was this kind of enthusiasm for Trump, but then almost immediately we've seen senior Saudi figures say, like, well, you know, we said we didn't love the JCPOA, but you're not going to actually get rid of the Iran deal, right?

You know, and and and I think, you know, then there is also this uncertainty or anxiety about like, you know, all of the language about making allies pay more. And so I do think that there is this frustration with the Obama administration, which, you know, frankly, I think you and I have said we share particularly in certain policies.

But like now that the reality of something different is setting in. You know, it's like, holy crap.

Aaron 30:41

Yeah, and it's one of the inherent advantages of being in the United States is that, you know, just like we talked about it, I think, three podcasts ago in this sort of great game to try and put words. At that time, we were talking about Secretary Clinton, and that was about the long-range standoff cruise missile so that we can hold our feet to the fire after she goes into office.

Yes. Right this is the old bureaucratic game of getting a principal to say something so then they feel obligated to follow through on it even if they wish they hadn't said it right so countries are doing exactly the same thing now now they know who the new u.s leader is going to be and i think you're seeing jockeying amongst you know allies around the world to try and get trump to at least go on the record and say something that would be reflective of their own interests And I think Saudi is one of them, you know.

Yeah, I just think Saudi is one of them who is engaging in that type of approach. It will be interesting to see, again, how he approaches this, because on the one hand, he ran on this disentangle us from foreign interventions abroad. You know, and in part doing so made odd statements and disconcerting statements about the topics we're talking about today, proliferation and nuclear weapons.

You know, but at the same time, you know, Were involved in multiple different conflicts in the Middle East, one of which is Yemen that Saudis will care about. And so they may be cheering him now, but when he begins to look at that conflict, as he begins to grapple with the actual office, will his instincts be to go back to campaign mode or sort of traditional alliance management?

Jeffrey 32:31

Yeah, James Acton said something that I thought was pretty smart about this, which was a series of tweets cautioning. First of all, it isn't clear that Trump Understands what the day-to-day business of being president is.

Aaron 32:46

I think it's clear he doesn't. And that's not partisan. I just don't think he understands. I think he's got a very steep learning curve.

Jeffrey 32:55

Yeah. And, you know, to be fair, Obama, too, had a very steep learning curve. I mean, Obama made a series of personnel decisions at the beginning of administration that hobbled him for, you know, six months or a year while it while they figured out how government actually worked. So it's not it's not unique to a Trump administration, although the the the steepness, I feel like step should be a word.

But the steepness of the learning curve does seem like it's going to be pretty shocking. I mean, I think The New York Times had that story where and, you know, this may be leaks from the Obama side, but like it appeared that it had not occurred to them that the entire White House staff was partisan and so would be departing with the president.

Yeah.

Aaron 33:40

I just have Twitter on in the background, you know, and Ash Carter, this is Monday at 1.26 p.m. East Coast time, told the press pool that the transition team for the Pentagon still hasn't been there.

Jeffrey 33:52

Yeah, right. It's like, you know, I mean, I don't think Ash is going to stick around, you know. Something tells me he's not. Yeah. So, you know, I think they don't. So James's caution, which which was important enough to me to interrupt you for right was was very explicit. Like Trump doesn't really know what he thinks about all this universe of stuff.

Totally agree. He has been winging it, right? Totally agree. And he's probably going to continue to wing it. And he doesn't have a deep understanding of what he's going to need to do bureaucratically. And as he picks people or as people pick people for him or with him or whatever the model that they set up is, it's not clear that he is going – most presidents pick people because they like them, because they like what they think about one issue.

So you're not – No one truly knows what it is that the president elect thinks or what the president elect will do as president. so I, I cut you off, Aaron, because I felt like I thought James did it. No, James kind of jumping in, James in far more concise terms completely articulated what I was trying to say.

Aaron 35:13

But, I mean, that's exactly what I'm trying to say. And I think a lot will depend on who he puts in place and who falls underneath them, who will then begin the task of actually making policy. Because, as I said earlier, the campaign was completely devoid of policy, except for a few interviews he gave on... On the way he would handle alliances.

And I'm not supposed to drive this, but I'm curious. I just want to flip around and actually ask you a question. Because it came up in your tweet storm. What do you think he thinks about nonproliferation? And I know I'm driving here and I'm not supposed to, but I'm actually just curious. What do you think he thinks about nonproliferation to begin to make some guesses about it?

Jeffrey 36:06

Well, that's actually where I think we want to end up. Because... On the one hand, he has said... He denies it, but it is not true. Like he has, in fact, said that he would support countries getting nuclear weapons. But I think the reason that he doesn't see himself saying that is he doesn't see that as a proliferation policy.

He sees that as a policy about getting money from allies. And I think for him, there is no like proliferation is this kind of abstract bad thing. But, and, and this is where I really am worried about this general approach. Like he doesn't think he supports proliferation because he abstractly thinks it's bad, but he does think that in the course of running the protection racket that he thinks the alliances or shaking down our allies, he does think that it's no big deal, or at least we should say it is no big deal if certain countries get nuclear weapons.

Right. And so What I worry about is his idea that proliferation is kind of bad, but not always and not with every country. That is fundamentally unsustainable. We had this policy in the United States through the 1960s where we thought proliferation was fine when our allies did it, and it was bad when our enemies did it, right?

Yeah. And what China testing a nuclear weapon in 1964 did was to shock a significant but not majority of people in Washington, I think, into understanding that. Mm-hmm. And where you cordon off the countries that have already built nuclear weapons and you say for them, you have to commit to disarmament. Everybody else has to commit to nonproliferation.

And if you come later, you still can't join the nuclear club because it has to stop and the rules have to be as much as possible the same for everyone. And the thing about that is that's not... That is still, I think, not a widely accepted view. You know, the Nixon administration, there's a wonderful document. I think I talk about this all the time.

When Nixon supported seeking ratification of the NPT in the U.S., he made it clear in the document announcing that decision that there would be no effort to pressure West Germany or other U.S. allies to join the treaty. You know, it was like a classic, like, have my cake and eat it, too. Like, OK, well, we'll support this treaty for like everybody in the world except our friends.

Right. And, you know, I think you still see echoes of that in the way that the Bush administration approached the India nuclear deal. Right. Which is, well, they have nuclear weapons and we kind of want to be friends with them. And, you know, even if the rules should apply to them, they're outside the rules. So let's make an exception for them.

Right. But I think if you go about nonproliferation and disarmament this way and you try to make exceptions for your friends in the countries you like. Right. Which is sort of how Trump talks about it. Right. Well, it's OK for this country, but it's not OK for this country. Or, you know, this country isn't going to pay.

So we're going to let them do it themselves. Like once you start down that path of making exceptions, I just don't think that the regime as a whole is is survivable. Right. It's just you have to, I think, approach these things systemically. And he doesn't. Right. And so I actually think he truly believes that he opposes the spread of nuclear weapons.

But from the way he talks about it, it's clear to me he doesn't support the structures we've put in place to oppose the spread of nuclear weapons. And so regardless of what he thinks he thinks, right, his actions are going to be to undermine those structures. And so, like, I really worry he's going to shake down the South Koreans and he's going to end up with the South Korean bomb and he's going to shake down the Saudis and he's going to be shocked to learn that, like, yeah, actually they can figure out how to build a bomb.

And then we're going to be in this era in which there is more proliferation and not less. And he's, you know, going to be like, you know, gee, this is terrible, and he is not going to see that it's his policies that have put this into place.

Aaron 40:56

Right, and if I can distill that down, actually, stop provoking me when you're speaking against this. Is treating non-proliferation as a bilateral transactional issue rather than something of the, you know, basically for the global commons to engage in outside of a few rogue actors. You know, but not realizing that dealing with it in this transactional manner, even with ostensible allies, erodes global trust in institutions that go beyond dollars and cents.

You know, because one thing... When we were having our earlier conversation about calculating the cost of American deployments elsewhere and how you offset them with contributions from allies is cost curve for defending against an erosion of nonproliferation norm. And all that entails. And that's the problem, in my opinion, with treating allies who Are restrained. South Korea, it's not as if they haven't thought about the bomb before, but are ultimately restrained by this combination of an American security commitment, perhaps something to do with internal politics.

I will let you discuss because I have actually no idea. But on top of both of that is the other half of that American security commitment that hardly ever gets talked about, which is the expectation that others will be restrained as well. So you buy into the bargain as long as it stays beneficial to you. And you don't want that to erode

Jeffrey 42:33

Yeah, Aaron, I think that's exactly right. I mean, if I was going to wrap this up in a nutshell, I would say he thinks about extended deterrence as a cost. It's something that we have to pay for. And as much as possible, we should get money back for that. And At some narrow level, that's right. We have to spend money.

But it is not a cost. It is an investment. It's not an expenditure in which we lay out money and someone else gets the benefit. It's an investment in a stable, functioning world order, the primary beneficiary of which is us. And so to the extent that he loses sight of the fact that it's an investment and turns it into this kind of narrow transactional thing, even if those countries keep paying, he's still eroding the basic normative framework in which these countries think that there is this world order and that world order is one that's worth investing in and defending in and participating in.

You know, I mean, I... Not to get all academic, but I mean, I think the best academic work on the spread of nuclear weapons is is the academic work that emphasizes how countries that think about building nuclear weapons are led and what they're, as you said, for South Korea, what their internal politics are. Right. And how those leaders think of themselves.

Right. Because it's not just a straight calculation. And so, you know, I'm a big believer in the alliance system and a big believer in extended deterrence. Right. And we talk about burden sharing. But that burden that we're sharing is not a cost. It's an investment.

Aaron 44:22

Yeah. But Aaron, go ahead. No, I couldn't have said it better myself.

Jeffrey 44:27

So you were supposed to tell me that we weren't really ending on a happy note.

Aaron 44:34

That's true. I mean, because... Well, we sort of got academic and philosophical there at the end, so there was a hope for a better future. But I think that goes beyond at least the debates that are taking place now amongst the transition team that Trump has in place, presuming one is in place.

Jeffrey 44:52

But I do have a happy thought.

Aaron 44:54

I know. So I'm waiting for you to tell me and cheer me up.

Jeffrey 44:58

It's a happy thought about doomsday.

Aaron 45:02

What is a happy thought about doomsday?

Jeffrey 45:06

No matter how bad it is, you only have to experience it once. That's right. That's right. He can only end life on the planet once.

Aaron 45:16

That is right. It takes two to tango, too. Somebody else has to go down that rabbit hole with him.

Jeffrey 45:24

Yeah, and it's probably not going to be his new BFF, Vladimir Putin, which is another podcast that we should have soon.

Aaron 45:29

We'll have that podcast a different time because that one deserves more than 30 seconds start to the end here.

Jeffrey 45:35

Hey, Aaron.

Aaron 45:36

Yes.

Jeffrey 45:38

Thanks for joining me. Thank you. Hey, Scott. Hey. Thanks for super producing. And thank you, listeners. If you like the podcast, please leave us an iTunes review. It helps get the word out. You can also support us by making a commitment on our Patreon page.

Scott LaFoy 45:53

Scott, that's your cue. So we just launched our backer Slack channel for all Patreon backers at the $3 level and above. So head on over to Patreon. Check that out. We've already had a couple listeners drop in. And that's something we're getting started now. So take a look.

Jeffrey 46:11

I'll post that document that Dick Nixon signed about the NPT and the Slack channel. Hey, thanks, Scott. Thanks, Aaron. And thanks for listening.