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Trump Is Triggering a New Nuclear Weapons Race

In Trump 2.0 America, there is much to fear, ranging from social program funding cuts coupled with the destruction of federal agencies, to potential soaring consumer prices combined with a recession, to masked federal agents seizing people (no citizens as yet) in their homes or on the streets and making them disappear, to the effort to erase racial and sexual minorities, to the future one's children or grandchildren may face in a country with an increasingly fascist and authoritarian government.  Add to the list, as laid out in a very long piece in Politico Magazine is a new nuclear weapons race among former U.S. allies spurred on in part that the realization that America is no longer a reliable ally who will honor its defense treaty obligations.  Just as the Felon's tariff war has upended the world economy, so too have statements by the Felon and his henchmen - think Vance and Rubio - that have insulted Asian and European nations and suggested that when push comes to shove America may not honor its common defense agreements.  Hence countries from German, Poland, Japan and South Korea are beginning to discuss building their own nuclear arms defenses.  Here are article highlights:

In his first presidential term, shortly before heading off to what would become an infamous 2018 summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump called nukes “the biggest problem in the world” and summed up for reporters what he hoped to accomplish: “No more nuclear weapons anywhere in the world.” Trump has repeatedly sounded the theme in his second term as well, warning over and over of “World War III.”

So it’s more than a little curious to consider that, in less than three months as president, Trump has already set in motion the opposite trend: potentially the fastest and most dangerous acceleration of nuclear arms proliferation around the world since the early Cold War.

The new nuclear powers aren’t just the rogue nations that have long been the focus of U.S. concern, countries like Iran and North Korea. Increasingly, the nations considering going nuclear are longtime U.S. allies, from Germany to South Korea, Japan to Saudi Arabia. Faced with the threat of U.S. withdrawal from its defense commitments, more and more countries are now openly talking about embracing the bomb — and just as worrisome, actually deploying nukes if hostilities break out.

Nor is there any evidence that in the flurry of activity marking what Trump has called “the most successful” start of any presidency in U.S. history, his administration has even begun reckoning with the implications of these seemingly contradictory policies.

“I’ve heard it’s a pure ghost town,” said Matt Costlow, who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy in Trump’s first term. “There’s just no one there. And the staff that is there is spread so thin it’s causing this paralysis.” As a result, he adds, “I don’t know that the Trump administration yet has a set view on the desirability of allies going nuclear. I think there’s a mix of views.”

Yet it’s clear that Trump’s signaling of a global drawdown of the U.S. defense umbrella has also produced an accelerated trend toward building — or at least considering deploying — nuclear weapons. Potential U.S. adversaries as well as allies say they are puzzled by the fact that no one in the Trump administration seems willing or able to grapple with the issue.

In Beijing, Chinese officials are growing worried that “regional security is fragmenting and eventually they’ll have to deal with more nuclear or ‘nuclear-latent’ countries in Asia,” said Francesca Giovannini, head of the Project on

Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who met with Chinese officials in late March. The problem, she said, is that the Chinese “really have zero idea of who he will appoint for arms control dealings. The Trump people don’t have the expertise in place to make decisions.”

One senior official who was just confirmed by the Senate, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, has been a leading and often strident voice in pressing European and Asian allies to beef up their own defenses. Last year Colby told the Yonhap News Agency that South Korea was going to have to take “primary, essentially overwhelming, responsibility” for its own defense and added that Washington should not sanction Seoul if it decides to go nuclear.

In his Senate testimony in March, Colby also said that Trump believes Taiwan needs to boost its defense spending from under 3 percent to about 10 percent of gross domestic product to deter a war with China — a hike that Taiwanese Premier Cho Jung-tai called “impossible.”

Many U.S. allies now have a sense that Trump is abandoning the entire postwar global system and casting the world back into a vicious scramble for power in which the biggest powers get to dominate their regions and the smaller countries fend for themselves. Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but said as much in a Jan. 30 interview with conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, when he effectively conceded that Washington’s hegemonic global stature had been “an anomaly.”

“The message coming from the U.S. is that Trump’s foreign policy is all about spheres of influence. Russia can have Ukraine. China can have Taiwan,” said Karl Friedhoff, an expert in East Asian security at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

As a result, some national security experts say this could be turning into the most unstable period since the early Cold War — an unstable period that could have a lot more nukes in a lot more places.

The danger posed by nuclear weapons in the 21st century is shaping up to be a very different threat than it was in the 20th century.

For decades during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union built up massive arsenals of nuclear missiles that could be launched from the air, ground or sea. The destructive power of those weapons led the two nations to conclude a series of arms control agreements that eventually reduced the size of those arsenals.

Then, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, there was a concern that the breakup of the Soviet Union would result in loose nukes and newly independent post-Soviet states being armed with nuclear weapons. As a result, three former Soviet republics — Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus — were pressured into relinquishing the weapons stationed on their territories. In 1998, President Bill Clinton made an anguished plea to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not to test a bomb; after Sharif refused, Clinton imposed sanctions. Finally, in the mid-90s the Clinton administration pushed successfully to extend the NPT from 25 years to an indefinite term. Among the nations that ultimately gave up active nuclear weapons programs: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Italy, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Yugoslavia.

Today, largely as a result of all this frenetic diplomacy led by Washington, there are just nine nuclear powers in the world, as there have been for decades: the United States, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and most recently, North Korea.

Yet increasingly, nuclear weapons are being sought by countries that aren’t global superpowers but instead face threats from neighbors or regional rivals, such as Russia in Europe, or Iran in the Middle East. That means the nuclear equation is increasingly a region-by-region strategic puzzle with global ramifications.

Here’s some of what that looks like.

In Germany — a country where even discussing the bomb used to be a political third rail — the likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, didn’t rule out the idea of developing one in a March interview. Merz also said Berlin should start talks about expanding the French and British nuclear deterrents to Europe, and he suggested Germany may finally be ready to go along with France’s on-again, off-again push for strategic autonomy from the United States. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed extending France’s nuclear umbrella; on March 18 he said France will deploy its own Rafale fighter jets equipped with supersonic nuclear warheads along its border with Germany in 2035.

And in Poland, a NATO front-line nation, Prime Minister Donald Tusk in March became that country’s first leader to hint at going nuclear, saying in a speech his nation should “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” He also suggested that Ukraine made a mistake by giving up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s, leaving itself vulnerable to Russia.

As for Ukraine, which feels threatened with abandonment by Washington in the face of Russia’s aggression, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has openly talked about reestablishing a nuclear deterrent. . . . . “Say you’re Zelenskyy and you’re being forced into unsatisfactory peace with Russia without good security guarantees, what’s your best bet?” said Daniel Serwer of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Could the Ukrainians technically do this? Sure. Look what they’ve done driving the war. They know their business. They’ve handled a lot of nuclear material. They have good physicists and really good engineers. It’s not beyond Polish, German, Japanese or Taiwanese capabilities either.”

And in the long run a French guarantee of extended nuclear deterrence would not suffice for many European states. “Would the Poles see it as credible? Not a chance. It’s not likely the Germans would either,” said Roberts, who foresees a future of new regional groupings of nuclearized states, including the Nordic countries.

In the Middle East, experts believe Iran has been backed into a strategic corner since Israel decimated its proxy armies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that its leaders are now more motivated than ever to build a bomb. . . . Iran has raced to develop its program, and current assessments estimate that Iran is close to producing weapons-grade uranium and is only months, not years, away from completing a nuclear bomb.

Both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have indicated they would duplicate Iranian nuclear capabilities if Tehran got a bomb. Turkey will begin operating its Russia-built Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant — its first — this year. And numerous reports over the years have indicated that the Saudis may have a secret diplomatic understanding with Pakistan under which Riyadh could quickly obtain a nuclear weapon from Islamabad, which developed its own bomb in the 1990s with Saudi financial backing. (Saudi Arabia denies such an understanding.)

But since his first administration, Trump and senior defense officials also have been pushing Asian allies hard to build up their own defenses. As a result, in South Korea and even Japan — where building a bomb was once unthinkable after Hiroshima and Nagasaki — there is a new willingness to embrace nuclear weapons in some form. . . . since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we’ve seen a total wake-up call in Japan about what kind of additional military power to possess,” said Junjiro Shida, a national security expert at Meio University on Okinawa, where about half of the 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are stationed.

In a statement last fall, Ishiba proposed an “Asian version of NATO” that must “specifically consider America’s sharing of nuclear weapons or the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region.”

South Korean politicians have gone further. In January — a week before Trump’s inauguration — South Korea’s politically embattled president, Yoon Suk Yeol, said for the first time that his country might consider building nuclear weapons in the face of mounting threats from nuclearized North Korea. Yoon has since been ousted after being impeached for declaring martial law last year. But even his likely successor, Lee Jae-myung, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea — which once stoutly opposed nukes — has not ruled this out.

“There is growing doubt among allies and partners about whether the United States will meet its defense commitments when the chips are down,” said Eric Brewer, the former director for counterproliferation at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “But there are a lot of other systemic factors driving countries to talk about developing nuclear weapons. One is the deteriorating regional security environments. In Europe, [you have] Russia’s growing nuclear arsenal and threat. In Asia you have the growing North Korean and Chinese nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East you have Iran at the nuclear threshold. The other factor is the absence of cooperation among great powers.

But as Costlow and others point out, just a willingness to broach the prospect of going nuclear could be something of a Pandora’s box.

“I compare it to uranium enrichment: The first 20 percent is actually the hardest hurdle to overcome. The last 80 percent doesn’t take much time,” Costlow said. “For some of these countries just the fact that they’re now talking about becoming a potential nuclear state is the toughest hurdle.”

And, he added, they’re starting to clear it.

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Trump Is Demonstrating Why Dictatorships Fail

After wild gyrations in the stock market the market is again down, the American economy (and the world's) is at risk, and the trade war with China is intensifying with China now hitting back with 125% tariffs on American goods.   Meanwhile, the federal civil service is being torn asunder and war has been declared on public education with threats to withhold federal funding, efforts to rewrite history so than no one other than white heterosexual males play a role, and book banning.  All the result of a single individual who is a malignant narcissist and who has contempt for true experts and expertise in general. As bad as things are and the way prices are going to significantly rise thanks to irrational tariff actions, much of MAGA world continues to drink the Kool-Aid and grasps for anything to suggest their glorious leader is not wrong, be it citing lower oil prices  - which are dropping due to economic uncertainty caused by the Felon - or applauding the white washing of true history that puts their ancestors in a bad light (for disclaimer, I have my own slaving owners in Charleston, South Carolina, which is a reality I cannot change).   They refuse the ineptitude and arbitrariness of the Felons actions which as a piece in The Atlantic lays out shows why dictatorships eventually fail, especially under a petulant and vengeful dictator, after ding great damage to the country involved.  Here are column highlights: 

He blinked. But we don’t really know why.  Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions.

Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name.

But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.

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What Trump Just Cost America

There is some speculation that the Felon's rollercoaster, on again of again tariff circus is actually about stock market manipulation and the use of insider trading to allow the super wealthy to further enrich themselves.  Candidly, suggesting there is a plan behind the madness is likely too generous for a clown squad that simply doesn't know what it is doing and which has never had any careful thought out plan. The reality is that the tariff policy - if one can even call it that - is being driven by an impulsive, malignant narcissist who enjoys dominating the news cycle and who gets off by playing the tough guy and seeking to push others, both individuals and nations to grovel and to quote the Felon "kiss his ass." In the process of this shit show, incalculable damage has been done to America's economy and rather than weakening China, the Felon has unwittingly strengthened China's hand while convincing former friends and allies that America cannot be trusted and that investments in America need to be rethought. As pieces in both The New Yorker, The Atlantic and New York Times lay out what likely pushed the Felon to suddenly announce his 90 day pause in tariffs except against China were signs that the bond market, especially U.S. Treasury securities, was about to collapse, sending America into a severe financial crisis that would be blamed on one orange madman.   First, this from the Times on the damage done to America:

I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.

Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.

After creating havoc in the markets standing on these steadfast “principles” — undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell low out of fear — Trump reversed much of it on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries, excluding China.

Message to the world — and to the Chinese: “I couldn’t take the heat.” If it were a book it would be called “The Art of the Squeal.”

But don’t think for a second that all that’s been lost is money. A whole pile of invaluable trust just went up in smoke as well. In the last few weeks, we have told our closest friends in the world — countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us after Sept. 11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan — that none of them were any different from China or Russia. They were all going to get tariffed under the same formula — no friends-and-family discounts allowed.

Do you think these former close U.S. allies are ever going to trust getting into a trench with this administration again?

This was the trade equivalent of the Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan, from which it never quite recovered. But at least Joe Biden got us out of a costly no-win war for which America, in my opinion, is now much better off.

Trump just put us into a no-win war.

How so? We do have a trade imbalance with China that does need to be addressed. Trump is right about that. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has the industrial engines to pretty much make everything for everyone one day if it is allowed to. That is not good for us, for Europe or for many developing countries.

But when you have a country as big as China — 1.4 billion people — with the talent, infrastructure and savings it has, the only way to negotiate is with leverage on our side of the table. And the best way to get leverage would have been for Trump to enlist our allies in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into a united front. Make it a negotiation of the whole world versus China.

But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.

Now, Beijing knows that Trump not only blinked, but he so alienated our allies, so demonstrated that his word cannot be trusted for a second, that many of them may never align with us against China in the same way. They may, instead, see China as a better, more stable long-term partner than us.

What a pathetic, shameful performance. Happy Liberation Day.

As for the pending financial crisis that prompted the Felon to blink, The Atlantic has this (the New Yorker largely echoes the same storyline):

Only yesterday, President Donald Trump was mocking Republicans nervous about his global trade war as “Panicans.” In a defiant speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, he insisted, “This time I’m doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs,” and that only he had the courage to defy “the globalists.”

But the globalists turn out to have had enough power to bring Trump to heel after all. This afternoon, the president announced a 90-day pause on what he has called his “reciprocal tariffs” against every country other than China.

According to Charlie Gasparino of Fox News, Trump retreated in the face of troubling developments in the bond market. Asked by reporters, Trump didn’t deny this, noting that, even with a “beautiful” bond market, “I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy.” This was a completely new layer of danger that appeared overnight. Before yesterday evening, the interest rate on Treasury bonds had fallen slightly, a sign of increased demand as nervous investors retreated to the historically safe strategy of lending their savings to the U.S. government. Then, suddenly, investors began pulling money out, sensing that the U.S. government was no longer safe, a prospect that created the risk of everything from higher interest payments on the debt to a full-scale financial crisis.

All of this is to suggest that if a stock-market swoon, or even a recession, does not frighten Trump, the prospect of a 2008-style meltdown apparently still does. And so the gargantuan trade war is back off, for now.

Where does this leave the economy? The new 10 percent tariff on almost every good imported from every country not controlled by Vladimir Putin remains in place.

That policy is, to be clear, quite harmful. Despite Trump’s rhetoric about reindustrialization, the universal tariff applies indiscriminately to almost every country and product. Some of those products, like coffee and bananas, cannot be practically grown in the United States, and will just get more expensive. Others, like metals and other industrial inputs, will make American manufacturing less competitive, not more.

The stock market surged after Trump’s “pause” announcement, but once the relief wears off, reality is likely to dull investors’ enthusiasm. Goldman Sachs, absorbing the news, has returned to its previous economic forecast, which calls for meager 0.5 percent economic growth this year and a 45 percent chance of recession. That is not the blinking-light disaster that the economy was facing before the pause, but it is still terrible, and much worse than the situation Trump inherited when he took office.

Nobody has made a new trade agreement with Trump. To the contrary, other countries have found the administration unable to even articulate its goals or objectives, because Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs are the product of a nonsensical formula putatively serving a grab bag of mutually exclusive goals.

To the extent that the reciprocal tariffs created any leverage, it rests on the side of Trump’s counterparties, who now know that he may be a madman, but is not mad enough to risk a full-blown global economic meltdown. The gun on the table is pointed at Trump’s own foot.

Trump could very well restore the gigantic tariffs, especially if he feels humiliated by today’s events. The likelier outcome is that he will muddle through with policies that push prices up and growth down, but don’t directly precipitate an economic collapse. Trump’s allies will tolerate an enormous amount of damage to the country, especially damage that takes place over an extended period of time or primarily hurts people who aren’t rich. Immediate, massive harm to his wealthiest supporters appears to be one of the few red lines that Trump still won’t cross.

The end result of all the insanity?  America is weaker and more isolated than ever in recent memory while its enemies smile as they gleefully watch the self-inflicted harm the Felon has wrought.

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