President Donald Trump’s transactional approach to international relations represents an “America First” vision of withdrawal from free trade, “forever wars,” unprofitable alliances, and the burdens of American post-war hegemony. But what kind of new world order will it produce?
The recent reversals in America’s Ukraine policy—the threat to cut off military support, the proposed vassalization of the country, the public humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky—suggest the outlines of an emerging world order. Considering Ukraine’s current fate invites a painful counterfactual evaluation: Would any of this be happening if it had not agreed, in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of 1994, to give up its nuclear weapons?
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the third largest stockpile of nuclear warheads in the world was in Ukraine. Its nuclear disarmament was completed by 1996, after it received security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, in keeping with the vital interest in nuclear non-proliferation following the end of the Cold War. But Russia then invaded Ukraine in 2014, annexing Crimea, and foreshadowing the current invasion, which began in 2022 and seems likely to end in the country’s partition.
“We should expect every mid-sized state to want to join the club of nuclear powers.”
What lessons should Taiwan, say, take from the Russian invasion of Ukraine? All the conventional force that Ukraine and its backers have mustered on its behalf since 2022 has evidently proven insufficient to save the country because it could never risk seriously antagonizing Russia, a nuclear power. How should Taiwan expect to fare in the event of the expected Chinese blockade? Should it depend on an adequate American-led response, which would nevertheless pit two nuclear powers against each other? And if not, should it race to join the club of nuclear powers? If its sovereignty cannot be guaranteed through either durable geopolitical alliances or international law, what choice does it have other than seeking the symmetry of reciprocal mass destruction to counterbalance an extreme asymmetry of conventional force?