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2. Toward a More Proliferated World? The Geopolitical Forces that Will Shape the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
- Author:
- Eric M. Brewer, Ilan Goldenberg, Joseph Rodgers, Maxwell Simon, and Kaleigh Thomas
- Publication Date:
- 09-2020
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Center for a New American Security
- Abstract:
- The United States and the international community have been relatively successful at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, but there are new reasons to question whether this track record will last into the future. Working with partners, the United States has steadily built a framework of disincentives and barriers to prevent proliferation. These include: 1) international treaties and agreements that have erected legal, political, and normative barriers to the bomb; 2) U.S. security commitments to allies that dampen their own perceived need for nuclear weapons; and, 3) a set of tough penalties (e.g., sanctions) for those who get caught trying to build the bomb. In other words, the barriers to entry to the nuclear club are high, and those countries that want the ultimate weapon need to be willing to accept significant risks. This helps explain why, although many countries have explored or pursued nuclear weapons, only nine states have them today. But several trends are eroding the foundation on which this formidable set of barriers rests. These trends are rooted in, and being shaped by, changes to the nature and structure of the international system: namely, the decline of U.S. influence and its gradual withdrawal from the international order that it helped create and lead for more than 70 years, and the concurrent rise of a more competitive security environment, particularly among great powers. These trends (detailed below) will have three broad implications for proliferation and U.S. policy. First, they stand to increase pressures on countries to seek nuclear weapons or related capabilities as a hedge. Second, they will almost certainly challenge the U.S. ability to effectively wield the traditional “carrots and sticks” of nonproliferation and counterproliferation policy and dilute the effectiveness of those tools. Finally, they could increasingly pit U.S. nonproliferation goals against other policy objectives, forcing harder tradeoffs.
- Topic:
- Security, Arms Control and Proliferation, Nuclear Weapons, Geopolitics, Nonproliferation, and Post Cold War
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus and United States of America
3. Explaining Eastern Europe: Imitation and Its Discontents
- Author:
- Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
- Publication Date:
- 07-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of Democracy
- Institution:
- National Endowment for Democracy
- Abstract:
- For countries emerging from communism, the post-1989 imperative to “be like the West” has generated discontent and even a “return of the repressed,” as the region feels old nationalist stirrings and new demographic pressures. The origins of the region’s current illiberalism are emotional and preideological, rooted in rebellion at the humiliations that accompany a project requiring acknowledgment of a foreign culture as superior to one’s own. Further contributing to illiberalism in the region is a largely unspoken preoccupation with demographic collapse—resulting from aging populations, low birth rates, and massive outmigration—which manifests as a fear that the arrival of unassimilable foreigners will dilute national identities and weaken national cohesion.
- Topic:
- Nationalism, Post Cold War, and Illiberal Democracy
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus