Good day, and thank you for having me back here to another lovely “Nukes at Christmas” event at Wilton Park. 

In light of President-elect Trump’s victory in our elections last month in the United States, I’ve been asked to offer some thoughts on what one might perhaps expect out of Washington over the next four years on nonproliferation and disarmament issues.  Just to be clear, however, please know that I can claim no special insight, and I am certainly not speaking for anyone other than myself.  So you’re just getting my personal opinion – but let’s give it a go.

Diplomatic Wonkery

In the spirit of diplomatic wonkery, let me start with a quick comment about nuts and bolts of dealing with U.S. officials from what you might call the “T2” administration on nonproliferation diplomacy. 

In terms of the negotiation of nonproliferation-related multilateral diplomatic statements, I think those of you in the NPT diplomatic community should expect even more of the kind of pushback you got from me, when I did this for a living, against efforts to pretend that felicitously progressive rhetorical box-checking in multilateral diplomatic pronouncements are worth the time and effort diplomats spend agonizing over them.  There will be, I would imagine, approximately zero appetite for performative virtue-signaling in agreed statements, and there will certainly be no patience for the idea that such statements can be any kind of consolation for a lack of substantive progress in addressing growing and very concrete threats in the security environment. 

Not being nearly so afraid – as diplomats sometimes are – of the disapproval of fashionable people, or of slipping out of the good graces of the arms control and disarmament civil society organizations, the T2 team will presumably not be particularly rattled by the idea of America being left “isolated” if they fail to join a diplomatic statement larded up with what they will see to be distastefully politically-correct phraseology and aspirational exhortations to recommit ourselves to what they will see as naïve approaches that failed years ago.  Nor will they be particularly deterred by the prospect of the supposedly catastrophic failure of not having an agreed consensus statement issue from any given diplomatic meeting. 

Accordingly, I recommend against trying to browbeat the Americans into more diplomatic and rhetorical flexibility in this way, as other diplomatic delegations frequently attempt to do.  If you do try, the incoming T2 team – whomever they end up being, which is still far from clear – will probably be delighted to demonstrate their “America First” bona fides by calling your bluff and walking away. 

This will give them considerable negotiating leverage against you, because you will want a deal much more than they are likely to; you’ll have to understand that, and moderate your expectations accordingly.  In the wake of the “anti-wokequake” that has overturned received wisdoms in Washington, in other words, my recommendation is that if you want to see U.S.-inclusive multilateral statements, you’ll need to be a lot more flexible with the Second Trump Administration even than you were last time with little ol’ me. 

Disarmament and Arms Control

When it comes to nuclear disarmament, I’m afraid this group isn’t going to like my prognosis either.

It almost beggars belief to think that anyone actually thinks that it will be possible in the foreseeable future to resume the forward movement that was possible after Cold War rivalries had dissolved and great power competition seemed to be forever behind us.  Frankly, thinking that this is a good time to double-down on pushing for “Zero” seems essentially insane, but I suspect there will be those who will try.

Such persons, however, will be very disappointed.  I should stress, however, that despite all the apparent hand-wringing in conferences like this about what our most recent American election may mean, it’s clear that the real problem from a disarmament perspective is emphatically not the incoming Second Trump Administration, or indeed anything to do with the United States at all. 

The real obstacle to having any kind of coherent and intelligible conversation about nuclear disarmament today results instead from the conjuncture of several grim dynamics: (a) territorial aggression by great power authoritarian revisionists in Russia and China; (b) nuclear arms buildups by those revisionists to which the Western nuclear powers have not yet responded effectively; (c) those revisionists’ efforts to use nuclear overmatch in theater-range systems vis-à-vis the West for coercive bargaining and to deter resistance to their regional aggression; and (d) Russia’s systematic betrayal of pretty much all of its arms control-related promises and obligations, making it difficult to imagine how anyone could trust the Putin regime in any arms control or disarmament context in the future. 

So let me be clear.  The mood in policy expert circles in Washington right now is hawkish.  There seems to be broad agreement that we in the United States – and our nuclear-armed allies – need a more robust nuclear posture than before, and that after a generation of happy post-Cold War shrinkage, and that it’s unfortunately time to explore expanded and/or new capabilities once more.   

And please don’t think that this just “a Republican thing,” for it is not.  As you can see from the findings of the Strategic Posture Review Commission Report in 2023, such thinking is powerfully bipartisan, and I’d say it represents the “new normal” in the D.C. expert community – precisely in response to Russian and Chinese nuclear policy and their respective nuclear buildups (Russia with theater-range systems especially, and China with – well – everything).  Debates are sure to come in Washington over details such as how much new capacity and which types of new system are needed, and of course how much we should spend on expanded capability, but there is not likely to be any serious argument that we should not be augmenting our posture at all.

So you should expect the “T2” Administration to be quite bullish on new U.S. nuclear capabilities, and perhaps also to be open to unorthodox concepts, both in terms of America’s own posture and in terms of possible collaborations with the British or perhaps even the French.  We shall see.

But – and here I’ll be bold in challenging this disarmament-focused audience – you shouldn’t actually bemoan this.  If there is a future for arms control and disarmament in the years ahead of us, I suspect it actually lies through an augmented Western deterrence posture, rather than existing in spite of it. 

All other things being equal, I would of course prefer to still be reducing rather than building.  Nevertheless, I’d much rather we be building than face strategic destabilization, deterrence failure, and war.  Yet that is what we indeed risk as geopolitical predators continue tp build up their capabilities and whet their territorial appetites while we fail to respond with countervailing postures sufficient to deter them.  There is little to like in an arms race, but when one side is already sprinting, sometimes peace and the eventual hope of reductions are best served by building up one’s own capability to recover and preserve the strategic stability the world so desperately needs, and to give that sprinter reason to think negotiated restraint is in his best interest after all.

Accordingly, as I’ve been pointing out a lot recently – again and again – if there is a pathway to a future of negotiated restraint, it will require changing the incentive structures perceived by our collective geopolitical adversaries.  At the moment, those adversaries clearly don’t feel any need to talk, for they would seem to be doing quite well by building up their arsenals and intimidating their neighbors while we, for the most part, sit placidly on our hands and resign ourselves to early-1980s force posture concepts and a late-1990s approaches to infrastructure capacity that are entirely inadequate to the times. 

Unless the Western powers shift emphatically back into “compete” mode after a generation of nuclear shrinkage, those adversaries will feel no need to change course – and in that case, you can forget about meaningful arms control, much less some future return to reductions.  If they do, however, I think it may well be possible to work our way back to meaningful arms control, and perhaps even to more forward progress on disarmament.

— Christopher Ford