How Trump could win, and deserve, a Nobel peace prize

Trump's worldview, which is anathema to international law and multilateral organisations such as the United Nations, happens to be well-suited to nuclear realities.

By Andreas Kluth

It’s no secret that Donald Trump is obsessed with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which is one reason why he’s pushing Ukraine and Russia so hard toward cease-fire negotiations. The way the US president is going about it won’t earn him any favour in Oslo, though, because so far he mainly seems to be coercing Ukraine to capitulate. But Trump has another path to the Nobel, and the whole world, including his haters, should root for him: He could win it by lowering the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

In his first term, Trump tried and failed to launch trilateral talks among the US, Russia and China about capping or even reducing nuclear weapons. (The US and Russia each have more than 5,000 nukes, while China, in third place, has about 600 and is racing to pull even with the other two.) Trump had already withdrawn from one arms-control treaty with Russia and then refused to renew the only remaining one, leaving the extension to his successor, Joe Biden. But even that agreement, called New START, expires next February.

At that point, and for the first time since the early Cold War, nothing will be in place to restrain the world’s major nuclear powers from a new arms race. In fact, several such races are already underway: China and North Korea are adding to their arsenals as fast as they can, and all nine countries with nukes are “modernising” their weapons. In the US that means upgrading warheads as well as the bombers, submarines and missiles to deliver them — at a cost of $1.7 trillion over 30 years, or $75 billion a year this decade, although the costs and the timelines keep expanding with every estimate.

The risk of nuclear war is rising even faster than these numbers suggest, because countries are also tweaking the types of nukes they have and the strategies for using them. Russia in particular is building more “tactical” or “theater” weapons; it has an edge of about 10-1 over the US in that category, which is not covered by New START. The US is also considering giving these limited nukes a greater role again.

Tactical nukes are loosely defined as weapons that are meant as a last resort to prevent defeat in battle. (By contrast, strategic nukes are built to destroy an enemy’s homeland in retaliation for an incoming nuclear strike.) Tactical weapons can still pack several Hiroshimas in explosive power. But because they have lower “yields” than the strategic kind, they’re considered more usable. Even so, war games suggest that any use, no matter how limited, would immediately lead to uncontrollable escalation, and possibly Armageddon.

Add to these trends a recent pattern of reckless taboo-breaking. The leaders of Russia and North Korea keep rattling their atomic sabers. And members of Trump’s first administration want to resume testing live nuclear bombs. Once you factor in the risk of miscalculation by someone somewhere under pressure, or the imponderable role of artificial intelligence in nuclear decision-making, it becomes clear that the world is entering the greatest danger since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Trump, despite all the chaos he’s causing in international affairs, understands that peril. Moreover, his worldview, which is anathema to international law and multilateral organisations such as the United Nations, happens to be well-suited to nuclear realities.

When it comes to the geopolitics of warfare by fission, multilateralism and law (as embodied in the Non-Proliferation Treaty) are all but irrelevant. What matters is the strategic interplay of the great powers. In the nuclear domain, it really does make sense to think in “spheres of influence” — as the American, British and Soviet leaders did in Yalta near the end of World War II, when they carved up Europe for the sake of stability.

The problem, of course, is that each nuclear superpower has different and conflicting interests. Russia knows that it’s economically and militarily weaker than the US and would lose a conventional war. So it values tactical nukes as a psychological deterrent and a last-ditch means to “escalate to deescalate” in its own favour.

China is the only nation that has an official policy of “no first use,” but it still wants parity with the US to avoid being coerced, especially if it ever comes to blows over Taiwan. The US, meanwhile, is wondering whether it should keep matching only its strongest nuclear opponent, Russia, or needs numerical balance against Russia and China combined, lest these two gang up in a crisis.

And yet they all have one interest in common: preventing nuclear war, which, as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev memorably put it, “cannot be won and must never be fought.” Moreover, they can all accept the logic of their mutual “security dilemma,” in which anything one of them does forces the others to respond, in what threatens to become a spiral toward war.

Trump could start small, by suggesting that the US and Russia informally stick to the caps in New START whether it lapses or not, pending a new arrangement. He could also press for resuming mutual inspections to build confidence.

Meanwhile, Trump and his counterparts, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, need to agree on a format. Trump wants Yalta-like talks among this trio. Russia prefers talks among all five nations designated by the Non-Proliferation Treaty as legitimate nuclear powers, including France and the UK. Some day, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (which has never officially declared its arsenal) must be brought in as well.

Either way, talks there must be, and Trump claims that Putin and Xi, whose autocratic style he admires, are open to the idea. “We’d like to see denuclearisation,” he said, because that would be “an unbelievable thing for the planet.” The planet is not what usually takes priority in his America First worldview, but he would be right. If Trump succeeds, he deserves that Nobel Peace Prize, even if he might have to share it.