At the same time, the norm against proliferation is something we must work to maintain. That cottage industry I derided -- and of which I am part -- is necessary. Left to their own devices, most diplomats, regionalists, and politicians would fatally compromise the nonproliferation regime with ever more exceptions and excuses. The United States has never made nonproliferation its top priority. At best, it's one of many interests -- and often the losing one. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, so the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations looked the other way while Pakistan built nuclear weapons with Chinese assistance. There is a special place in nonproliferation hell for the George W. Bush administration, which hijacked the nonproliferation agenda as an excuse to invade Iraq and then, in some misguided geopoliticking, sought a waiver (or blew a gaping hole) for India in the Nuclear Suppliers Group, making India the only country in the world eligible for nuclear imports without the obligations that would come with joining the NPT. Mr. Obama, despite his lofty nonproliferation rhetoric, has been as willing as any other president to bend the rules for his friends.
Which brings us back to his State of the Union address. After declaring all that "vulnerable" fissile material secure and reminiscing about the good old days in Prague, Mr. Obama will have to say something about North Korea and Iran. He'll take a swipe or two -- more in sadness than anger -- at their intransigence. But what he really ought to do, and what would be hard, is to talk about how he'll respond when our friends want to start down the same road.
North Korea is about to test a nuclear weapon for the third time. The usual types in South Korea and Japan have made all manner of irresponsible statements. Negotiations with Iran are going nowhere. Whether or not you believe that Iran's program is paused, as I do, Tehran's neighbors are also sounding worried. Our friends aren't going to ask for the bomb directly, at least not at first, but they've already started asking if, perchance, we might not bend the rules a little here or there. Maybe, they ask, we could agree to let them develop longer-range ballistic missiles, or would we mind if France sold them really great cruise missiles? Or borrow the plutonium out of the reactor fuel we sold them? Or spin a few centrifuges?
Not for nuclear weapons, of course! Oh, no, no, no. Did you mention hedging? I didn't mention shrubbery. Topiary is an interesting hobby, don't you think?
There is every temptation to respond to these hard cases by making more exceptions. They are our friends. None of them has had active nuclear weapons programs for at least 20 years. (You did what in 2000? Never mind, we're good.) Historically, the United States helped build the norm against proliferation by making it clear to some of our friends that the choice was between nuclear weapons and an alliance with the United States. Today, Seoul or Riyadh might reasonably conclude that the formula works in reverse: Would Washington abandon an ally over an act of proliferation? What are a few nuclear weapons among friends, anyway? What if they keep it on the DL?
At some point, the exceptions will destroy the rule. Having five nuclear weapons states was a necessary compromise, but a compromise all the same. The holdouts of the 1970s were toughies. Israel already had built nuclear weapons by 1970, but just not tested them -- isn't that better than overtly joining the club? India tested in 1974 when the treaty was still young, claiming its nuclear test was a "peaceful nuclear explosion." Pakistan couldn't sign because India wouldn't. After India tested again in 1998, we simply had to "deal with the realities" of India's de facto nuclear weapons possession in seeking special treatment for New Delhi at the Nuclear Suppliers Group. And so on, and so on.
Every single one these exceptions made perfect sense at the time. And that's the problem: so will all of the exceptions that Barack Obama's national security teams asks him to make in the next four years. Do we put nuclear weapons back into South Korea? Consent to their reprocessing of American-made spent nuclear fuel? Sell the Jordanians, Saudis, or Emiratis who knows what? Each of these decisions will represent a perfectly sensible opportunity to strengthen relations with a key partner at only a small cost to the broader nonproliferation regime as a whole. We'll tell ourselves that the harm we do pales in comparison to harm already done by North Korea or Iran. This will be true, but will be beside the point. The aggregate wisdom of the foreign policy community, over time, will doom the regime as a whole.
I don't think the administration sees it this way, which worries me. A certain administration official derided some of the people critical of their nonproliferation policies -- okay, me -- as nonproliferation "purists" because we believe that the rules ought to be applied in a consistent and impartial manner to our friends, as well as our enemies. Worrying about special pleading, however, doesn't make one a "purist." It makes one aware that the legitimacy of any international regime is a fragile thing. It makes one careful not to let too many small changes accumulate catastrophically. The diplomat's preference to treat every case as sui generis amounts to having no rule at all, save that of the jungle. Yet if there is one realization of the nuclear age, it is the law of the jungle is simply too dangerous in a nuclear-armed world. That is the logic behind Kennedy's fear of 25 nuclear-armed states. And behind Gilpatric's conclusion that "the spread of nuclear weapons poses an increasingly grave threat to the United States." And it was, I thought, the logic behind why Barack Obama stated his "commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."
We must have rules, even for our friends. We have enough exceptions already.
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