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Trapped Between Authoritarians, Europe Must Fight, Not Retreat
The E.U. must unite with all like-minded countries against the illiberal nationalists who are challenging universal values and international law.
Apr 01, 2025
The news of Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest surprised me.
It’s not that I doubted the former leader of the Philippines was guilty of the horrific crimes detailed in his International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant. Duterte himself boasted quite openly of the mass killings he’s been accused of. But I always thought that the prospects of bringing that brutal, outspoken politician to justice were remote indeed.
After all, Duterte’s daughter Sara is currently the vice president of the Philippines and that country is no longer a member of the ICC. On top of that, Duterte himself was so sure of his immunity that he was running for mayor of the city of Davao. In mid-March, after returning from campaigning in the Filipino community in Hong Kong, he suffered the indignity of being arrested in his own country.
The International Criminal Court’s arrest of Rodrigo Duterte should be a powerful reminder that justice is possible even in the most unjust of times.
Forgive me for saying this, but I just hadn’t thought the ICC was still truly functioning, given that the leaders of the most powerful countries on this planet—the United States, China, and Russia—don’t give a fig about human rights or international law. Sure, the ICC did issue high-profile arrest warrants for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on war crimes charges, but no one expects those rogues to be taken into custody anytime soon. And the impunity for the powerful has only become more entrenched now that a convicted felon squats in the White House.
The specialty of the ICC has, of course, been arresting human-rights abusers in truly weak or failed states like Laurent Gbagbo, former president of Côte d’Ivoire, and Hashim Thaçi, former president of Kosovo. With the world’s 31st largest economy, however, the Philippines is no failed state. Still, without nuclear weapons or a huge army, it’s no powerhouse either. Indeed, it was only when the Philippines became ever weaker—because of a feud between President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte (accused of threatening to assassinate him)—that the ICC had a chance to grab its target and spirit him away to The Hague to stand trial.
The arrest of Rodrigo Duterte might, in fact, seem like the exception that proves the (new) rule. After all, the international community and its institutions are currently facing a crisis of global proportions with violations of international law becoming ever more commonplace in this era of ascendant right-wing rogue states.
In 2014, Russia first grabbed Ukrainian territory, launching an all-out invasion in 2022. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, sent troops into southern Lebanon, and expanded its footprint in Syria. U.S. President Donald Trump has spoken repeatedly of seizing Greenland, absorbing Canada as the 51st state, and retaking the Panama Canal, among other things. Small countries like Taiwan can’t sleep for fear of a late-night visit from jackbooted thugs.
But then there’s Europe.
Transatlantic Divergence
In the wake of Donald Trump’s dramatic return to the stage as a bull in the global china shop, European leaders have hastened to replace the United States as the voice of liberal internationalist institutions like the ICC. Of course, the U.S. was never actually a member of the ICC, which suggests that Europe has always been more connected to the rule of law than most American politicians. After all, if Duterte had been sent to Washington today—not to mention Beijing, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Moscow, or New Delhi—he would undoubtedly have been feted as an exemplary law-and-order politico rather than, as in The Hague, placed behind bars and put on trial.
This transatlantic divergence was only sharpened in mid-February when Vice President JD Vance berated an audience of Europeans at the Munich Security Conference, singling out for criticism Europe’s support of feminism and pro-choice policies, its rejection of Russian election interference (by overturning a Kremlin-manipulated presidential election in Romania), and its refusal to tolerate fascist and neo-fascist parties (shunning, among others, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD). By urging them to worry more about internal challenges to “democracy” in Europe than the challenges presented by either Russia or China, Vance was effectively siding with illiberal adversaries against liberal allies.
In a certain sense, however, he was also eerily on target: Europe does indeed face all-too-many internal challenges to democracy. But they come from his ideological compatriots there like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, and far-right political parties like Germany’s AfD, as well as ultra-conservative cultural movements that target immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and secular multiculturalists.
Vance opposes mainstream European opinion, which has directly or indirectly challenged Donald Trump’s MAGA proposals and policies, as well as his rejection of the reality of climate change. Europe has, of course, been stepping up its defense of Ukraine, remains committed to promoting human rights, and adheres to democratic principles in the form of regular electoral checks and balances, as well as safeguards for civil society. Above all, unlike the Trump administration, it continues to move forward on the European Green Deal and a program to leave behind fossil fuels.
These were, of course, fairly uncontroversial positions until Trump reentered the White House.
Can Europe sustain that fragile plant of liberalism during this harsh winter of right-wing populism? Much depends on some risky bets. Will U.S. foreign policy swing back in favor of democracy, human rights, and transatlantic relations in four years? Will the weight of a never-ending war, in the end, dislodge Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin? Will Ukraine overcome its own internal divisions to become part of a newly enlarged European Union (EU)? Will Bibi Netanyahu someday become Duterte’s cellmate?
At the moment, unfortunately, it seems more likely that Europe will be the last powerful holdout in a world entering a new political Dark Age. A dismal scenario lurks on the horizon in which democracy and human rights cling to existence somewhere within the walls of the European Union, much as monasteries managed to preserve classical learning a millennium ago.
Europe Steps Forward
After Trump and Vance humiliated Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his White House visit in February, an ideologically diverse range of European leaders raced to support the Ukrainian leader and his country. But defending democracy means all too little if that defense remains largely verbal.
So, no longer being able to count on U.S. power or NATO security guarantees in the age of Trump, European Union leaders have decided to visit the gym and muscle up. Shortly after Zelenskyy’s meeting, the E.U. readied a large military spending bill meant to contribute to the “security of Europe as a whole, in particular as regards the E.U.’s eastern border, considering the threats posed by Russia and Belarus.” About $150 billion more would be invested in the military budgets of member states. The E.U. will also relax debt limits to allow nearly $700 billion in such additional spending over the next four years.
Semi-socialist, DEI-loving, human-rights-supporting, Israel-skeptical, Europe is everything Donald Trump hates. Think of the E.U., in fact, as the global equivalent of his worst nightmare, a giant liberal arts campus.
Of course, in the past, Europe’s vaunted social democracy was largely built on low defense spending and a reliance on Washington’s security umbrella. That “peace dividend” saved E.U. member states a huge chunk of money—nearly $400 billion every year since the end of the Cold War—that could be applied to social welfare and infrastructure expenses. Forcing NATO members to spend a higher percentage of their gross domestic product on their militaries is a dagger that both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are holding to the throat of Europe’s social democracy. Germany can still afford to engage in deficit spending for both guns and butter, but it presents a distinct problem for countries like Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, and Spain with high levels of government debt.
And when it comes to Europe’s future, it’s not just a military affair. While some European leaders have used intelligence assessments to focus on Putin’s territorial ambitions, others are more anxious about Russia’s assault on their values. Fearful of the way the illiberal values of Putin and Trump seem to overlap, Europeans have cast the fate of Ukraine in the loftiest of terms: the defense of democracy against fascism. However, given the connections between the European far-right and the Kremlin—thanks to Germany’s AfD, the two French far-right parties (National Rally and Reconquest), and Bulgaria’s Revival among others—the fight against fascism is now taking place on the home front as well.
Europe is also defending democratic values in other ways. It has long promoted DEI-like programs, beginning with France’s diversity charter in 2004, while the European Commission is committed to equality for the LGBTQ community. In 2021, to promote universal values, the E.U. even launched a program called Global Europe Human Rights and Democracy, which was meant to support human rights defenders, the rule of law, and election monitors across the planet. Typically, on the controversial topic of Israel-Palestine, European countries have condemned the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza and several have even recognized the (still-to-be-created) state of Palestine.
Semi-socialist, DEI-loving, human-rights-supporting, Israel-skeptical, Europe is everything Donald Trump hates. Think of the E.U., in fact, as the global equivalent of his worst nightmare, a giant liberal arts campus.
No wonder the MAGA crowd has the urge to cut the transatlantic cable as a way of targeting its opponents both at home and abroad.
Europe Divided
But wait: The MAGA crowd doesn’t hate Europe quite as thoroughly as it does Columbia University. After all, not all European leaders are on board with social democracy, DEI, human rights, and Palestine. In fact, in some parts of the continent, Trump and Vance are heroes, not zeros.
Hungary’s leader Viktor Orbán, for instance, has long been a friend and inspiration for Donald Trump. After all, he’s managed to translate the illiberalism of Vladimir Putin—anti-democratic, anti-LGBT, uber-nationalist—into a semi-democratic vernacular of great appeal to an American far-right that must negotiate a significantly more complex political landscape than the one that surrounds the Kremlin.
As Putin’s greatest acolyte, Orbán has worked overtime to undermine a common European approach to Ukraine. He initially opposed aid to Ukraine, a stance ultimately overcome by the pressure tactics of other European leaders. He pushed for a watered-down version of the most recent E.U. statement in support of that country, only to watch the other 26 E.U. members pass it without him. And he’s rejected Ukrainian membership in the E.U. Still, with elections scheduled for 2026 and the opposition now outpolling Orbán’s Fidesz party, the days of one man holding the E.U. hostage may soon be over.
While Orbán does have allies, most of them—like AUR in Romania and the National Alliance in Latvia—are sniping from the sidelines as part of the opposition. Several other far-right parties like the ruling Fratelli d’Italia in Italy don’t share Orbán’s odd affection for Putin. But if the AfD in Germany or the National Rally in France were to win enough votes to take over their respective governments, Europe’s political center of gravity could indeed shift.
Such divisions extend to the question of E.U. expansion. Serbia’s pro-Russian slant makes such a move unlikely in the near term and Turkey is too autocratic to qualify, while both Bosnia and Georgia, like Ukraine, are divided. It’s hard to imagine Ukraine itself overcoming its internal divisions—or its war-ravaged economy—to meet Europe’s membership requirements, no matter the general enthusiasm inside that country and elsewhere in Europe for bringing it in from the cold.
Nonetheless, E.U. expansion is what Putin fears the most: a democratic, prosperous union that expands its border with his country and inspires Russian activists with its proclamations of universal values. No small surprise, then, that he’s tried to undermine the E.U. by supporting far-right and Euroskeptical movements. Yet the combination of the war in Ukraine and the reelection of Donald Trump may be undoing all his efforts.
The experience of feeling trapped between two illiberal superpowers has only solidified popular support for the E.U. and its institutions. In a December 2024 poll, trust in the E.U. was at its highest level in 17 years, particularly in countries that are on the waiting list like Albania and Montenegro. Moreover, around 60% of Europeans support providing military aid to Kyiv and future membership for Ukraine.
For increasing numbers of those outside its borders, Europe seems like a beacon of hope: prosperous democracies pushing back against the onslaught of Trump and Putin. And yet, even if Europe manages to stave off the challenges of its home-grown far-right, it may not, in the end, prove to be quite such a beacon. After all, it has its own anti-migrant policies and uses trade agreements to secure access to critical raw materials and punish countries like Indonesia that have the temerity to employ their own mineral wealth to rise higher in the global value chain. Although, unlike Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America, it’s doing its best to shift to a clean-energy economy, it’s done so all too often by dirtying the nests of other countries to get the materials it needs for that shift.
Whatever its resemblance to a liberal arts college, Europe is anything but a non-profit institution and can sometimes seem more like a fortress than a beacon. As was true of those medieval monasteries that preserved the classical learning of the ages but also owned land and serfs, supplied markets with addictive products like chartreuse, and subjected their members to torture and imprisonment, saving civilization can have a darker side.
Exiting the Dark Age
The International Criminal Court’s arrest of Rodrigo Duterte should be a powerful reminder that justice is possible even in the most unjust of times. Brutal leaders almost always sow the seeds of their own demise. Putin’s risky moves have mobilized virtually all of Europe against him. In antagonizing country after country, Trump is similarly reinforcing liberal sentiment in Canada, in Mexico, and throughout Europe.
If the world had the luxury of time, holing up in the modern equivalent of monasteries and waiting out the barbarians would be a viable strategy. But climate change cares little for extended timelines. And don’t forget the nuclear doomsday clock or the likelihood of another pandemic sweeping across the globe. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are destroying things at such a pace that the bill for “reconstruction” grows more astronomical by the day.
The gap between the fall of the Roman Empire and the first glimmers of the Renaissance was about 1,000 years. No one has that kind of time anymore. So, while long-term strategies to fight the right are good, those standing up to the bullies also need to act fast and forcefully. The world can’t afford a European retreat into a fortress and the equivalent of monastic solitude. The E.U. must unite with all like-minded countries against the illiberal nationalists who are challenging universal values and international law.
The ICC set a good example with its successful seizure of Duterte. Let’s all hope, for the good of the world, that The Hague will have more global scofflaws in its jail cells—and soon.
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Trump’s Manual for Not Turning a Cease-Fire Into a Lasting Peace
The U.S. president’s unholy affection for both Putin and Netanyahu will produce only the worst kind of cease-fire, the kind that the strong use as a prelude to their final push to eliminate the weak.
Mar 29, 2025
Israel has resumed its aerial bombardment of Gaza. The latest cease-fire, which lasted two months and led to the release of 33 Israeli hostages and 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, never made it out of its first stage. The Israeli government has now adopted a strategy of inflicting overwhelming violence until Hamas capitulates by releasing the remaining hostages.
Ukraine and Russia have accepted a limited cease-fire. Both sides have agreed to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure, but neither has actually adhered to this condition. U.S. President Donald Trump, who coaxed both sides toward this cease-fire, is reportedly furious. This week, Moscow and Kyiv agreed to extend this partial cease-fire to the Black Sea, though here, too, they don’t seem in a rush to stop their attacks. No serious analysts, including those in Russia, expect this cease-fire to hold.
A United Nations-brokered truce in Yemen lasted nearly six months in 2024 before fighting in the country between the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government started up again in the fall. The Trump administration has recently escalated air strikes against the Houthis in response to their revived efforts to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea.
Donald Trump promised that he would, like some authoritarian father figure, force warring parties in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere to stop fighting and get along. Only the credulous believe in this avatar of Trump as peacemaker.
Last year, a cease-fire in Syria came to an end when rebels, with the go-ahead from Turkey, caught government troops by surprise when they seized Aleppo and kept going. A little more than a week later, they were in control of the capital of Damascus and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was on his way to Moscow.
Cease-fires have come and gone in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last week, the DRC and Rwanda called for a cease-fire in the eastern part of the country. An astonishing 700,000 people have been displaced by fighting just since January. The record of truces in this war-torn country does not give much hope for this latest initiative.
In other countries, the mutual hostility between the warring parties has been so intense that cease-fires don’t even get a chance to take hold. Sudan, split in two by government forces and the rebel Rapid Support Forces, has so far resisted international calls for immediate humanitarian pauses in the violence.
Cease-fires don’t always fail. Libya hasn’t seen any major violation of the cease-fire signed in 2020. But it’s the only success of the three cease-fires that the Borgen Project cited in October 2022 as evidence of a more peaceful world. The civil war in Sudan resumed in April 2023. Later that year, Azerbaijan broke a cease-fire to defeat Armenia and seize control of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Donald Trump promised that he would, like some authoritarian father figure, force warring parties in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere to stop fighting and get along. Only the credulous believe in this avatar of Trump as peacemaker. The truth is, cease-fires are usually just empty promises, regardless of how smart, powerful, or delusional the mediator-in-chief happens to be.
What makes some cease-fires endure even as so many others disappear into the fire of renewed hostilities?
Why Cease-Fires Die
When he responded to Trump’s peace proposal for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “We are in favor of it but there are nuances.”
Those “nuances” were sticking points as sharp as a saber. Putin wants the world to recognize his illegal seizure of four Ukrainian provinces over which he doesn’t even have full control. He wants all foreign military assistance and intelligence sharing with Ukraine to end. NATO membership for Ukraine must be off the table. Oh, and he also wants the world to lift sanctions against his country.
Putin believes that he has an advantage on the battlefield and, with Trump as president, at the negotiating table as well. There is some truth to Putin’s perception. Russia has more soldiers and resources at its disposal than does Ukraine, and Trump is the most pro-Russian president that the United States has ever produced. Putin also knows that the celebrated dealmaker is actually a naïf who pays little attention to details and has been taken to the cleaners in the past, most notably by the Taliban in its 2020 deal with the United States.
But Russia, too, has reached certain limits in its capacity to recruit soldiers and produce the armaments to continue its occupation of Ukraine. Mutual exhaustion is one of the best signs of a cease-fire that can endure. That was certainly the case with the two Koreas in 1953 after two years of relatively little territorial movement by either side.
But both parties to the conflict have to acknowledge, if only to themselves, that they have sunk into a quagmire. Putin, by contrast, thinks that he can prevail. He wants not only those four provinces but the entirety of what he calls “Novorossiya,” which includes all of Ukraine’s southern coast, which would render the country land-locked. Putin also wants elections that can replace Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a more malleable leader.
Any cease-fire that doesn’t lead to Putin achieving these ultimate goals is a cease-fire that Russia is unlikely to uphold.
A power-besotted aggressor who believes that he—and isn’t it always a he?—has an asymmetric advantage over his opponent is one of the leading reasons why it’s difficult to stop wars. Cease-fires for these aggressors are only pauses to regroup or to win international approval or to lull opponents into complacency.
That applies to Benjamin Netanyahu as well. Israel and Hamas have been locked in a conflict over Gaza for more than two decades. On October 7, the much weaker Hamas launched a brutal surprise attack on Israeli territory that killed more than 1,000 people and produced 250 hostages, which the Palestinian group figured it could use as bargaining chips. Instead of negotiating, the Netanyahu government launched its own brutal response, which has left 50,000 dead in Gaza.
Like Putin, Netanyahu has maximalist ambitions and an uncompromising attitude. He wants to destroy Hamas. He also wants to destroy the capacity of Gaza to serve as a part of some future Palestinian state. He doesn’t really care about the hostages that Hamas is holding. The Israeli leader is so determined to prove that Hamas is using Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians alike as human shields that he’ll sacrifice them both in his bid to annihilate Hamas and, of course, maintain his own political position. To add grievous insult to catastrophic injury, he’ll then accuse the Palestinian group of human rights abuses after the fact.
A huge number of Israelis are fed up. This last weekend, 100,000 turned out to protest in the major cities.
Getting to Peace
Most cease-fires fail, often spectacularly so. “Of the 105 failed cease-fires, 84% were followed by an offensive within an average of just 13 days,” reports Patrick Burke in his study of cease-fires in 25 wars from 1947 to 2016. According to a study by Jason Quinn and Madhav Joshi, 80% of cease-fires fail.
Mutual exhaustion on the battlefield is certainly one factor behind a successful cease-fire. But what can mediators do when one or both sides believe that they can still achieve a complete victory, as Croatia did with Operation Storm in 1995 and Azerbaijan accomplished more recently?
Trump’s approach is to strong-arm the weaker party. He cut off military aid to Ukraine, trash-talked its leader, and forced the country to accept a partial cease-fire. With the latest deal on the Black Sea, he is dangerously close to agreeing to lift some restrictions on Russian exports without approval from Ukraine or the European Union. Such a cease-fire is not likely to last or to lead to a second stage.
Putin is no doubt watching Netanyahu, taking careful notes, and identifying lessons to learn:
- Lesson one: Break previous agreement
- Lesson two: Flatter Trump
- Lesson three: Apply maximum firepower
- Lesson four: Ignore international opinion
From a conflict resolution point of view, a more successful approach would be to identify the underlying reasons for the dispute—competition for resources, historical grudges, cultural differences—and find ways of nudging the parties toward addressing those root causes nonviolently. But this approach assumes a certain power balance among the combatants.
It’s hard to imagine Trump, Netanyahu, or Putin being very interested in such a process. They don’t believe in talk therapy. They believe in power moves.
Where one side has an obvious advantage, an outside force could try to level the playing field. That requires arm-twisting not the weaker party but the stronger one. That’s what the United States did to get Serbia to the table and sign the Dayton Accords to end the war in Bosnia.
Ah, but didn’t the West follow just such a strategy with Russia during the current conflict? All the sanctions against Russia and arms deliveries to Ukraine and resolutions at the U.N. only made Putin fight harder. These punitive actions were taken to help Ukraine repel the invaders and uphold the principles of international law. In other words, the international community has had a stake in the conflict, since Russia didn’t just seize Ukrainian territory, it defied a collective global norm.
With Israel, of course, the Biden administration did little or nothing to restrain Netanyahu. The Trump administration has only encouraged the Israeli leader. Trump’s scenario of a Gaza resort with no Palestinians, however ridiculous it sounds, served notice that the United States would be okay with a genocidal push of all Palestinians from their land.
So, perhaps in some contexts, cease-fires are just bound to fail.
But don’t despair. Remember that 80% failure rate from Jason Quinn and Madhav Joshi? Believe it or not, these researchers were actually encouraged by the results of their analysis of data from 196 conflicts between 1975 to 2011.
“What we found was that the best predictor that any one cease-fire agreement will be successful—and by successful I mean: not followed by renewed conflict or violence—… is how many failed peace agreements came before,” Jason Quinn noted. He pointed to the ultimate successes in ending wars in Nepal and Colombia as important examples.
Wars are hard to end. Exhibit A: The Hundred Years War. It makes sense that cease-fires are bound to fail and fail and fail and fail and fail until one day, they produce a lasting peace. Skilled mediators, a power move or two, mutual exhaustion on the battlefiel and at the negotiating table: These can all eventually lead to success.
But one thing is for sure. Trump’s unholy affection for both Putin and Netanyahu will produce only the worst kind of cease-fire, the kind that the strong use as a prelude to their final push to eliminate the weak.
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No One Wins When Nuclear-Armed States Believe That ‘We Can’t Lose’
Any conflict risks going nuclear if one of the belligerent parties choses to use their ultimate weapon rather than accept the possibility of defeat.
Mar 28, 2025
Nations engaged in wars with conventional weapons are not likely to hold back from using their most powerful weapons if they believe they are losing the war, and for too many countries in our world the most powerful weapons are nuclear. Countries committed to fighting a conventional war are also likely to be committed to the meme of “We Can’t Lose.”
A nuclear war could begin with the losing side in a conventional war making use of a small local tactical nuclear weapon to destroy the supply lines of its enemy. But once one side uses such a weapon the other side will feel that it too must engage with its most powerful weapons. Frustration is likely to set in when it appears that restricting such weapons to the immediate battlefield of the war is not sufficient to win. It might then be seen as necessary to destroy the enemy’s airfields and the power centers in its capital with longer range, more powerful nuclear weapons.
Just such a sequence of escalation in the use of nuclear weapons from tactical use in a local battlefield to strategic use in the destruction of an enemy’s cities was shown to be likely in a 1983 simulation described in a recent article by William Langewiesche in The New York Times Magazine. The simulation was large scale and involved much of the U.S. defense establishment. The simulation began with a conventional war between Russia and the West on the fields of Poland and East Germany. As it began to appear that the West was losing and the Netherlands was threatened, the West initiated the use of small tactical nuclear weapons that it fired onto the enemy’s supply lines in the local battlefield. Russia followed suit. Within a few days the airfields behind the frontlines from which the planes dropping the tactical weapons took off were struck with larger nuclear weapons. Finally, strategic weapons were used against the capitals of Western Europe and Russia.
One fears the near inevitability that one or more of the current wars in our world will end in nuclear war, the accompanying nuclear winter, and the possible end of human life on Earth.
The results surprised those who participated in the simulation. The conclusion was that a nuclear war cannot be controlled.
Our world has many local conflicts such as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that involve nuclear powers. This is in addition to major geostrategic conflicts between the nuclear powers of U.S., Russia, and China. All of these conflicts have the potential of becoming nuclear.
Russia, for example, has warned the West that it will use a nuclear weapon in its war with Ukraine if it believes it is losing the current war with conventional weapons. Russia is thus telling the west that “we can’t lose.”
Israel has warned that it will exercise “The Samson Option” if it is in a war with its neighbors and believes it can no longer defend Israel with conventional weapons. The Samson Option involves the nuclear bombing of cities such as Damascus, Bagdad, or Cairo with nuclear weapons. More recently, Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has raised the possibility of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza. Israel too is thus telling the world that “we cannot and will not lose.”
It is likely that the United States too believes that “we cannot lose.” If it is in a war with China using conventional weapons and China is gaining the upper hand then it is quite possible that the U.S., with its triad of nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and land-based missiles, would use these nuclear weapons. In fact, many in the U.S. defense establishment believe that a nuclear war with China can be fought and won by the U.S. Thus, the U.S. too believes that “we cannot lose.” Similar considerations by the U.S. would apply if it were losing a war with Russia.
Other states with nuclear weapons may also believe they cannot lose. North Korea has stated that it would not use nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike but would use its nuclear weapons if attacked, and recent events on the Korean peninsula suggest that war between the two Koreas is a real possibility. It also seems likely that if Pakistan or India were engaged in a conventional war and one side was losing, that that side would believe they could not lose and would initiate a nuclear exchange.
The likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons becomes still greater if other nations such as Japan, Brazil, Iran, or Saudi Arabia join the nuclear club in the interest of deterrence (no nuclear armed country has ever been invaded) and adopt the meme of “we cannot lose.”
All this makes one pessimistic. One fears the near inevitability that one or more of the current wars in our world will end in nuclear war, the accompanying nuclear winter, and the possible end of human life on Earth.
What can be done? It seems the only solution is the complete abolition of nuclear weapons as proposed in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that has now been signed by 93 non-nuclear states. Unfortunately, the nuclear states have not signed onto this treaty but should be encouraged to do so.
Skeptics will say that nuclear powers might sign on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons but would hold in secret a few nuclear weapons so as to be able to dominate their enemies in a conventional war. That may well happen, but the vast reduction of nuclear weapons that the treaty would require and the absence of nuclear fear it would bring with it would make the universal adoption of the treaty a self-perpetuating step toward the world we deserve and must have.
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