Foreign Affairs
How Trump Made the World Go Nuclear
The 47th president has been a disaster for nonproliferation.
(Photo by Alexander NEMENOV / AFP) (Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump thinks big. “I like making deals, preferably big deals,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “That’s how I get my kicks.” Go big or go home (the latter being a palatial Manhattan penthouse atop a golden tower with your name on it). That was Trump’s philosophy in the business world, and that’s his philosophy as president of the United States.
At the beginning of term two, Trump said he wanted to make a big deal, not a big war, with Iran. But diplomacy—tedious, boring, often hinging on the smallest of technical details—isn’t how Trump “gets his kicks.” Negotiations did seem promising for about a month, until the Trump administration started making big demands, namely, that Iran cease enriching uranium even at levels well below weapons grade.
That was a nonstarter for Tehran, as The American Conservative and other institutions repeatedly warned, so instead of a deal, we got a war—bigger and longer than Trump expected. The president underestimated Iran’s resilience and the intensity of its retaliation, though the Islamic Republic had threatened to ignite a conflagration that would consume the Middle East. He dismissed warnings from Dan Caine, America’s highest-ranking general, that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for the global energy trade. He expected the war to last mere weeks if not days.
Yet here we are.
The war has been a catastrophe for American interests, emptying stockpiles of key defensive munitions even as Iran has managed to wreck U.S. bases in the region. At least 18 American service members have been killed and more than 800 wounded. Oil prices have rocketed, worsening general inflation and raising risks of global recession. The illegal war—undeclared by Congress, unprovoked by Iran, and unnecessary by any reasonable metric—subverts the U.S. Constitution and makes a mockery of the UN Charter.
But the fallout could prove even bigger and more dramatic than all that. For while Trump claims he acted to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the war has made that outcome more likely, not less, experts told TAC. Moreover, it has undermined the cause of nuclear nonproliferation across the Middle East and beyond. “The clear lesson coming out of this for countries that are not friends of the United States would be: get a nuclear weapon,” Rosemary Kelanic, a Middle East expert at Defense Priorities, told The American Conservative.
And it’s not like Trump resorted to military action only after exhausting diplomatic options—quite the contrary.
Back in 2018, Trump pulled out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—aka the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal—despite Iran’s continued compliance. Under that agreement, the United States provided sanctions relief and Iran accepted restrictions on its nuclear program beyond those it had already agreed to as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (a cornerstone of international law in force since 1970). After Trump withdrew from the deal and imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions, Tehran began enriching uranium far beyond the limits imposed by the JCPOA. It also, eventually, curtailed the additional access it had granted to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Since returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump has attacked Iran twice, both times amid nuclear negotiations and alongside Israel, a bitter enemy of the Islamic Republic. While U.S.–Israel strikes have set back Iran’s nuclear program, they’ve done even more damage to America’s diplomatic credibility—and prompted Tehran to reconsider its nuclear policy. “The Iranians have lost faith in the Americans as good-faith negotiating partners,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “So that is leading them to look at a secret nuclear weapons program.”
The way things are headed, Trump 2.0—and especially the calamitous Iran War—will accelerate the demise of a global non-proliferation regime that has worked better than many had expected at its inception during the darkest years of the Cold War. In Kimball’s telling, Trump has eschewed arms-control negotiations with adversaries—“one of the classic and proven tools of U.S. foreign policy,” Kimball noted—reverting instead to “blustery threats” and ham-fisted diplomacy that relies on his personal relationships with foreign leaders. “He has nothing to show for it,” Kimball added.
Nothing good, anyway.
Beijing is expanding its own nuclear arsenal, in part to shore up its deterrence capabilities vis-à-vis Washington. Meanwhile, the New START treaty with Moscow expired this February, and Trump rebuffed an offer by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to extend the accord’s limitations on the number of deployed nuclear weapons. After New START died, the White House didn’t seem very eager to allay fears of a 21st-century nuclear arms race, to put it mildly.
“In the five days since the last remaining nuclear treaty between the United States and Russia expired, statements by administration officials have made two things clear: Washington is actively weighing the deployment of more nuclear weapons, and it is also likely to conduct a nuclear test of some kind,” reported the New York Times. “Both steps would reverse nearly 40 years of stricter nuclear control by the United States, which has reduced or kept steady the number of weapons it has loaded into silos, bombers and submarines.”
Amid the uncertainty, even America’s friends are drifting away from their nonproliferation commitments. Three days after the American-Israeli surprise attack on Iran this late February, President Emmanuel Macron announced the first expansion in decades of France’s nuclear arsenal. “To be free, we have to be feared,” Macron said. Officials in other European nations apparently share that sentiment. Asked by TAC whether any non-nuclear-armed European countries had started to consider getting the bomb, the foreign minister of one small European nation answered yes—his own.
Of course, America’s European allies are reacting less to the Iran War than to other emanations of Trump’s erratic and confrontational persona: his threats against Greenland, tariffs against the European Union, and perceived unwillingness to defend NATO partners against any future attack by Russia. But beyond Europe, the Iran War itself has caused some U.S. partners to eye nuclear weapons.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia seeks uranium enrichment capabilities, signing a civil nuclear deal with the U.S. that experts warn could ignite a regional arms race. Riyadh is motivated, in part, by the ongoing Iran quagmire and perceived need to build a latent nuclear capability to deter Tehran, an historic rival. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said for years that if Tehran ever acquires nuclear weapons, Riyadh will need to do the same. Moreover, America’s inability throughout the war to protect Saudi Arabia from attacks by Iran and its allies—especially the Yemeni Houthis—has prompted the Kingdom to diversify the sources of its own security.
The odds of nuclear proliferation have also grown in East Asia. “With Washington focused on the Middle East, the world desperate for energy, and Asian allies unsure of the future, the possibility of multiple nuclear-armed states in Northeast Asia looks dangerously plausible,” warns Joshua Kurlantzick, a regional expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The region, Kurlantzick notes, is heavily reliant on oil and natural gas from the Gulf and thus acutely impacted by the supply crunch. To meet energy needs, Japan and South Korea have mulled an expansion of their nuclear programs, despite risks of a Chinese backlash. As the Trump administration moved weapons systems from East Asia to the Middle East to support its Iran War, the two nations grew concerned about the reliability of U.S. security guarantees. Officials and analysts in Seoul and Tokyo began asking whether their nations should not only expand their civilian nuclear programs—but weaponize them.
From Eurasia to the Middle East to the United States itself, nuclear proliferation increasingly looks like a plausible long-term consequence of the second Trump administration. Such an outcome would be not only depressing, but the very opposite of what Trump had said he wanted in early 2025. Back then, America’s 45th-and-47th president unexpectedly made global denuclearization a foreign policy priority. And he wasn’t talking about some technocratic add-on to extant international law. True to form, Trump teased a new grand bargain among the United States, China, and Russia, the great powers of the world system and the states with the largest nuclear arsenals.
He first floated the idea in early February 2025, during a speech at the glitzy, uber-elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think it’s very possible,” Trump said. He reiterated the proposal days later. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over, and here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to China and Russia. “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually hopefully much more productive.”
A year and a half later, a U.S.–China–Russia denuclearization pact seems downright fanciful. Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent and well-connected political analyst in Russia’s capital, told TAC that U.S. militarism generally—and Trump’s Iran War in particular—had all but killed any prospects for eliminating nuclear weapons. “As far as the general issue about ‘denuclearization’ is concerned, I think that everybody understands that this notion is utopian now,” Lukyanov said. “The nuclear factor is back as a political tool, maybe even a military one.”
One major problem, as Kelanic and Kimball also emphasized, is that American aggression has demonstrated the vulnerability of states that lack a nuclear deterrent. “The cause of events is very clear,” Lukyanov said. “Those who abandoned the nuclear program—Iraq, Libya, now Iran—are being attacked, while those who completed the program—North Korea—are untouched.” Moscow insiders assess that Trump’s war not only gave Iran added incentive to acquire a nuclear deterrent, but exposed Tehran’s folly in failing to do so before now.
Apparently, Iranian elites see things much the same. “By all accounts, the war has dramatically changed the debate in Iran, including within the Iranian security establishment, about weaponization,” said Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “There is a strong narrative now, right or wrong, that had Iran built the bomb, the U.S. and Israel would never have attacked it, just like the U.S. has not attacked North Korea.”
Both Lukyanov and Parsi were quick to mention the fatwa—a type of Islamic legal ruling—against nuclear weapons issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who always insisted that Iran’s nuclear program was solely for peaceful energy purposes. While some analysts have dismissed the fatwa as irrelevant if not a ruse, others judge it to be real, binding, and sincere—at least until early this year. Khamenei, of course, was killed in the opening strikes of the current war, and the fatwa seems to have died with him.
Even before Khamenei’s assassination, Iranian officials stressed that the fatwa could be rescinded. In 2021, an intelligence chief said the Islamic Republic would drop it if “pushed in that direction” like a “cornered cat.” Last year, amid a growing sense that war was inevitable, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps—a hardline force of the Iranian military—urged Khamenei to cancel it, apparently to no avail. But Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba, appears more amenable to the views of hardliners, who increasingly are calling on Tehran to exit the NPT and build the bomb. “It is noteworthy that the new supreme leader has not renewed his father’s fatwa against weaponization,” Parsi said.
If he’s been listening to the U.S. president’s recent speeches, the new Khamenei’s amenability has probably only grown. “If they had a nuclear weapon, I’d be calling the supreme leader,” Trump quipped at a campaign rally this September. “And I’d be saying, ‘Mr. Supreme Leader, how are you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?’ As opposed to bombing the crap out of them.” The crowd roared, and Trump continued, using repetition to drive home the point: “We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon, it’s very simple. We cannot let them have a nuclear weapon.”
The irony, of course, is that “bombing the crap out of them” has only made Iran more likely to get the bomb, at least in the long run, and especially compared to what Trump might have achieved through earnest diplomacy. Despite Trump’s claim to have achieved “the essential Denuclearization of Iran,” Tehran retained its enriched uranium and Iranian scientists haven’t forgotten how to conduct the full nuclear fuel cycle, which they mastered long ago. The Islamic Republic will reconstitute its nuclear facilities and, this author predicts, make a dash for the bomb—if it’s not doing so already.
And the human wrecking ball known as President Donald Trump didn’t smash only that part of the nonproliferation order holding Iran back from weaponizing its nuclear program. No world leader could fail to notice that Iran was attacked precisely because it lacked a nuclear deterrent. Nor could anyone fail to hear the implicit nuclear threat contained within Trump’s pledges to wipe out Iranian civilization and unleash a level of military destruction not seen since World War II.
The president seems to have been bluffing, but can anyone doubt that a man obsessed with so meager a concept as bigness finds himself drawn, at least unconsciously, to pushing the big red button?
The post How Trump Made the World Go Nuclear appeared first on The American Conservative.
(@MarvelWarRoom) October 12, 2026
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