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Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Daniel Horner, David Welch, and Benoît Pelopidas for comments on earlier versions of this essay.
Notes
1 Meier and Vieluf explicitly note (p. 5) that their article builds on my concept of “oppositional-nationalist” leaders. See Jacques E. C. Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2 See especially Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). For a different argument—that the superpowers’ evident lack of restraint since 1945 is the inevitable consequence of the fundamental anarchic structure of the international system—see Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).
3 James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, The Armageddon Letters: Kennedy/Khrushchev/Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).
4 Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); see also Benoît Pelopidas, “Power, Luck, and Responsibility at the End of the World(s),” International Theory, Vol. 12, No. 3 (November 2020), pp. 459–470.
5 Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
6 Nick Ritchie, US Nuclear Weapons Policy after the Cold War: Russians, “Rogues,” and Domestic Division (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 118.
7 William C. Potter, “India and the New Look of US Nonproliferation Policy,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 (July 2005), pp. 343–354. For the standard estimate of the growth of India’s nuclear arsenal over time, see “Status of World Nuclear Forces,” Federation of American Scientists, last updated February 23, 2022, <https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/>.
8 Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq (New York: Penguin Books, 2020).
9 “Albright Casts a Critical Eye on US Foreign Policy,” NPR, Weekend Edition Saturday, March 31, 2007 (full text available via ProQuest). The lone positive nonproliferation development that could arguably be attributed to Bush’s Iraq invasion was Libya’s decision to give up its nuclear-weapons efforts. But Libya’s efforts had been flailing for decades and had little chance of ultimate success. The US intelligence community was not wrong to rate Libya as “an inept bungler, the court jester among the band of nations seeking biological or nuclear capabilities.” Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report to the President of the United States, March 31, 2005, p. 259, <https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/wmd_report.pdf>.
10 See John S. Duffield and Peter J. Dombrowski, Balance Sheet: The Iraq War and National Security (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
11 Ron Paul’s son Rand Paul also condemned the decision to invade Iraq during his short-lived 2016 presidential run.
12 Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them (New York: Crown, 2022).
13 Geneviève Rousselière, “Can Popular Sovereignty Be Represented? Jacobinism from Radical Democracy to Populism,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 65, No. 3 (July 2021), pp. 670–682.
14 Kevin Duong, “The People as a Natural Disaster: Redemptive Violence in Jacobin Political Thought,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 111, No. 4 (2017), pp. 786–800.
15 Brian Singer, “Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forms of Expulsion,” in Ferenc Fehér, The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 151.
16 Duong, “The People as a Natural Disaster,” pp. 794–795.
17 The same was not true for the prior electoral cycles that resulted in the election and reelection of President Barack Obama. See Olivia Fortunato, Rick Dierenfeldt, Sherah Basham, and Karen McGuffee, “Examining the Impact of the Obama and Trump Candidacies on Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism in the United States: A Time-Series Analysis,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence (March 2, 2022), <https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605221078813>.
18 Quoted in Bethan Johnson and Matthew Feldman, “Siege Culture after Siege: Anatomy of a Neo-Nazi Terrorist Doctrine,” ICCT Research Paper (ISSN 2468-0664), International Centre for Counter-Terrorism—The Hague, July 2021, p. 13, <https://icct.nl/publication/siege-culture-anatomy-of-a-neo-nazi-terrorist-doctrine/>.
19 Johnson and Feldman, “Siege Culture after Siege”; Rebecca L. Earnhardt, Brendan Hyatt, and Nickolas Roth, “A Threat to Confront: Far-Right Extremists and Nuclear Terrorism,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 14, 2021, <https://thebulletin.org/2021/01/a-threat-to-confront-far-right-extremists-and-nuclear-terrorism/>.
20 On the rather curious general phenomenon of people understanding the territory of their home country as an indivisible whole, see Hein E. Goemans, “Bounded Communities: Territoriality, Territorial Attachment, and Conflict,” in Miles Kahler and Barbara F. Walter, eds., Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
21 On the importance of perceptions in deterrence, see Robert Jervis, “Deterrence and Perception,” International Security, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Winter 1982–1983), pp. 3–30.
22 See “Hwasong-14 (KN-20),” CSIS Missile Defense Project, last updated July 31, 2021, <https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/hwasong-14/>. On March 16, 2022, North Korea failed in its first attempt to test the larger Hwasong-17 ICBM, then apparently tested a Hwasong-15 with a light payload a week later and claimed it was a successful test of the Hwasong-17. See Vann H. Van Diepen, “Revisiting the Hwasong-17/15 Controversy: What If North Korea Had Launched a Hwasong-15?” 38 North, April 27, 2022 https://www.38north.org/2022/04/revisiting-the-hwasong-17-15-controversy-what-if-north-korea-had-launched-a-hwasong-15/.
23 “Seattle, Portland, New York Sue over Trump’s ‘Anarchy’ Label,” PBS NewsHour, October 22, 2020, <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/seattle-portland-new-york-sue-over-trumps-anarchy-label>.
24 James Cameron, The Double Game: The Demise of America's First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 113.
25 Nuclear and defense establishments also decide who will bear the greatest burden of nuclear deterrence, typically choosing powerless subjects such as the Marshall Islanders. I am hypothesizing that populists may choose powerful rivals instead. From an ethical standpoint, both kinds of choices are highly problematic.
26 US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Inspector General, “Review of HUD’s Disbursement of Grant Funds Appropriated for Disaster Recovery and Mitigation Activities in Puerto Rico,” Report No. 2019SU0089451, April 20, 2021, <https://www.hudoig.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/HUD%20OIG%20Final%20Report_2019SU008945I.pdf>.
27 Tracy Jan, Arelis R. Hernández, Josh Dawsey, and Damian Paletta, “After Butting Heads with Trump Administration, Top HUD Official Departs Agency,” Washington Post, January 16, 2019, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/top-hud-officials-departure-follows-disagreements-over-housing-policy-and-puerto-rico-disaster-funds/2019/01/16/e6ba5be4-1839-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081_story.html?noredirect=on>. On the broader context that facilitated Trump’s behavior: Yarimar Bonilla, “The Coloniality of Disaster: Race, Empire, and the Temporal Logics of Emergency in Puerto Rico, USA,” Political Geography, Vol. 78 (2020), Article 102181.
28 Cynthia J. Bowling, Jonathan M. Fisk, and John C. Morris, “Seeking Patterns in Chaos: Transactional Federalism in the Trump Administration’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” American Review of Public Administration, Vol. 50, Nos. 6–7 (2020), p. 517.
29 US House of Representatives, Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, “More Effective, More Efficient, More Equitable: Overseeing an Improving & Ongoing Pandemic Response,” December 17, 2021, <https://coronavirus.house.gov/sites/democrats.coronavirus.house.gov/files/SSCCInterimReportDec2021V1.pdf>.
30 White House, “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing,” March 28, 2020, <https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-13/>.
31 Katherine Eban, “‘That’s Their Problem’: How Jared Kushner Let the Markets Decide America’s Covid-19 Fate,” Vanity Fair, September 17, 2020, <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-the-markets-decide-covid-19-fate>.
32 White House, “Telephone Conversation with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine,” July 25, 2019, declassified by order of the president, September 24, 2019, <https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6429027/White-House-Transcript-2019.pdf>.
33 William Perry and Tom Z. Collina, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2020).
34 Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), p. xxiv. The accuracy of Woodward’s journalistic scoops has often been questioned, but in this case, Woodward and Costa obtained a full transcript of the January 8, 2021, call between Milley and Pelosi.