Security assurances and proliferation risks in the Trump administration

ABSTRACT

Comments that Donald Trump made while campaigning to be U.S. president have raised concerns that his administration will pull back from U.S. alliance commitments and encourage countries such as Japan and South Korea to acquire nuclear arms. The new article by Frühling and O’Neil outlines an institutional framework that can be helpful in assessing the risks that Trump administration policies will lead to nuclear proliferation. An institutional perspective shows that important elements of U.S. security assurances will continue to function, and this reduces the chances that President Trump’s actions or statements will trigger proliferation by U.S. allies. The greatest risk to global non-proliferation efforts posed by a Trump administration in fact lies elsewhere, in the possibility that President Trump will seek to abrogate the Iran nuclear deal.

KEYWORDS:

• Alliances
• assurance
• extended nuclear deterrence
• nuclear proliferation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jeffrey W. Knopf is a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, where he serves as chair of the M.A. program in Non-proliferation and Terrorism Studies. He is also a senior research associate with the Institute’s James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies. Dr Knopf is the editor of two recent book volumes, International cooperation on WMD non-proliferation (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and Security assurances and nuclear non-proliferation (Stanford University Press, 2012). In addition, he is a proud past winner of the Bernard Brodie Prize, awarded by Contemporary Security Policy for his article “The fourth wave in deterrence research” published in the April 2010 issue.

ORCID

Jeffrey W. Knopf http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3827-5192