In the spirit of the season, the Washington Examiner has identified 12 issues we believe will shape 2024 — and beyond. These close-up examinations of agenda-setting issues cover everything from the ongoing battle between the Biden family’s business deals and Republican Oversight, the emergence of a “new world order,” and fights over redistricting and new election maps. Part Four is about said “new world order.“
President Joe Biden and other Western leaders could soon face a world upended by the spread of nuclear weapons, current and former Western officials fear, as a wide range of threats spur more governments to grab for the bomb.
“Nuclear proliferation is now much, much more dangerous than it has been since 1945,” said Janis Kazocins, whose seven-year tenure as national security adviser to the president of Latvia, a NATO ally, ended in 2023. “It’s much more likely, on a larger scale, and is one of the three or four existential threats to humanity, which our children and grandchildren will have to face during this century.”
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The security pressures driving that ominous forecast have been accumulating for three decades, with rogue states such as North Korea relying on their nuclear weapons arsenal to foreclose the possibility of regime change at foreign hands. Yet 2024 could be the year that the strategic argument in favor of nuclear proliferation outweighs the diplomatic costs, even if democracies long faithful to the international ban on the acquisition of nuclear weapons continue to postpone a policy change.
“People have seen what happened to Ukraine when they gave up their nukes,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), who sits on the House committees that oversee the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community, said. “People saw what happened [to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein], people saw what happened to Libya, they see the threat that South Korea is under, completely reliant on the U.S for their deterrent. So I think you’re gonna continue to see — sadly, scarily — you’re gonna see proliferation.”
U.S. leaders since the Second World War have managed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons by persuading less powerful allies that they can shelter secure under the protection of an American nuclear umbrella. That project included a negotiation to persuade Ukraine to relinquish its nuclear weapons in 1994, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in exchange for so-called security assurances from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, which also signed a 1997 treaty affirming the inviolability of Ukrainian borders.
With Ukraine now at war and U.S. policymakers in both parties debating the prudence of backing an attempt to expel Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory, the American umbrella looks leakier than ever.
“Yes, but I would just make the point that we sent that signal around the world in 2014,” Waltz said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s initial maneuver to annex Crimea. “Not now with this debate, where we’re saying, ‘Well, wait a minute: We stopped the sucking chest wound, you know, we kept the patient alive, but now we need to have a real debate on what kind of what the long term wellness plan is.’”
Russia’s war in Ukraine has been enabled in part by Kremlin cooperation with Iran and North Korea, two regimes that have the potential to spark nuclear crises on their own. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un began 2023 with a warning that his regime’s nuclear force is not tasked with the defense of the regime alone — “the second mission is not defense,” he said — and he has overseen a flurry of short-range missile launches and five intercontinental ballistic missile tests in 2024.
“North Korea continues to perfect its long-range missile and nuclear capabilities in ways that are antithetical not only to the region but to the United States as well,” Kurt Campbell, the lead White House official for the Indo-Pacific and Biden’s nominee for deputy secretary of state, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his Dec. 7 nomination hearing. “I am worried that North Korea in the current environment has decided that they are no longer interested in diplomacy with the United States. And that means that we are going to have to focus even more on deterrence.”
To that end, Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol affirmed that South Korean defense is “backed by the full range of U.S. capabilities, including nuclear,” as the so-called Washington Declaration put it. That language was designed to leave South Koreans “feel[ing] that they are sharing nuclear weapons with the United States,” as one of Yoon’s top advisers put it, but that sensation might fade if Ukraine is perceived as losing the war.
“I think the fate of Ukraine is really going to be the deciding factor here,” a Pentagon strategist told the Washington Examiner in reference to South Korea’s potential interest in nuclear weapons. “If Ukraine goes south, that really will become a real point of contention.”
While the possession of nuclear weapons by a U.S. ally might not seem like a terrible outcome, at first glance, it means more “countries having the ability to destroy the world,” as Waltz put it, and fewer resources invested in conventional defense.
“For example, Japan is increasing its defense budget to 2% of its GDP,” Waltz said. “But if they’re going to spend the vast majority of that of developing a nuclear triad from scratch, then there’s an opportunity cost of having real capabilities in the western Pacific, where the U.S. has struggled from a logistics standpoint.”
U.S. efforts to contain the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East also face a severe strain. Campbell, in his Senate testimony, conceded that he doesn’t “think anyone sees that there’s any chance in the current environment to go back” to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which former President Donald Trump exited in 2018. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in September that “if they get one, we have to get one.” That blunt declaration underscored the Biden administration’s interest in a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, underpinned by “some form of security guarantee” and military assistance, as a Washington Institute analyst put it in September.
Those negotiations were interrupted on Oct. 7, when Iran-backed Hamas terrorists rampaged across southern Israel, igniting the war in Gaza. The eruption of violence raised U.S. and Israeli fears that the conflict would widen into a war with Iran’s larger terrorist proxy, Lebanese Hezbollah. That hasn’t come to pass, to the relief of many, but Iran’s seeming decision to keep Hezbollah on the sidelines points to a desire for those forces to remain intact and available to deter an Israeli strike on their nuclear forces.
“They’re holding the Hezbollah ace card [because] they’re continuing to march towards weaponization and testing a nuclear device,” Waltz said. “So if that happens, then we have a full-blown nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Nobody in the Middle East believes we’re going to [risk] a full-blown nuclear conflagration [to protect] a city in the Gulf.”
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There’s no sure way to predict when such a crisis might emerge, whether in 2024 or further down the line, analysts agree. And yet the components of such a crisis seem to loom larger on the horizon, leaving officials and observers to wonder what event will demonstrate that the world has been on the threshold of a new era in the nuclear age.
“Now, if you add to all of this, the fact that, of the countries we’re talking about which possess nuclear weapons, some are very unstable … we have serious problems,” Kazocins, the former Latvian national security adviser and a retired general in the British army, said. “We’re starting to lose our grip on nuclear proliferation. And that’s really, really dangerous.”
