Whodunnit?

Walter Russell Mead in his Wall Street Journal column thinks he has found the culprit responsible for killing nuclear non-proliferation—Barack Obama:

As President Clinton told the Irish news service RTÉ last week, the Ukrainians resisted American pressure to denuclearize: “They were afraid to give them up because they thought that’s the only thing that protected them from an expansionist Russia.” But Americans, as Mr. Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright once put it, “stand tall. We see further than other countries into the future.” And so the Clinton administration pushed another message on the Ukrainians: The rules-based international order would protect Ukraine’s future better than anything as anachronistic as nuclear weapons.

“I feel terrible about it,” Mr. Clinton told RTÉ, arguing that now Americans must help Ukraine in a crisis brought on in large part by their trust in our word.

The real situation was complicated. Russia still controlled the nuclear weapons left on Ukraine’s territory. They were less a Ukrainian hedge against Russian adventurism than outposts of Russian power on Ukrainian soil. Nevertheless, with hindsight it appears that trusting the word of a U.S. president and the rules of the international order rather than relying on a nuclear deterrent was a blunder of historic proportions.

Bill Clinton’s reflections come as the barriers to nuclear proliferation are rapidly weakening around the world. Russia and China are abandoning all pretense of opposing the North Korean arsenal. In South Korea, polls show that 70% of the population believes that the time has come to follow the North’s lead. In the Middle East, Iran’s relentless progress toward nuclear weapons is touching off the long-feared regional proliferation cascade. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are taking the first steps toward acquiring the capability to enrich uranium. Turkey is unlikely to lag far behind as nuclear weapons become a normal part of the arsenal of middle powers. Nationalists in countries such as Brazil and Argentina will want their countries to join the expanding nuclear club.

The fight against nuclear proliferation has been a centerpiece of American foreign policy since the first bombs fell on Japan in 1945. American diplomacy tried and failed to stop the Soviet, British, French, Chinese, Israeli, Indian, Pakistani and North Korean programs. The Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970 and was permanently extended five months after the 1994 signing of the Budapest Memorandum. In that memorandum, Russia, the U.S. and U.K. agreed not to threaten or attack Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and to consult on helping if they were attacked; also, the three former Soviet republics joined the NPT as nonnuclear states. The NPT has been hailed as a cornerstone of the rules-based international order. Backers hoped that nonproliferation was only the start. Ultimately the nuclear powers would follow the example of Ukraine and give up their nuclear arsenals in the service of world peace.

History will name Barack Obama as the man on whose watch nonproliferation definitively failed. His waffling response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine not only marked the end of the post-Cold War holiday from history; it also marked the death of the dream that the leaders of the democratic world had the strength and vision to uphold the principles of the rules-based international order in the face of a ruthless opponent. It further taught the world that nuclear weapons are a better defense than American pledges. Coupled with the failure to address North Korea’s nuclear progress and the Iran deal’s sunset clauses, which made the treaty about delaying rather than blocking Tehran’s nuclear advances, Obama-era diplomacy made clear that, despite high-flown rhetoric to the contrary, Washington had no plan to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

I think that nuclear non-proliferation was killed long before 2014 and the blame belongs to none other than Bill Clinton. To the clue mentioned by Mr. Clinton himself I would add:

• NATO expansion
• Failure to react to North Korea’s obvious prevarications regarding nuclear weapons
• the “Agreed Framework”

Much of North Korea’s nuclear development activities took place under Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s watches. You can’t blame Obama and let them off the hook.