Trump and the Interregnum of American Nuclear Hegemony

Abstract

ABSTRACTNuclear weapons are the ultimate power capacity of states. They make it possible to exterminate whole states, cities and peoples almost instantaneously. Because they are militarily unusable in almost any conceivable context, their main (but not only) use today is to deter other nuclear-armed states from using them first, by threatening nuclear retaliation. American nuclear hegemony combined the ideology of nuclear deterrence to legitimate nuclear alliances, embodied in institutional form as integrated force structures, and undergirded by uniquely threatening American nuclear forces.Since the end of the Cold War, this hegemony has declined. The first year of the Trump Administration revealed glimpses of Trump’s intention to exploit nuclear threat, formalized in his Nuclear Posture Review and nuclear modernization budgets. These suggest that Trump will accelerate the dissolution of residual American nuclear hegemony at all three levels of ideology, institutions, and forces. We can expect more “morbid symptoms” that reveal that we are now in a post-hegemonic interregnum wherein nuclear weapons may be used in ways that disorder the international system.Eventually, non-nuclear states and civil society may combine to create post-hegemonic forms of governance of the threat posed by nuclear weapons, especially by the states committed to nuclear weapons abolition.