36
votes
Donald Trump shock spurs Japan to think about the unthinkable: nuclear arms
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- Authors
- Tim Kelly, John Geddie, Ju-min Park, Joyce Lee, Josh Smith, David Lague
- Published
- Aug 19 2025
- Word count
- 4157 words
The global world order from post Cold war to a few months ago was sort of like a large, mostly safe city. There was a single, large policing force who mostly had a monopoly on violence and the weapons to back it up. Yes, there were rough areas and spats of violence, but if it got out of hand, there would be a rapid, overwhelming response, so things hadn't escalated from smaller regional conflicts. This was mostly a mutually beneficial arrangement. Smaller countries didn't have to spend billions of dollars to build and maintain nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, and so on. It was hugely beneficial to the US, who got to be the global reserve currency backed up by a massive military that made the US dollar the safest investment the world had ever seen.
What trump is doing is pushing us towards an earlier type of relationship between states, and stretching this analogy a bit, it much more resembles something like the wild west. Everyone is responsible for their own defense, violence is used freely by anyone based on their own judgement, and legal responses are mostly unofficial and ad hoc. Notably, the reason why there are so many westerns and it's such a popular setting for stories is because of how conducive an environment like that was for drama. People were killed, and there were no reprocussions. Theft, rape, murder, kidnapping and all sorts of other really horrible stuff happened regularly because there were no reprocussions, which was very attractive to bad actors.
This really isn't the type of situation we want between nations.
Trump's eternal problem is that he views every single relationship as a zero sum game. I don't know why he has this mental block in his brain, but he's spent his entire life without the concept of a mutually beneficial deal. In his mind, if something is good for one party, it must be bad for the other.
He can't conceive of the idea that the party that benefited the most from the US more or less having a monopoly on military action was the US. He just sees the cost, and can't conceive that we've benefited by being one of the very few countries that have nuclear weapons, and by far the most powerful ones.
It makes as much sense as a government in a city thinking that they're being exploited by their residents, because they're the only ones that have to pay for guns, uniforms, and bullet proof vests.
I'm not sure what it is about his line of reasoning that makes him think this way, but if he's allowed to continue, he's going to destroy decades of progress and peace and return us to a time where when a nation feels like it has the upper hand militarily, it just takes what it wants from its neighbors.
Hell, he's advocated for the US doing just that.
We've seen the beginning of this with Russia invading Ukraine. If this continues to be normalized, we could very soon see China trying for Taiwan, North Korea trying for South Korea, India trying for Pakistan and so forth. It would be a situation similar to the the 18th century, except this time with guided missiles, FPV suicide drones, and nuclear weapons. This kind of thinking could directly result in hundreds of millions of lives lost and untold more destroyed.
I think your Wild West analogy is spot on. Tangentially related, it reminded me of an argument put forward in an episode of Revisionist History (podcast by journalist/author Malcolm Gladwell) exploring gun violence in the U.S. Gladwell argues that America's problematic relationship with gun rights and gun crime may have been in part influenced by idealistic portrayals of the American West in modern media, particularly the TV series Gunsmoke.
I think as time as marched on, the concept of the West (at least, in it's many idealistic modern interpretations) has become very appealing to a large facet of society. We live in an incredibly complex, interconnected world, so the concepts of simple societies that 'look after themselves' and solve moral issues without getting 'bogged down in the details' are attractive to some.
To give another domestic example, some members of parliament in my country (Australia) were recently chastised for some comments regarding family violence that, shall we say, grossly oversimplified the issue:
I'm including this example to illustrate that this line of thinking and idealisation of societies depicted in the Wild West genre is culturally persistent, even outside the U.S.
To return to the original geopolitical discussion that this post has generated, it breaks my heart that we have lost the generation that learned the lessons of the First World War, and those that cemented those lessons after the Second - Not perfectly, of course, but I generally believe there was an overall global push towards a peace that would prevent those atrocities from ever repeating. The current trajectory is putting us straight back on to a path of destruction that collective humanity successfully steered us away from, except as you mentioned with destructive capacities previously unimaginable. And sadly, many, many people are struggling to see what the problem is: In our increasingly complex world, simple solutions and a twisted understanding of freedom and independence are getting harder to argue against, especially when we're all too busy, stressed and uncompassionate to explore the consequences, which unfortunately only empowers Trump and those of his ilk.
I feel almost like Japan reconsidering their stance towards nuclear armament is a geo-political canary in a coal mine. Consensus is turning away from peace even there - and that's terrifying.
CBC Ideas did a full show on how the cowboy myth affected the trajectory of the Republican movement. Worth a listen.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/9.6743827
We won’t fully know for years the worldwide damage this criminal traitor has done. And I assume the minute he’s gone the full truth of his corruption and depravity will be revealed, and most of his supporters will act surprised or deny they ever supported him.
I mean, we saw how corrupt and depraved he was the first time around and his supports dug their heals in and denied reality. I think at this point if he fully admitted to all his corruption, most of the base would praise him for being so clever at gaming the system. As far as I can tell there's a big group of people that are pretty far gone from reality and I don't know how we bring them back, or if it's even possible.
We legit need widespread deprogramming initiatives. These people are in a cult.
If the US government starts “deprogramming programs”, what kind of “deprogramming” do you think the current administration would do?
I guess we'll see soon just how many countries are really only a screwdriver's turn away from nuclear deterrents of their own.
AIUI the bigger ones are only months away - Germany and South Korea being the big two. Nukes have two hard parts - the nuclear part and the missile part. The missile part can be completed as a non-nuclear power, and its difficulty depends on your target (if SK only needs to reach NK then they could potentially fire the nuke with artillery if they wanted to, whereas if Iran wanted to threaten the US then it would have to make a very a specialised intercontinental missile), whereas the nuclear part mostly takes some time, access to the right fissile material (having civilian nuclear industries really helps, since they have people trained in very similar fields), and a ton of centrifuges.