These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
For much of the Washington D.C. foreign policy apparatus, Latin America — a region plagued by economic instability, political upheaval, and social calamity — represents little more than a headache or an after-thought.
Not for Greg Grandin.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, and Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft makes the case in a new book that the United States’ unique national identity and foreign policy in fact emerged from a constant and turbulent engagement with Latin America that has molded the contours of U.S. history.
Grandin contends that centuries of turmoil, bloodshed, and diplomacy in Latin America have shaped not only political outcomes in the United States but the laws, institutions, and ideals governing the modern world. Grandin’s original, accessible reinterpretation of New World history also illuminates how Latin America’s deeply held social democratic tradition has, despite profound obstacles, persisted over time, offering lessons for the U.S. and other Western nations.
RS sat down with Grandin to discuss his new book, “America, América: A New History of the New World,” released in April from Penguin Random House.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT: Foreign policy scholars in the U.S. generally tend to look towards Europe to understand the United States' unique national identity and history. Why should they be looking instead to Latin America?
GREG GRANDIN: Well, not so much instead, but also, I would say. I think that the intensity of the relationship within the New World, starting with the violence and horrors of the conquest, created a kind of moral revolution within the Catholic Church that put a lot of questions that we now associate with political modernity on the agenda. It certainly didn't slow the violence or lessen the horrors of the conquest, but it did raise questions about human equality and dignity and rights. More specifically, the United States’ relationship with Latin America was unlike any other relations that an empire — albeit an informal one, one that denies that it's an empire — had with its colonies, or at least that a superpower had with its periphery, given it was so ideologically combative. The struggle was over a shared set of common ideals, starting with the nature of Christianity, working its way up through republicanism and then notions of property, rights, sovereignty and the role of international law. Latin America really was formative for how the United States engaged with the rest of the world.
The book argues specifically of the importance of Latin America for the United States, but it also argues for the importance of that relationship in the creation of, for lack of a better word, the rules-based order, or the liberal international order, which is what got put in place in 1945. Latin America has largely been ignored for a lot of reasons, but the liberal and the republic tradition within Latin America gets downplayed as a result. It hasn’t been a site of intellectual history. When intellectual historians or European historians start to consider global history, they look to Europe and its colonies as the origins of the League of Nations or the United Nations. They tend not to incorporate Latin America into that framework. And that's what I was trying to do in this book.
RS: What are one or two critical moments, movements, historical events or trends in which Latin America helped shape that liberal international order that you mentioned — the legal norms, ideas, and institutions that undergird today's order?
GRANDIN: The book covers 500 years and there are lots of moments and encounters and stories that flesh out in detail concretely what I'm arguing here abstractly. But I would say right from the beginning, think about the origins of Spanish America, which came into the world as a kind of already existing League of Nations, with seven independent republics on a continent that the leaders of the independence movements imagined as already filled up. Contrast that to the United States, which came into the world as a single republic on a continent that they imagined as mostly empty. Obviously, it was not empty. Aside from Spain, there was France, Great Britain, indigenous sovereignties — the continent was far from empty, but it was perceived as empty in the conceptualization of international law. The United States then revived the doctrine of conquest in order to justify its push west. Its thesis of sovereignty was a revitalization of the doctrine of conquest, the right to wage war and to keep territory that you grab in that war.
Latin America didn't — couldn't — do that. As a concert of independent nations, Latin America couldn't come into the world affirming the doctrine of conquest because it would just lead to endless war. What would stop Argentina from saying, “we want to get to the Pacific too, just like the United States does, so why can’t we just roll over the Andes and take Chile?”
They had to learn how to live with each other. And each nation legitimated the other’s existence because each nation affirmed the validity of being able to break and create republics from from the Catholic empire, but they also threatened each other because under the old terms of what we now call international law, they would be engaged in endless wars for more territory for whatever reason they want. So, Spanish Americans rejected both the United States’ revival of the doctrine of conquest and rejected Europe's real-politik balance of power.
Simón Bolívar famously argued that real-politik, in which nations push against each other to pursue their interests, will always lead to war because it's inherently unstable. So one of the transcendent principles that Latin America helped pioneer was the idea that nations had common interests and that cooperation, not competition, should be the guiding principle of international relations. They also came up with laws affirming the sanctity of borders, principles against aggressive war, offensive war — basically all of the principles that one finds in the United Nations in 1945, or even the League of Nations.
One could see these origins in the first decades of Latin American independence as they worked out the norms on how to deal with each other. The moral revolution that rejected much of the violence of the conquest also questioned the legitimacy of the Spanish empire. People like Bartolome de las Casas, who has a large role in the book, went as far as rejecting Spain's claim to dominion and sovereignty in the Americas and certainly rejecting the doctrine of conquest. So Spanish America's independence leaders were already primed with a critique of empire, and once they cast off the Spanish empire, they had to deal with another empire: the United States. So all of the criticisms that Latin America would level at the United States were already in many ways worked out vis-a-vis Spain.
I'll just give you one very concrete example. In the early 1890s, the United States organized the first Pan American Conference and for a long time rejected all of Latin America's critiques of international law, what Latin American jurists had already begun to call American international law. The United States representatives kept saying, there can only be international law. There are no regional variations. It has to be universal. So Latin Americans said, “okay, but we’re still calling America international law.” And at that very first meeting, one of the main points of contention was Latin Americans insisting that the United States reject and acknowledge that the doctrine of conquest was invalid and agree to abrogate it. And the United States resisted.
But they finally reached a compromise in which the United States agreed that conquest would be illegal for only two decades, and then revisit the question. Latin Americans went along with it because they didn't have much power in relation to the United States, but still it's an interesting moment in which Latin America is constantly trying to get the United States to reject the doctrine of conquest and the United States refusing.
RS: Many examples are listed in the book, but are there one or two particularly salient examples of Latin American historical figures or moments in 20th century U.S.-Latin American ties that have been most consequential in molding sort of the contours of world history. I’m thinking about the Good Neighbor policy, Latin America’s role in the Marshall Plan and World War II. What bearing did these events and Latin America’s role in them have for what would come later in the 20th century?
GRANDIN: The Good Neighbor policies opened markets in Latin America that gave ballast to the New Deal coalition, incorporating a new corporate sector which didn't mind FDR's expansion of liberalism at home if it meant open markets abroad. One of the key figures of this is Cordell Hull, FDR's secretary of state. In 1933, at the 7th Pan American Conference in Montevideo, he extemporaneously accepted pretty much the whole Latin American agenda of international law more than any U.S. representative had (the rejection of conquest, the rejection of the right to intervention, etc). This is a big thing among Latin Americans because the United States was sending gunboats, occupying Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Mexico, taking Panama, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and then giving back Cuba, but as a kind of informal colony.
So Hull's acceptance of this long standing demand is probably the most successful foreign policy turnaround in U.S. history because it didn't lead to a hemorrhaging of U.S. power, but to a refinement and rationalization of U.S. power in the world. It taught the United States how to be a more effective hegemon within its own region, but then also to ready itself for the coming fight against fascism.
I also look at how FDR’s re-election efforts, his get out the vote campaign, was run by Good Neighbor Leagues, which were consciously borrowed from the Good Neighbor policy. It was a way of creating a new moral worldview in which the acceptance of pluralism abroad, including economic nationalism in Latin America, was analogous to a domestic acceptance of racial and cultural pluralism.
These Good Neighbor Leagues became an alternative to the kind of proto-fascism that was on the rise in the United States, consciously understanding themselves as a response to the Saxon supremacy of the so-called Liberty Leagues. Roosevelt won that reelection with 27 million votes. He won more votes than any human being in world history. And he won on a program of what other countries would call social democracy or socialized liberalism. And the first thing he does within a week of winning is sail to Rio de Janeiro to shore up relations with [Getulio] Vargas. And they both call themselves fathers of the New Deal. Vargas, of course, was not elected. He's a dictator. But it was a moment in which social reform was seen as essential as the vote itself.
There’s a great anecdote where the two pass a protest against Vargas in an open car, and Vargas says, “they call me a dictator.” And Roosevelt whispers, “they call me that too.” And then he continues on to Buenos Aires.
It’s unclear if FDR was trying to shore up the old order destroyed by World War I, or organizing the continent to fight fascism, but either way, it's a bringing together of a kind of hemispheric alliance that was absolutely essential in the defeat of fascism, as I argue in the book. Because one of the things that could very well have happened is Latin America could have become a kind of hemispheric Spain, as many of the variables that led to the rise of Praetorian Catholic nationalism under Franco were certainly present in Latin America: a small landowning class that was deeply Catholic, threatened by militant peasant organizing and the rise of more pluralistic political parties and an expansion of a federal state. There was a backlash to that, and the fascists easily could have won that conflict had the United States not tipped the playing field to the social democratic left or the economic nationalists and basically created a unified front against fascism.
I argue in the book that it wasn't just that Latin Americans thought they were just fighting against fascism, but for social democracy, the idea that democracy entailed something more than just the right to vote — it entailed a dignified life. And that was what created such an effervescent moment coming out of World War II, and then explains the backlash and violence leading into the Cold War when those hopes and aspirations were frustrated, when the United States flips and adopts an anti-communist rather than an anti-fascist foreign policy.
RS: So if the social democratic ideal is so persistent in Latin America, as you argue in the book, why hasn’t it been obtained or maintained in practice? But maybe even before getting there, what are some of the concrete examples in which Latin America has been at the forefront of enshrining these social democratic ideals into their constitutions? I know in the book you cite the example of Mexico.
GRANDIN:Social scientists have spent the last couple of decades asking (and many have given up the question by now): why is democracy so weak and institutions so fragile in Latin America? But I think that question has it exactly backwards. Considering all of the violence that's directed at labor and peasant leaders, feminists, gender and environmental activists, the question should be, why is it so strong? Why does it persist? Why do people keep thinking that history is redeemable?
To answer that question is really the charge of the book. I tried to wed intellectual, legal and social history together to understand the endurance of this ideal. And a lot of it has to do with a kind of holism associated with Catholicism, a notion of the dignity of the individual.
The Spanish Empire understood that it was presiding over people that they felt responsible for, which they had to justify rhetorically. Native Americans and African descendants were the center of the Spanish imperial project. Their wealth was extracted, but also they were the moral center in which the whole project was justified. And that's a lot different than what happens in the United States where the English and Protestant colonialism are about evasion and denial. But that ideal in which the individual exists within a larger sociality over time, I argue, manifests itself as what we call social rights and social democracy.
For example, Mexico’s Constitution was the world's first social democratic constitution, the first constitution to recognize not just individual rights, but social and economic rights. The right to dignity, to a pension, health care and education. And you can even go back further. The whole set of independence constitutions affirmed what we call negative or individual rights, in which the virtuous state is one that stands back and allows individuals the greatest area of liberty. But at the same time, and this goes back to this earlier point, these independence leaders were operating in the shadow of the conquest, which they thought was vile, illegal and morally abhorrent, unlike Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who had no problem with English settlements. So the independence constitutions all insisted that you can only have individuality if you also had society.
To give you an example, the Venezuelan Constitution uses the word social and society dozens of times, whereas that word doesn't appear once in the U.S. Constitution. So there's a real sense that what democracy means is some form of social democracy. To the point where reformers, in the early 19th century weren't that concerned with suffrage, believing that it would just really lead to the strengthening of the landed class. They thought that you had to actually have social reform before the vote truly mattered. So Latin America has this long tradition of social rights and social democracy that manifests itself in all sorts of ways, from a kind of lived experience of sociality to legal expressions that affirm that democracy is defined by not just political rights, but social rights.
So why does this not translate into institutional stability? A lot of it has to do with the social nature of Latin American independence. Bolivar would have loved to have had a republic based on the freeing of individual pursuits of their own ambitions, but we have a small landed class, an enormously servile population, three centuries of Spanish colonialism, and at the same time states that were deeply in debt right from the beginning. The banks in London were sending invoices in 1820 for shipments of arms and cloth that they sent in 1810, and these new states felt like they had to honor those debts. The social structure didn’t allow the political coalitions to form that could manifest this social vision of democracy over any length of time: a political project. You have these moments of reform, and yet they often can't last because there's no reform coalition that could establish a kind of electoral and rhetorical hegemony for any length of time, the way the New Deal did, for instance.
RS: Your book underscores the history of how U.S.-backed coups and military invention in Latin America has fomented a distinct sense of nationalism in the region rooted in respect for sovereignty and non interference in domestic affairs. What lessons might this history offer policymakers who are grappling with how to respond to these shared security challenges across the hemisphere?
GRANDIN: It's difficult to see how the history of Latin America and U.S.-Latin American relations translate into useful policy positions because I think the lessons learned are more intuitive and about embracing transcendental values. And we know how when values get folded into foreign policy, they're often twisted in a way that justifies existing power relations.
For example, Latin Americans don't really like realism. They tend to be more idealistic. I mentioned that Bolivar's critique of realpolitik balance of power was that it always leads to war, and that you need to have transcendent values. What history does teach is that resistance to empire is essential to holding empire accountable to some degree, if not reforming it, at least holding it accountable.
At this current moment, the United States is locked into this kind of conspiratorial fever in which the leaders of the opposition party refuse to confront power with their own moral vision. The Democrats trim and triangulate to such a degree that it creates a vacuum for the conspiratorial world-building of some parts of Trumpism to continue to grow and grow and create more nooks and crannies to build bigger coalitions.
In some ways, I think what we can learn from Latin America is that the left in Latin America understands itself as ideological and understands itself as defending a set of ideological beliefs and values that it uses to confront the right, and with great success. That's how you beat fascism. You don't beat fascism by calling them fascists. You beat fascism by offering an alternative, a moral alternative that is not procedural but that actually has a vision for what a just society looks like. And that's one of the reasons why the left keeps coming back despite the fact that more environmental activists are killed in Latin America than in any other region in the world, more trade unionists are killed in Latin America than any other place in the world — they keep fighting back. It’s a certain kind of worldview and insistence on human dignity that is inextinguishable.
Reformers in the U.S. could look to Latin America, the history of the New Deal and the way New Dealers made common cause with continental reformers over issues related to wages, equal rights for women and health care, and forged something like a common front against reactionary forces. Certainly today there's plenty of people in Latin America the United States could ally with, and we saw this, frankly, when Biden supported Lula's re-election campaign and pushed back against the coup attempt against him by Bolsonaro in 2022. Now we're living in a different moment where the Trump administration is actively trying to promote Bolsonaro's reelection in next year's election, and there doesn't seem to be movement among those who oppose Trump’s approach framing what is happening in Brazil as somehow having a bearing on their own fortunes.
Eighty years ago today, August 6, 1945, the U.S. military dropped an atomic weapon nicknamed “Little Boy” on the city Hiroshima, Japan, resulting in a blast equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT, killing approximately 66,000 people immediately and some 100,000 more, the vast majority civilians, by the end of 1945.
Three days later, the U.S. deployed another nuclear bomb — this one “Fat Man” — on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, leaving upwards of 80,000 people dead by the end of the year.
Japan surrendered in September, bringing a victory to the Allies in the Pacific theater and an end to World War II.
In the 80 years since, nine countries have acquired nuclear weapons arsenals, according to the American Federation of Scientists, which counts some 12,331 warheads (9,600 active) total. Russia and the U.S. have the most, with 5,449 and 5,277 respectively, as of 2023.
Despite fears to the contrary, no nuclear weapon has been used in conflict since Little Boy and Fat Man flattened two Japanese cities 80 years ago this week. This, despite a Cold War spanning decades between the world’s two great powers of the time, the United States and Soviet Union.
What primary lesson should we take away from this fact in our geopolitical history?
Does this mean nuclear deterrence among great powers actually works?
We asked a broad mix of historians, political scientists, anti-nuclear weapons activists and journalists this question, particularly as it relates to heightened fears of Great Power conflict and what appears to be a new era of nuclear proliferation today.
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Andy Bacevich; James Carden; Brandan Carr; Emma Claire Foley; John Allen Gay; Lyle Goldstein; William Hartung; Stephen Kinzer; Cynthia Lazaroff; Dan McCarthy; Rajan Menon; Christopher Preble; Steve Simon; Susi Snyder; Marcus Stanley; Michael Swaine; Jake Werner
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Andy Bacevich, co-founder and Emeritus Board Chair of the Quincy Institute.
Nuclear deterrence assumes rationality. It requires all parties possessing the "ultimate weapon" to recognize that they share a common interest in their continuing non-use. Just to take the American case, can we be certain today that decisions in Washington derive from a rational calculation of interests and the likely implications of action? Or do impulses, ideology, grudges, and the need to settle scores shape behavior?
For all of its flaws, the old (and now justly discredited) foreign policy "establishment" demonstrated a reassuring level of prudence on nuclear matters — at least it did after the Cuban Missile Crisis scared the wits out of everyone.
In retrospect, we can see that the October 1962 brush with Armageddon had a useful educational effect, especially in Washington and Moscow. Whether Donald Trump and his crew endorse or even understand the resulting lessons remains to be seen.
James Carden, editor of the Realist Review
Myths are the lifeblood of the national security establishment. And no myth remains more entrenched after 80 years than the efficacy of nuclear weapons. After all, many argue that President Truman’s decision to use them ended the war — except it didn’t.
Japan had been looking to surrender long before August 6, 1945. The war would have been won, says the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, by November 1st at the latest — even in the absence of an American invasion of the home islands.
Another myth is that nuclear deterrence “works” — well, until it doesn’t. What about the deterrence of conventional attacks? I was in Manhattan 25 years ago when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Russia, possessor of the largest strategic and tactical nuclear arsenals, has found its weapons have not deterred attacks on its military bases and infrastructure. Nuclear-armed Israel sustained an attack on its own soil in October of 2023. Nuclear weapons pose an unacceptably large threat to the human environment, to global security, and to civilization itself. Let us be done with them.
Brandon Carr, studies associate at the Quincy Institute
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age, ending a conflict that, fundamentally, relied on the grinding, attritional destruction of armies at mass scale.
Perhaps the most notable feature of the nuclear age — aside from the avoidance of military nuclear use — is the absence of another conventional great power war. Indeed, the Second World War’s end resulted in a power vacuum that was soon filled by the fierce bipolar competition between the United States and Soviet Union that, like the war that preceded it, was global in scope.
At numerous points during the Cold War and after, the world came exceedingly close to nuclear use that was avoided only by the collective skin of humanity’s teeth. Though the existence of nuclear weapons has not negated the sources of security competition, it has, at times, moderated it — furnishing a “ceiling,” of sorts, for escalation. The war in Ukraine is a clear example of this; throughout the war, but especially at the beginning, decisionmakers in Russia and the United States have plainly been aware of the risks and consequences of nuclear escalation and have worked assiduously to avoid that possible outcome. Whether that means nuclear deterrence is “working” (and will last) is not totally clear; it is a question with an answer that can change at any time. On the whole, however, it is difficult to argue that the existence of nuclear weapons is not a — or the — primary variable that has driven this relative peace between the great powers for nearly 80 years. It is a peace not without flaws but is nonetheless superior to those that came before it.
Emma Claire Foley, nuclear issues campaign director at Roots Action
My academic training, and my more general experience as a person who wants to understand the world, tells me that isolating and asserting specific causes and effects in a situation of infinite contingency — human life on Earth over an 80-year period — is junk thinking. Yet just this proposition, that eight decades with no nuclear war has proven that these weapons are a source of stability, not a profound liability, is constantly brought up as a justification for what appears to be a strong bipartisan consensus in the United States that nuclear weapons should exist into an indefinite future, and they should make us feel more, not less, safe.
A consideration of this question shaped by intellectual integrity and a serious consideration of the stakes of the question would instead acknowledge what we as a country and a world actually stand to lose should this ongoing case study we are all living through show that a world where nuclear weapons exist and countries are willing to use them will in fact experience nuclear war more often than one where they do not exist. Eighty years, by the standards of recorded human history and our much longer tenure on Earth as a species, is not very much time at all.
John Allen Gay, executive director of the John Quincy Adams Society
Nuclear deterrence has worked so far. We cannot know the odds of nuclear war; presumably they are small but not zero. We do know the costs of nuclear war: disaster. A small but nonzero risk of disaster merits our full attention.
So how do we reduce that risk? Many in the nuclear policy space do vital work on questions of nuclear force posture and nuclear doctrine. Yet this is not only a task for atomic wonks. Grand strategy shapes nuclear risk, too. Adding new allies means expanding the number of places we're willing to risk nuclear war. Keeping current alliances means accepting nuclear risks in those alliances. Entering confrontations, military or political, with other nuclear powers means increasing nuclear risk with those enemies. If nuclear risks turn into nuclear war, our posterity may rue our thoughtless commitments — if, that is, we have posterity at all.
Lyle Goldstein, Director of the Asia Program, Defense Priorities
Yes, nuclear weapons have helped to stabilize great power relations in the modern world. Now, the possibility of great power conflict is almost unimaginable. The Russia-Ukraine War stands as a clear example of this quite novel phenomenon. In the absence of nuclear weapons, the U.S. likely would have intervened directly. Nevertheless, all is not well. There are several dangerous tendencies extant in today’s world. Ideology, militarism, and the illusive search for “strategic superiority” all play a role in undermining peaceful relations among the great powers.
However, the biggest single problem with realizing “nuclear peace” is the failure of many foreign policy experts to accept the basic principle of “spheres of influence,” and how this natural principle of world politics accords with major nuclear arsenals. In other words, if Washington would simply accept that other major nuclear powers have their own sacrosanct spheres, global tensions, including nuclear tensions, would radically diminish.
William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute
The idea that the possession of nuclear weapons by major powers has kept the peace over the past 80 years is comforting. It is also dead wrong. Nuclear arsenals may have reduced the prospect of direct conflict among major powers, but they have also served as a shield allowing those same powers to intervene in the global south and on their own borders with near impunity.
Even more concerning is the fact that nuclear arms boosters are moving to define “deterrence” in the most aggressive terms possible.
Minimum deterrence, in which nuclear-armed powers maintain the smallest arsenals needed to dissuade an adversary from attacking them, is one thing. Building a new generation of nuclear weapons and rolling back measures to reduce nuclear risk in the name of deterrence is another. The only way we will absolutely be safe from a nuclear exchange is to get rid of these weapons altogether. In the meantime we should move towards the smallest possible arsenals consistent with deterrence and structure them to minimize the risk of an accidental launch or miscommunication.
Stephen Kinzer, senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
After India successfully tested nuclear weapons in 1998, the New York Times sent me to Pakistan to await its response. Less than two weeks later, Pakistan carried out its own nuclear test. Many Pakistanis I met asked the obvious question: “Why not us?”
Today that question is being asked in more than a few countries. Middle powers see nuclear weapons the way superpowers saw them in the Cold War — as deterrents. By bombing Iraq, Libya, and recently Iran while leaving North Korea alone, the United States has sent a clear message: nuclear weapons keep you safe, not having them makes you vulnerable.
The modern practice of geopolitics makes nuclear proliferation inevitable. We should face it the same way we should face climate change: by preparing to adapt to a new world, not by pretending it’s not coming.
Cynthia Lazaroff, founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy and NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth
As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s time to dispel the myth that we can count on deterrence to prevent nuclear war. The concept that nuclear powers will be deterred from starting a nuclear war because of the threat of retaliation and mutual annihilation is fundamentally flawed.
Ignoring millennia of human behavior, deterrence rests on the naive assumption that leaders will act rationally and resist the temptation to push the button first,100% of the time, even in peak crisis moments and the fog of war. Deterrence fails to address the risks of unintended escalation and accidental nuclear war including blunder, miscalculation, mistake, and false alarm. We have already had many false alarms and narrowly escaped Armageddon. The only way to avert nuclear war is to eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us. The landmark Nuclear Ban Treaty offers an inspiring pathway forward.
Dan McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review
Nuclear deterrence works not only for great powers but for any country that possesses nuclear weapons. In a world without the bomb, the United States and Soviet Union would very likely have fought a conventional war in Europe sometime in the late 20th century, and today NATO would be directly at war with Russia. There would probably have been a second Korean War, too. On the other hand, “weapons of mass destruction” wouldn’t have served so well as a rationale for the Iraq War, and this year’s Iran crisis wouldn't have been the same, if it had happened at all.
If more states had nuclear weapons, would fewer wars be possible — or would the risk of these weapons being used again only rise? If war became more difficult to wage openly, would this lead to more state sponsorship of terrorism instead? The answer to all of these questions is simply “yes.”
Rajan Menon, Spitzer Professor of International Relations Emeritus at the City College of New York
Nuclear weapons haven’t been used in wartime since the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which killed 110,000-210,000 people within three days. That’s no small matter, considering that there are now nine nuclear-armed states and an estimated 12,241 warheads, including those not deployed on missiles or aircraft (nearly 90% belong to the U.S. and Russia). Nuclear-armed states have traded gunfire and even fought brief wars recently (India and China, India and Pakistan), but those clashes didn’t careen into nuclear war.
Has the world escaped nuclear war for eight decades because deterrence works? Or is that due to sheer luck? Regardless, can the long streak continue indefinitely? There will be no shortage of opinions on these questions — but none that rest on hard facts. Moreover, though many measures are in place to prevent nuclear war, and more are feasible, none are foolproof.
Christopher Preble, senior fellow and director of the Stimson Center’s Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program
If you had said to the scientists at Los Alamos, or to President Harry Truman, or his Secretary of War Henry Stimson, that we would make it 80 years without nuclear weapons having been detonated as an act of war, I think they would have been pleasantly surprised.
It's not accurate to say, however, that nuclear weapons have not been used since August 9, 1945. They have been brandished, much in the way that a handgun is used in a stick up. Some people claim that threats to use nuclear weapons have allowed certain states to achieve their objectives without resorting to war.
But just because we have avoided a nuclear war doesn’t mean we will in the future. We should strive, therefore, to understand the core elements of deterrence, and avoid purchasing more weapons than we need to keep our current streak going.
Steve Simon, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute
Max Hastings' “Retribution,” a history of the last year of the war in the Pacific, argues that Japan’s conduct of the war biased U.S. decision making toward use of the bombs.
Also with only a couple of weapons, reluctance to use one for demonstration purposes was to be expected. Despite evidence that some Japanese were noodling about surrender, the fact was that they didn’t actually do so. After 3-and-a-half years of war, and the costs inflicted by the Japanese on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Saipan, one could well understand why Truman decided to use the bomb. And it did end the war.
It’s easy to conceive of alternative endgames. The U.S. could simply have starved the Japanese into submission, continued to incinerate them in strategic fire bombing campaigns, let the Russians have a go, or take the risk that even in the absence of formal surrender, a U.S. invasion would be unopposed and bloodless. There were individuals who opposed the use of the bomb against Japan because they thought it would be immoral to punish civilians for the actions of their government. In retrospect, we naturally see them as having had the better argument. But during the summer of 1945, the picture looked very different.
Susi Snyder, programme coordinator, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
First, there have been over 2,000 nuclear detonations since the first one took place in New Mexico 80 years ago, and while there has not been another nuclear war since the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, thousands of people have been harmed by nuclear weapons explosions in the last 80 years.
Second, nuclear deterrence is a scam. There is no evidence that nuclear weapons deter war beyond the correlation of their existence with the fact they have not been used in warfare since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The absence of direct conflict between great powers could be attributed to dozens of other factors from integrated economies to the existence of the United Nations. There is no proof that nuclear deterrence works, only that its failure would cause cascading, cumulative, catastrophic consequences.
Finally, it is just not normal for nine countries to assert the right to cause catastrophic harm to every living thing on Earth at a moment’s notice. Nuclear deterrence doctrine is incredibly aggressive. It requires being ready at all times to use nuclear weapons, causing indiscriminate harm, including to people and countries that have nothing to do with the conflict. Fortunately, half of all nations have legally rejected the legitimacy of this concept through the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Marcus Stanley, director of studies at the Quincy Institute
Today, the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 would be classified as "low yield" or "tactical" nuclear weapons, as many of the world’s existing arsenals contain many times more explosive power. However, those two bombs killed over 200,000 Japanese civilians and destroyed two cities.
These bombings were a continuation and expansion of World War II’s innovation of the terror bombing of civilian populations, such as the London Blitz and the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo. But the destructive power of nuclear weapons marked an inflection point in the history of warfare. So far, the fear of nuclear weapons and the “balance of terror” created by opposing nuclear arsenals have prevented any use since 1945. But all we can say is that this truce has held since 1945, not that it will hold in the future.
We know of numerous close calls during the Cold War, some very public (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and others shrouded in secrecy. The current collapse of any infrastructure for international arms control agreements, the planned nuclear weapons build ups by the U.S. and other countries, and the increasing number of countries obtaining nuclear weapons in the belief that they are the only way to guarantee safety in a world where great powers do not respect the sovereignty of smaller nations, should all raise the fear that the nuclear truce will not last.
Michael Swaine, Senior Research Fellow in the Quincy Institute’s East Asia Program
The mass murder by the United States of many thousands of civilians using a horrendous weapon in order to reduce the number of casualties among American soldiers was at root immoral. It was presumably based on the notion that Japanese civilians of all ages would fight American soldiers and hence were in a sense “combatants,” and that only such a horrendous attack could convince the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. Both assumptions are highly contentious. As the Dresden fire bombings also showed, these acts triggered movement toward the development of international laws banning such mass murder of civilians in war. None of this detracts from the horrendous nature of the fascist Japanese and German governments that initiated a world war. But they do speak to the responsibility of combatant nations to avoid civilian casualties, not deliberately increase them exponentially.
Jake Werner, director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute.
To the extent that nuclear deterrence kept the peace among the great powers during the Cold War — and we should remember that proxy wars nonetheless killed tens of millions of people — it rested on an arduously constructed foundation of bureaucratic oversight within the nuclear powers and robust diplomatic structures among them to advance arms control and monitoring. Nuclear deterrence “worked” not through unmediated apprehension, but through a complex apparatus that managed fear and communicated reassurance to all sides.
After the Cold War, the great powers aligned behind market-led globalization and enjoyed peace without such intensive efforts. But that same process led to the steady erosion of bureaucratic regularity of all kinds, including those around nuclear weapons. With the end of great power accord and a global system moving toward open predation, we face a new era of explosive international conflicts with neither bureaucratic safeguards nor market interests to restrain them. If antagonism continues to build, the use of nuclear weapons will very much be under consideration.
A few weeks ago, 92-year-old Cameroonian President Paul Biya announced his intention to run for an eighth term in the country’s forthcoming election. This announcement, shocking, albeit widely anticipated, is already fueling fear that the country’s stability could be at risk, with wider implications for regional security.
The aged leader, who has ruled Cameroon with an iron fist since 1982, is easily the oldest president anywhere in the world. Indeed, only a few Cameroonians alive remember a time without Biya in power. Yet recent health scares seem to suggest that he may have reached the limit of his natural abilities. In 2008, his regime carried out a constitutional amendment to annul the two-term limit — clearing Biya’s path to rule for life through elections that, although regular, have been neither free nor fair.
Under his 43-year rule, the country of 29 million has gone from a period of relative stability to one of crisis and conflict. Approximately four in 10 Cameroonians live below the national poverty line, while unemployment, especially among school leavers, is high. This is in spite of Cameroon's rich endowment of natural resources, including oil and natural gas, aluminum and gold.
Since 2014, Cameroon has also come under attack by Boko Haram in the far north while a secessionist insurgency is devastating the country’s Anglophone regions. Cameroon is divided into French and English-speaking regions — a development rooted in the country’s colonial past. The conflict, now in its seventh year, was precipitated in late 2016 by the state’s mishandling of peaceful protests that erupted against the application of the French civil law system by courts in the Anglophone regions. The crisis has led to over 6,000 deaths and the displacement of a million people internally and to neighboring Nigeria.
In the same vein, the Boko Haram conflict has resulted in numerous deaths and the internal displacement of well over 300,000 people, not to mention the disruption of local economies that has led to widespread food insecurity.
To combat the threat, Biya, who is known for a non-aligned foreign approach that has permitted him to play off multiple great powers, recently has had to lean quite heavily on U.S. support for funding and training of the country’s elite Rapid Intervention Brigade (BIR), as well as troops from the Multinational Joint Task Force that Washington established with Cameroon’s neighbors, Nigeria and Chad. U.S. training of Cameroon’s military personnel is valued at $600,000 annually. Washington also has a drone base with approximately 200 personnel stationed in Garoua, a city in northeastern Cameroon, to support the military in its operations against extremism. Cameroon remains one of the diminishing number of former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa that permits foreign military bases on its territory.
At the same time, Cameroon weighs heavily on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expansionist aims in the Sahel and West Africa. The country recently renewed a military cooperation agreement with Moscow while playing host to Afrique Média, a Russia-linked news organization generally regarded as Putin’s mouthpiece in the region. Such great-power attention illustrates Cameroon’s potential strategic importance.
In the meantime, the integrity of the October 12 election is already in jeopardy. Out of 83 candidates who submitted applications to run for president, the electoral body, Elections Cameroon, only approved 13, disqualifying Biya’s main challenger, Maurice Kamto, who was the runner-up in the 2018 elections when he won 14.2 percent of the vote. Although those disqualified from the presidential race can file a legal challenge, many Cameroonians don’t believe that anything will come of it.
With Kamto’s exclusion, Biya and his Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (RDPC) party will face less popular candidates, including two of the president’s allies, former Prime Minister Bello Bouba Maigari and Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who resigned in early June as employment minister. Unsurprisingly, their qualification has sparked accusations that Biya and the RDPC are orchestrating another sham election to retain their hold on power.
The resulting situation has heightened political tensions and fueled fears of unrest. On June 12, the U.S. Embassy in Yaounde, the capital, called for respect for press freedom and urged all parties concerned with the electoral process to act in a manner that “promotes peace, respects the rule of law, and upholds democratic norms.” But the situation remains uncertain as security forces have been deployed in the economic hub, Douala, and Yaounde, especially around the headquarters of the electoral council in anticipation of protests.
Biya’s insistence on running is, to put it mildly, bewildering. In a now distant era, Africa’s longstanding aging leaders, such as Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor or Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi, planned for their succession to both ensure a peaceful transition and preserve their legacies.. Biya’s current gambit suggests he has no such plans. His apparent determination to continue to rule until he nearly turns 100 — presidential terms run seven years — spells trouble to many Cameroonians.
Indeed, in a country where more than 60% of the population is under 25, Biya’s ambition may prove too much for the public and for the ambitions of other members of the ruling elite as they jockey for position in a post-Biya period. To a growing number of analysts, the evolving situation, especially if public protests become widespread and militant, could create a pretext for a military coup. Historically, Cameroon’s army has been loyal to Biya who has only experienced a coup once early in his long rule. Reputed as a master-manipulator of the security forces, Biya has managed to keep ambition in check by keeping the armed forces fragmented and through regular reshuffling.
But as the developments witnessed in Gabon just two years ago show, the specter of coup cannot be fully discounted in a situation of political stasis. In August 2023, Gabonese elite presidential guard mounted a coup that ended the half-century rule of the Bongo dynasty. The irony was that the coup occurred just hours after then-President Ali Bongo had pulled out all the stops to win an unconstitutional third term through an election that all observers, local and foreign, agree was neither free nor fair.
Before matters reach that point in Cameroon, regional bodies, including the African Union, the Economic Community of Central African States, and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) may be able to exert influence on the upcoming electoral process to ensure greater inclusivity and adherence to basic democratic norms in the runup to the October election. The forthcoming poll is not simply a matter for Cameroonians alone but an important question for the region as well.
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