The international community, particularly the West, does this strange song and dance whereby they claim they don’t want nuclear proliferation, or frown upon nukes in general - yet they show great deference, fear and respect to nations that do possess nukes - precisely what those nations wanted.
Saddam in 1991 - gets routed by Western conventional warfare, since he has no nukes. Same in 2003. West = intervenes directly against Gaddafi’s Libyan regime in 2013, since he had no nukes. Ukraine gave up its nukes in the 1990s - and now gets invaded by Russia.
But every talk about any form of direct military intervention against Russia (or North Korea,) is laced with “you can’t, because they have nukes” hundreds of times over. This sort of deference to nuclear-armed powers is giving non-nuclear states like Iran every single incentive in the world to develop nukes.
There’s a clear difference between the way the West treats nuke-armed nations and non-nuke nations, and this fear, respect or deference is completely counterproductive to a stance that says “Don’t get nukes.”
Well, yeah…because they have nuclear weapons. That’s kind of the point of spending such an extraordinary amount of money to develop, build, and deploy them; they aren’t useful battlefield weapons but they are essentially the bête noire of international diplomacy. What the US showed with Libya is that Saddam was foolish to give up his nuclear ambitions. And of course, the US is the original proliferator, providing information and delivery systems to the British as part of the “Special Relationship” (to be fair, we took a bunch of their “Tube Alloys” people for the Manhattan Project), and also unwittingly giving the Soviets information that allowed them to advance their own program.
This sentence doesn’t make any sense, and as it is the thesis of this thread, neither does the thread. The international community doesn’t ‘claim’ it doesn’t want nuclear proliferation, it actually doesn’t want nuclear proliferation. That’s why 190 nations are signatories of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and only 5 nations are non-signatories. Nations that are signatories and covertly try to acquire them anyway get sanctioned by the other members, not rewarded. See Iran and Iraq under Saddam. Nations - or rather the only nation that has withdrawn from the NPT is an international pariah, North Korea. The deference to nuclear armed powers is simply a recognition of reality. Direct military intervention against Russia, or prior to that the Soviet Union, or the US, or the UK, France, or China is laced with “you can’t” not as a rhetorical device but as a recognition of the reality that they have the capability of ending civilization worldwide in the case of the US/USSR/Russia or at least in the nation choosing to militarily intervene in them for the other nations.
The international community isn’t doing some strange song and dance and only claiming that they don’t want nuclear proliferation. The actually don’t want nuclear proliferation and have voluntarily chosen to sign the NPT. If this clear difference were actually counterproductive, there is no reason why every nation in the West, most of Europe, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, South Africa, and at least a couple of dozen other nations wouldn’t have their own nuclear arsenals rather than voluntarily foregoing doing so.
The old policy dated back to the time of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, was that nuclear states declared an official policy that they would not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. So countries had an incentive to not develop nuclear weapons; it protected them (on paper at least) from nuclear attacks.
This changed in 1991. The Bush administration adopted the policy that if Iraq used chemical or biological weapons against American or allied forces, the United States would feel free to respond by using nuclear weapons against Iraq. This negated the defensive advantage of not having nuclear weapons.
Putin’s responsibility dates back to Ukraine’s independence in 1991. At the time there were hundreds of nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union had based in Ukraine. In 1994 there was a agreement signed by Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia in which Ukraine agreed to surrender these nuclear weapons to Russia and Russia, the UK, and the USA agreed to respect Ukraine’s independence and its current borders. The nuclear weapons transfer was completed by 1996 and Ukraine became a non-nuclear power. But the terms about respecting Ukraine’s borders was violated by Russia when it annexed Ukrainian territory in 2014 and was further violated when it seized additional territory in 2022.
So countries have begun deciding that having nuclear weapons provides more protection than having promises from other countries.
Sure, they don’t. But the way they treat nuke-armed nations - even rogue regimes - with the deference and fear that they don’t show nations that don’t have nukes - is incentivizing nuclear proliferation. That fear or respect is exactly what the nuke-acquiring nations wanted, and are getting.
Does this really confuse you? As was said above, it’s just recognizing reality.
It’s like saying I’m not really against violence and crime because I’m not afraid of the little old lady living next door, but I am afraid of the drug dealing gang members across the street. Recognizing the gang’s ability to beat me up or kill me doesn’t mean I secretly approve of gangs, or want the little old lady to start recruiting for her own gang.
And you’re right - smaller countries really should, in the world as it is today, start thinking about maybe getting some nukes. As discussed above, Ukraine is the poster child for this. Had Ukraine kept even a few nukes, Russia would have never invaded them. Were I the dictator of a small country, I’d be doing my damnedest to get a few nukes, risks and costs be damned.
But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world are conflicted about this - they’d also do everything they could to stop me from getting them. At that point, it becomes a race, and whoever wins, wins the prize.
The prize for me is, not worrying about invasions.
I suppose we could just start treating every nation with fear and deference, nuclear status notwithstanding. Want to invade your neighbor that we’ve had a long-standing alliance with? Go right ahead!