Populist backlash risks existential nuclear war

Building on Meier and Vieluf’s accounting of the dangers of populism

I have argued that nuclear-armed establishments are more dangerous than Meier and Vieluf suggest. Now I will also argue that nuclear-armed populists are dangerous for even more reasons than Meier and Vieluf enumerate.

Meier and Vieluf’s article does not do enough with its basic definition of nationalist populism as a black–white oppositional stance toward internal as well as external enemies. If we take that definition seriously, it becomes apparent that the biggest problem stemming from the rise of populists is not that they might ignore the advice of traditional nuclear and defense establishments and behave carelessly toward foreign powers. The biggest problem is that populism is a gateway drug to internal political violence, revolution, and civil war.12 And, perhaps needless to say, serious domestic upheaval in a nuclear power also increases the likelihood of a nuclear incident of some kind.

Perhaps the first-ever populist government in history was led by the Jacobin faction that drove the French Revolution forward from 1792 to 1794.13 The Jacobins expressed a radical populist faith in the power of “redemptive violence” by “the people.” 14 They made war both inside and outside France. To quote historian Brian Singer, the Jacobins’ violence was directed neither “at a well-defined enemy” nor “at some limited, short-term end, but to the creation of a new regime, a new humanity.” 15 In short, they wanted to raze the old world to the ground—or die trying. The Jacobins’ favorite metaphor for their violence was lightning, which materializes from out of nowhere to simultaneously destroy and enlighten the dark world it strikes. Their interest in lightning was not only metaphorical; Jacobin ideologues such as Jean-Paul Marat were serious students of the new science of electricity.16 France and the world are lucky that nuclear physics was not very far advanced in the Jacobins’ day.

None of the contemporary nuclear-armed populist leaders listed by Meier and Vieluf is a modern-day Jacobin. Most populists are merely unprincipled con artists who prey on atomized and insecure sections of the public, manipulating them to gain personal wealth and power. Even so, the language of populism is the language of revolution and civil war, and pretend revolutionaries can easily be carried along by the tide of social resentments that they have irresponsibly stirred up. Take, for instance, Trump and his followers’ dismal trajectory to January 6, 2021. We need to consider worst-case scenarios.

Trump did not actually want a civil war in the United States, but his rhetoric emboldened the not-so-small number of Americans who do. A rigorous time-series analysis found that Trump’s presidential run in 2016 was associated with an abrupt, statistically significant, and durable increase in violent attacks by domestic far-right extremists.17 For instance, the leading ideologist of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, James Mason, wrote in July 2017, “I am not ashamed to say that I shed a tear of joy at [Trump’s] win.” 18 Far from standing back and standing by, Mason preached direct action to “accelerate” the onset of a society-purifying race war that he believed would push the Trump administration into embracing full-blown fascism. In May 2017, an Atomwaffen member, National Guard veteran, and onetime physics major named Brandon Russell was arrested for plotting to attack the Turkey Point nuclear power plant, among other targets. Police later also found traces of thorium and americium in Russell’s bedroom.19

The domestic divisions fomented by populists do not have to arrive at their logical end point of revolution and civil war to increase deterrence instability and the chances of a nuclear incident. Below I elaborate three more specific hypotheses on the deterrence consequences of internally divisive populist governments. The hypotheses are speculative, but they logically follow from the definition of populism and should therefore serve as useful points for further discussion of Meier and Vieluf’s core idea.

Hypothesis 1. Populists are likely to be insensitive to nuclear threats to the political strongholds of their domestic opponents. Meier and Vieluf observe that the credibility of US extended-deterrence promises to America’s allies suffered massively under the Trump administration. That is certainly true, but the question of whether the United States would be willing to trade “Pittsburgh for Paris” (p. 19) has been around for decades. The new problem that populism creates is that even homeland deterrence starts to suffer from the same credibility dilemmas as extended deterrence. In addition to the “Pittsburgh for Paris” question, we now also have to ask whether a populist administration in Washington would be willing to trade Pittsburgh for Portland.

In a country where populist leaders revel in dividing society against itself, deterrence theory’s standard assumption that a nuclear threat to any part of the homeland will be treated as a threat to the whole homeland can no longer be taken for granted.20 Whatever the president’s true intentions, foreign powers could potentially calculate that they will not be punished for striking at certain targets within the country’s borders.21 For instance, the longest-range North Korean missile that is currently operational, the Hwasong-14, has enough range for a nuclear attack against Seattle but not Mar-a-Lago. 22 Would the same president who formally designated Seattle as an “anarchist jurisdiction” in an attempt to starve it of federal dollars be greatly concerned by a credible threat of a North Korean strike against it? 23 Probably—but is “probably” a good enough answer for homeland deterrence credibility?

Another dimension of this same hypothesis has to do with the precise locations where populists choose to install military installations that are likely to become nuclear targets. During the Nixon administration, the objections of congressional Democrats to the planned construction of Sentinel anti-ballistic-missile facilities near their political strongholds such as Boston and Seattle led Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to move the projects to less populated areas.24 President Nixon believed that he needed to work constructively with the Democrats on core national security issues. By contrast, a populist president would love to see his political opponents sweating the targets he put on their backs.25

Populists in power may even be slow to help their political opponents’ regions recover from an actual nuclear attack. There is a lesson for nuclear analysts in the Trump administration’s intentional slow-walking of congressionally mandated emergency aid to the US territory of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017, one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history.26 Having long held a low opinion of Puerto Ricans, Trump reportedly told his chief of staff and budget director that he “did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico.” 27 Would Trump have been any more helpful if the island had been hit by a man-made bomb instead of a natural one? Maybe if Puerto Rico could do something for him in return, which leads to the second hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2. Populists are likely to exploit their control over homeland deterrence to demand political concessions from their domestic political opponents. At the heart of populism is a disrespect for the principle of equal application of the laws. Instead, governance becomes a pure power game, and populist rulers notably exploit crises as opportunities to bring domestic political opponents to their knees. There is every reason to assume that a populist in full command of the nuclear and defense establishment would similarly take advantage of a nuclear crisis to conduct such a shakedown. In other words, populists in power will charge a high price for adequately responding to nuclear threats against their domestic opponents’ political strongholds.

Let us continue with the example of the Trump administration. The mass-destructive COVID-19 pandemic offers a highly relevant analogy for thinking about the internal political dynamics of a potential nuclear crisis under populist rule. Public-administration scholars have labeled Trump’s governing approach as “chaotic transactional federalism,” a cynical power system that “removes any vestige of certainty as decisions are shaped based on a desire to reward or punish other political actors, or left to subnational actors entirely. Expertise matters very little in these political, partisan transactions.” 28 In line with this, Trump responded to the COVID-19 crisis by pitting the 50 states against each other in bidding wars for vital medical supplies and for his political favor.29 The president publicly criticized Vice President Mike Pence for reaching out to all the state governors in his role as the coordinator of the national pandemic response, telling the press that he wanted Pence to deal only with those governors who were sufficiently “appreciative.” 30 Trump administration officials were even blunter in private. Trump’s son-in-law and closest adviser Jared Kushner reportedly said that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE [personal protective equipment] for his state … . His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.” 31 Trump’s response to the Democratic governors’ pleas for PPE to defend against the virus was essentially the same as his response to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s pleas for weapons to defend against Russia: “I would like you to do us a favor though.” 32

The hypothesis that populists will demand concessions from their domestic political opponents in exchange for issuing nuclear-deterrent threats on their behalf may at first glance appear to be only a matter of internal politics, but the distractions caused by internal political wrangling could greatly affect the denouement of a time-sensitive nuclear crisis. Foreign powers could also be tempted to initiate a nuclear crisis precisely in order to intensify their adversary’s domestic divisions. In addition, when facing the double burden of a nuclear threat and simultaneous shakedown by the president, politicians from disfavored regions would likely appeal to friendly elements of the military for assistance. That possibility tees up the third hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3. The establishment’s reaction to populism is likely to increase deterrence instability at least as much as the actions of the populists themselves. Meier and Vieluf’s article implies that the fate of the world hangs on the establishment’s ability to keep populist fingers off the nuclear button. But the establishment’s effort to fend off the populists could itself dramatically increase deterrence instability, for instance by sowing confusion about the chain of command. This hypothesis is not mere speculation. Reacting to widespread fears that Trump might be tempted to launch a nuclear attack against China or another country after his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, in January 2021, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quietly worked the phone lines to reassure key people at home and abroad that he personally would not allow the president to do anything of the sort. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is legally outside the chain of command for the execution of the president’s military strategy. Indeed, neither he nor anyone else has the legal authority to prevent a determined president from launching a nuclear strike.33 Yet Milley told Pelosi, “The president alone can order the use of nuclear weapons. But he doesn’t make the decision alone. One person can order it, several people have to launch it.” 34 Essentially, Milley was saying that if push came to shove, the military would mutiny. Meier and Vieluf seem to think that Milley did the right thing (pp. 15–16). Maybe so, but he also set an ominous precedent.

As I mentioned at the outset, these comments are simply intended to spark further discussion about the important issues raised by Meier and Vieluf’s stimulating article. I would be relieved to discover that I am being overly pessimistic about humanity’s chances of survival with either the establishments or the populists in charge of nuclear arsenals. But the more I study the issue, the more pessimistic I become