Good day, and thanks for having me participate in this conference.  I’m sorry not to be able to attend in person, as I’m over in here at Oxford to give a series of lectures on China, but I’m grateful to CGSR for allowing me to join you via video link. 

Brad Roberts has asked me to compare and contrast the world’s political order and its nuclear one, and I’m happy to try.  Naturally, these remarks will represent only my personal opinions, for neither Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies nor CSIS take official positions.  Nevertheless, I hope my comments can help give all of you at this conference some more food for thought as we explore possible futures for nuclear diplomacy.

For our purposes today, to help us more usefully ponder these two orders, their relationship, and what all this might mean for the future of nonproliferation and nuclear competition, I’d like to encourage you to think about those two global orders and their complex interactions by looking at their respective structural characteristics and dynamics.  In this respect, I’d suggest they can be distinguished in a number of ways.

Dynamics of Development

One way in which they could be compared is in the dynamics that shape how they evolve.  And in this respect, the two orders differ considerably.

For its part, it seems to me that the nuclear order generally develops in a conceptually straightforward fashion.  For the most part, its central dynamic is driven merely by degrees of access to and facility with only one specific area of technological capability – specifically, the capacity to produce or otherwise acquire fissile materials and use them to manufacture nuclear weapons.  As I’ll describe further in a moment, clear institutional and practical barriers do exist to “nuclear entry,” and the security externalities presented by a country becoming a nuclear weapons power can help mobilize third-parties to try to impede such development.  Nevertheless, the dynamics of the process are not that complicated, and even less developed and less technologically sophisticated countries such as Pakistan and North Korea have shown themselves quite capable of making themselves into possessors – as indeed did all the other current nuclear weapons possessors in the mid- and mid/late-20^th Century. 

By contrast, the global political order evolves as the result of the almost endlessly complex array of factors that affect states’ degree of relative power, prosperity, standing and influence, sense of identity and role, and reciprocal engagement.  The complexity of these interactions – with the bewildering array of economic, demographic, technological, cultural, sociological, and political forces that may be involved – makes change in the political order far more complicated to follow and more unpredictable than change in the nuclear order. 

With neither the nuclear nor the political order is it easy (or even possible) reliably to predict the future, of course. Nevertheless, to even attempt to predict the trajectory of global politics is a vastly more complicated challenge than merely that of assessing who has access to what nuclear technology and material, what they seek to do with it, whether the rest of the world will attempt to keep them from weaponizing, whether any such efforts will succeed, and what the consequences of proliferation are likely be.

For similar reasons, is also vastly easier to bootstrap yourself into membership in the nuclear order than it is to build a country into a great power – much less a superpower – in the broader political arena.  Indeed, until China’s relative success since the early 1980s in boosting what Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders call its “Comprehensive National Power” (CNP), no country has ever really succeeded in building itself into a great power as the result of an actual national plan. 

The United Kingdom and the United States enjoyed spectacular successive runs at the center of the global political system, but neither of those two powers actually planned their ascent to geo-economic centrality as a matter of prior national policy.  Neither was in its heyday at all shy about being globally ambitious, of course, but in terms of the myriad factors that permitted and facilitated their rise, neither London nor Washington really orchestrated their global ascendency as part of a deliberate and sustained policy agenda set in motion years earlier.  They were both happy to take advantage of the power they acquired through hypertrophic development, and were able to leverage their rapid economic and technological rise into enormous global influence, but it was more the case that this power just happened to accrue to them in favorable circumstances than that they won it through the steady implementation of some kind of master plan.

For its part, Germany tried to undertake a deliberate strategy of self-development into economic and military power after its unification in 1870, but it overreached and suffered the debilitating consequences of losing two world wars in the 20^thCentury before being left as merely a so-called “Middle Power” today.  Japan also had remarkable success in building itself to great power status in the years of the late 19^th and early 20^th Century, but ran into similar problems when hubrisand aggression eventually produced disastrous overreaching. 

The Soviets, too, thought they had cracked the nut of building themselves into a superpower – and indeed into a global hegemon – through Marxist-Leninist planning, but the USSR eventually ossified into a dysfunctional gerontocracy that collapsed under its own weight, leaving Putin’s Russia today a mismanaged, kleptocratic, and demographically disintegrating (if dangerously warlike) mess.  Meanwhile, France tried all the while to maintain itself as great power through a considerable degree of deliberate military, economic, and technological planning, but it still couldn’t avoid long and anemic generations of steady relative decline. 

Today, China stands alone as an example in terms of its apparent ability to deliberately plan and implement a great power ascent.  Even there, however, Beijing’s success is far from assured.  After all, it took China a century and a half of multiple – and sometimes catastrophic – attempts at “self-strengthening” to settle on its current recipe for development, and CCP failure today due to a combination of corrupt dictatorship, strategic-level economic missteps, and bellicose overreaching remains a distinct possibility. 

Planning for success in the global political order, in other words, is really hard, and certainly much more so than simply figuring out how to build a nuclear arsenal. 

Rates of Development

Related to these different degrees of complexity and difficulty is a potentially important distinction between the nuclear order and the political order in terms of rates of change.  It should not be surprising that where joining or leaving only involves one’s acquisition or dispossession of very discrete and specific technological know-how and materials, change can occur fairly rapidly. 

Even the first pioneering development of a nuclear weapons program, after all – the U.S. Manhattan Project – occurred remarkably quickly, moving from initiation in 1942 to actually first dropping an Atom Bomb in 1945.  Conversely, after U.S. and British officials – in the shadow of the American invasion of Iraq over what was believed to be Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – persuaded Muammar Qaddafi to renounce the pursuit of nuclear weapons and other WMD in late 2003, it only took a few months for us to eliminate those Libyan programs on a cooperative basis.  By the same token, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, three “new” nuclear weapons possessors appeared on the scene essentially immediately, as weapons formerly belonging to Soviet central authorities in Moscow were stranded in the territories of the newly independent nations of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.  (Within a few years, moreover, they had all been negotiated away again!)  The nuclear arena may not change too often, but it tends to move quickly when it does.

To be sure, change can sometimes occur very rapidly in the global political order – as with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, or with the way in which major wars have always had the potential to act as major precipitants of rapid change and reordering.  Nevertheless, things often move much more slowly in the political order, with countries’ relative rise and fall commonly taking decades, generations, or even centuries.

Binary versus Continuous  

Change in the nuclear arena, moreover, tends to be more of a step-change function rather than a continuous one.  That is, it proceeds to some extent in “quantum” leaps with the addition (or, less commonly, the subtraction) of a new weapons possessor.  It’s true that it is quite possible for a country to linger as a “virtual” or “latent” nuclear weapon state – that is one easily and quickly able to weaponize but not yet actually having done so – and that this status can have important geopolitical implications.  For the most part, however, the issue of nuclear weapons possession is, like pregnancy, rather a binary question: either one is or one isn’t. 

By contrast, the global political order is basically a giant concatenation of continua – a complex aggregate of qualities and characteristics all of which are generally possessed in gradations.  Where nuclear possession is (more or less) binary, matters of power and influence in the political order always involve questions of degree: of “more” versus “less,” of “relative to whom?” and “in what context?” 

Moreover, axes of geopolitical power and influence can overlap and function in cross-cutting ways.  The United States wielded a ferocious economic club with tariffs on Chinese imports in 2025, for instance, but Beijing continued to expand its exports by directing them elsewhere and forced the Americans to back down on tariffs not merely by replying in kind (e.g., with a soybean purchase boycott) but also by employing “off-axis” pressures such as by restricting critical mineral supply chains and working to lure U.S. military allies into trade deals that made them more dependent on China than ever.  (Washington did not back down merely on tariffs, moreover: the United States also abandoned its blockade on high-end Artificial Intelligence chips for China in exchange merely for a share of the profits from sales giving CCP and its minions the American technology they want.) 

Strategists at places such as CGSR have made valuable contributions to the nuclear arena in trying to think through issues of “cross-domain deterrence” during the period in which U.S. nuclear warhead numbers were still falling.  In the global political order, however, everything is always “cross-domain” all the time – and it always was.

Barriers to Entry

The nuclear and political orders, one might also say, have different barriers to entry.  I realize that the term “barrier to entry” isn’t quite right when applied to continuous phenomena of the sort one generally finds in the political order, but please bear with me: think of this just in the sense of “what factors can impede a country’s positional advancement within each order?” 

In nuclear affairs, where the main issue is simply one of technological capacity, quite literal and deliberate barriers to entry exist in the form of the global nonproliferation regime centered around the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear safeguards, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and other such institutions and practices.  Many individual countries, moreover, have explicit nonproliferation policies by which they seek to prevent or slow the emergence of new nuclear weapons possessors. 

Furthermore, with a few historical exceptions – among them the USSR helping China build its nuclear weapons program, China helping Pakistan, and Pakistan in turn giving technical assistance to multiple countries through the smuggling network run by A.Q. Khan – countries that have already mastered the technology of manufacturing nuclear weapons generally try to keep others from learning these secrets.  All of these elements together represent a framework of entry barriers that retard the rate of change in the nuclear order. 

In extreme cases, in fact, forward-leaning counterproliferation policies – that is, ones aimed not merely at making nuclear proliferation more difficult but also at actively intervening to impede or roll back proliferation efforts already underway – have been employed to turn back the clock on nuclear weapons proliferation.  It was the robust American counterproliferation posture of the early Proliferation Security Initiative era, for instance, that helped set the stage for the dismantlement of Libya’s WMD program.  Even more dramatically, Israeli strikes against plutonium production reactors under construction in Iraq in 1981 and in Syria in 2007 – as well as the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025 – dealt important blows to those countries’ weapons ambitions.  (We’re all still waiting to see whether present-day negotiations with Iran will result in a deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear capabilities, or whether the current war will produce just another Obama-style can-kicking exercise in merely delaying Iran’s nuclear advancement.)

By contrast, the political order has few formal barriers to entry, as for the most part countries are generally free to try as best they can to adopt policies promoting economic and technological development, and to reap the benefits thereof in terms of being better able to engage with other states from a position of power and influence, and in being able build a stronger military.  That said, as I’ve described, putting yourself on an upward trajectory in geopolitics is no easy thing, and such pathways are seldom clear or reliable.  The primary “barrier to entry” in the political order is thus the inherent difficulty, cost, and complexity of developing one’s country into a technologically and methodologically sophisticated modern economy with a corresponding military capability.

That said, it is also quite possible for entry barriers in the political order to be built deliberately, such as where countries to cooperate to deny another state important inputs – e.g., technologies or natural resources – where that country’s rise is felt likely to be destabilizing or otherwise undesirable.  The United States and many other nations have used tools such as national security export controls, arms embargos, and economic sanctions for such purposes for many years.  Nonetheless, this is another area in which the political order is vastly more complex and unpredictable than the nuclear one.

Externalities of Entry

The nuclear arena and the political one also differ in terms of the externalities presented when countries change their status within these orders.  For its part, the nuclear order presents a fairly clear set of externalities, though even here they are by no means simple. 

Nuclear weapons proliferation is quite reasonably usually assumed to be destabilizing.  Proliferation, after all, has the potential to overturn long-established power balances, and it increases the number of axes of potential conflict that are capable of escalating to nuclear conflict, the complexity of deterrence calculations therein, and the potential for accidents or miscalculations.  (This is why, for instance, Article II of the NPT – which prohibits non-nuclear weapons states from acquiring nuclear weaponry – is not actually a concession made by those states to the detriment their national security interests, but in fact a rule that helps make them much more secure by helping ensure that their regional rivals and neighbors do not acquire the most destructive military tools mankind knows how to make.)

Yet it isn’t necessarily inherently the case that proliferation is always destabilizing.  In certain circumstances – such as where a militarily weaker state faces existential threats of territorial conquest by a more powerful one – proliferation might actually prove to be, on the whole, more stabilizing than it is disruptive.  Nevertheless, issues of nuclear weapons possession do tend clearly to focus pretty much all observers on the question of security externalities, and the conceptual terrain here is comparatively clear.

Things are much more complicated for the political order.  A country’s growth in geopolitical clout, of course, certainly can have externalities, including security externalities.  Even leaving aside its massive nuclear weapons buildup, for example, China’s enormous growth in economic might over the last two generations has created huge ones.  Some of these externalities have been positive ones, as with the global availability of cheap consumer goods for people all around the world. 

Many externalities, however, have been negative, such as in terms of supply chain dependencies that have made many countries highly vulnerable to CCP coercion, the hollowing-out of Western industrial economies due to offshoring of manufacturing jobs to China, and the ways in which economic and technological growth has both permitted the CCP to build a large and modern military with which it now threatens the political autonomy of its neighbors and has given Beijing a swaggering self-confidence that has encouraged it to envision replacing the long-established international order with a newfangled Sinocentric hegemony.  Most dramatically, one potential externality to China’s rise is in fact the possibility of a new global war as Beijing’s regional and global ambitions rub up aggressively against the rest of the world – and in particular against the security interest of the United States and regional allies increasingly concerned about being coerced into a 21^st Century analogue to China’s ancient imperial “tributary system.” 

There can obviously be huge externalities to change in the political order, but the situation here is clearly infinitely more complex than in the nuclear realm than one finds in looking merely at the nuclear order – with the effects being at once broader, more diffuse, more multifaceted, and less clear in their net impact.  It is terribly hard to assess their implications, even with the benefit of hindsight, and this makes policy analysis and policy formulation especially difficult.

Interactions

For the most part, I’ve thus far been talking about the political order and the nuclear order as if they were separate ones. Naturally, of course, this isn’t really true.  In fact, they are interconnected, with development in each affecting the other in ways that can be quite significant. 

In this relationship of reciprocal causation or influence, for instance, developments in the broader political order can have a powerful – indeed potentially dispositive – effect upon critical nuclear order questions, such as which states may want nuclear weapons and what costs and risks they are willing to bear in this pursuit, and perhaps even whether, when, and which states feel they no longer want nuclear weapons.  Indeed, political arena developments will also powerfully shape which states feel an interest in supporting nonproliferation or counterproliferation policies, as well as how hard they are willing to work to this end.  (As I have observed elsewhere, we know from the history of the last two generations that the international system tends to be more conductive to nonproliferation in some configurations that others.  Bipolarity and unipolarity have tended to work pretty well, from a nonproliferation perspective.  Multipolarity?  Less so.)

Geopolitical developments, moreover, help set the parameters even for which states are able even to consider nuclear proliferation in the first place.  While nuclear weapons, as I have noted, are not all that hard to develop, there are nonetheless some states for which the question simply cannot arise because they are so poor, so chaotic, or so otherwise dysfunctional that weaponization is clearly precluded. 

At the same time, developments in the nuclear arena clearly can also have broader ramifications in the political order, for nuclear weapons obviously can powerfully affect how able countries are to exert influence against each other, especially in crisis or in wartime.  The policies nations adopt vis-à-vis proliferation can also have important effects on how different groups of likeminded states form and behave in diplomatic, political, and even military coalitions.  (At the extreme, of course, a nuclear weapons possessor might be able to use such tools to defeat another country in combat, and perhaps even effectively to erase an opponent from existence.  That’s definitely a political order effect!) 

My experience in government has been that many diplomats, civil society activists, and think tankers find it much easier to understand that nuclear weapons issues affect broader geopolitical questions than the other way around.  This leads them to forget basic truths such as the fact that disarmament is only feasible when and to the extent that circumstances of tension and rivalry in the geopolitical arena wane enough to make such moves seem non-suicidal to real-world decision-makers entrusted with national security decisions.  As Ronald Reagan once put it, “[w]e don’t mistrust each other because we’re armed; we’re armed because we mistrust each other.” 

This means, in Winston Churchill’s phrasing, that it is only “[w]hen you have peace you will have disarmament” – and hence that the easy assumption of so many arms control advocates and disarmament activists that the path to disarmament starts with stigmatizing and prohibiting the weapons rather than reducing geopolitical tensions and strengthening trust is a false premise.  I thus think the causal arrow is probably in many ways stronger and more important from global politics into nuclear weapons policy than the other way around, but it is nonetheless important in both directions.  There is a complex dance between the two arenas.

Conclusion

I do not pretend to have mapped this terrain and charted these dynamics with the fidelity one would need in order to offer statesmen and diplomats a useful guide or “playbook” as they seek to manage risks and pursue their countries’ interests at the complex intersection of the world’s political and nuclear orders.  Nonetheless, I hope that my effort here to draw out some of these factors will help give you more material to work with as this conference considers possible futures for nuclear policy and diplomacy.

—  Christopher Ford