> So I've made peace with mafia boss power politics keeping the number of countries with nuclear weapons on the low end of the spectrum, and for that matter I'd support a much more aggressive approach to that end than we have seen these last 30 years.
The contradiction is that by relying on militarism instead of diplomacy we keep demonstrating that countries are safer from aggression once they have the bomb. You think the situation you’ve described provides a negative incentive for nuclear development, but it does not.
Or more realistically: both war and diplomacy. I don’t know why it’s being framed as one or the other, but the fact is when diplomacy fails, and it is a must-achieve goal, war is an option.
With regard to the "mafia boss power politics" you were talking about, the mafia boss keeps doing things like withdrawing from the JCPOA (back then) and abandoning negotiations to follow Israel's lead in war (today). Maybe approaching things at the mafia boss level isn't the way to go.
Yeah what I was talking about doesn't exclude diplomacy, but at one point or another you've got to be clear that under no circumstances will the development of nukes by $country be tolerated either if you're going to keep the number of nuclear powers tamped down.
Or maybe that is the wrong approach, but the policy we've had that let North Korea develop nukes and Iran at least get very close also isn't working.
North Korea is the place where foreign policy hawks go to die. It's embarrassing to watch. Every now and then over the past seven decades we have had politicians who think they're clever because their trusted advisors told them "we'll find a new way to threaten them," "let's offer them something," "you're really smart, you've got this, and nobody has noticed that you're orange" and so on, and they issue some tough talk about North Korea. It's hard to describe how inadequate their diplomacy has always been to the task. Their diplomacy is like the Visigoths trying to pull down the hated remnants of the Roman Empire, like bridges and aqueducts and so on, using oxen and ropes and inevitably failing. Something like that. North Korea is a tough problem.
Iran is more straightforward. I don't know why we've been so reluctant to make real diplomatic effort, especially after so many of Iran's proxies were significantly weakened in the last year or two, and Iran's sway was at a minimum. There seems to be an unwritten rule that once we've categorized a country as an enemy we're obligated to deal with them in the dumbest ways imaginable.
The contradiction is that by relying on militarism instead of diplomacy we keep demonstrating that countries are safer from aggression once they have the bomb. You think the situation you’ve described provides a negative incentive for nuclear development, but it does not.