David Kenner contends that the president’s foreign policy is best understood as a drive toward nonproliferation:
Obama’s non-proliferation agenda got off to a fast start in its first year, as the administration negotiated the New START treaty; held the Nuclear Security Summit, which included delegations from 47 countries across the world; and released a new Nuclear Posture Review, which called for reducing the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy. In some of the global hotspots that concerned the United States, the focus on nuclear non-proliferation also took precedence over concerns about human rights or democracy promotion.
In Russia, Obama prioritized non-proliferation over concerns about Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on his domestic political opponents. “The nuclear issue is really important to his background,” Michael McFaul, the current U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told Mann for The Obamians. “He thinks you need a New START treaty, no matter whether the Russians are a democracy or an autocracy, because these are dangerous weapons and we’ve got to control them-and in a way, that’s a legacy from this 1980s era.” …
With the wind at the back of the president’s nuclear agenda, the stakes could extend far beyond Damascus or Tehran. The one notable exception to Obama’s non-proliferation agenda — so far – has been Israel, where this administration’s refusal to push for nuclear disarmament has led to charges of hypocrisy among both Arabs and Iranians.
Zachary Keck adds that it looks as though, despite some scary cases, nukes are not spreading very quickly:
[T]here has been an undeniable decline in the number of states interested in acquiring nuclear weapons.
Harald Muller and Andreas Schmidt have documented this well. In their comprehensive study of states with nuclear weapons activities between 1945 and 2005, they find that “states with nuclear weapons activities were always a minority, and today they are the smallest minority since 1945.” Specifically, in 2005 they identified 10 states as having nuclear weapons activities (including those with nuclear weapons), which constituted less than six percent of UN members. Today the only non-nuclear weapon state (NNWS) that might be interested in an atomic weapon is Iran.
The fact that states have by and large been uninterested in nuclear weapons is somewhat perplexing from a historic perspective. After all, what other revolutionary military technology hasn’t elicited strong interest from most states competing in the international system? At the same time, when one examines the properties of nuclear weapons more closely, the lack of interest is easier to understand. Nuclear weapons have basically served one purpose for states possessing them; namely, they have deterred others from challenging that state’s survival and other fundamental interests. But the nuclear era has also been characterized by a sharp decline in warfare and today fewer states face fundamental external threats to their existence. Given the high costs of building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal, it makes little sense to acquire nuclear weapons without such an existential threat.
The Dish 