On November 19, Foreign Affairs published an article by Moritz S. Graefrath and Mark A. Raymond, two University of Oklahoma professors, arguing that the United States should bestow nuclear weapons on Germany, Japan, and Canada, three of its closest allies. It asserts that possessing nuclear weapons can convey substantial benefits and should be seriously considered for those countries that the United States sees as trustworthy. A dismaying amount of ink has been spilled in recent years trying to make nuclear weapons a more acceptable part of the day-to-day of global politics. An argument for “a modest nuclear deterrent” for three more states is another ill-considered attempt to normalize weapons that still threaten virtually all life on earth.

Even as it makes the case for proliferation, the essay’s argument continues the short-sighted structural condescension of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which formalizes the status of five nuclear-armed states but limits other countries from developing the weapons, obligating those five countries to pursue disarmament on their own terms. That privileged status persists, but without the commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons that would convince countries that don’t have nukes to tolerate a lopsided status quo, at least for a while.

But the Graefrath and Raymond article also makes the disappointingly common mistake of assuming America is the only country with agency when it comes to the type of decision it proposes. Other nuclear-armed countries have duly demonstrated that they are more than willing to make similar judgments. If the United States openly steps into the role of bestower of nuclear privileges, it will more than likely create a situation where other countries see no reason not to do the same. It’s certainly not uncommon to see a lack of realistic consideration of consequences in American foreign policy thinking, but it displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the possibility that other countries have agency, that they take their security as seriously as the United States does, and that they are as willing to consider all the options they may have to defend it. American foreign policy thinking seems not to consider at all what it would take to prevent a broader wave of proliferation that the United States might view as less advantageous.

Their choice of Canada, Germany, and Japan is revealing of a fundamental hostility to democratic governance. In 2020, a study conducted by Harvard researchers found that 75 percent of Japan’s population supported the country signing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which outlaws nuclear weapons worldwide entirely, and research conducted more recently produced similar numbers. Sixty-four percent of Germans opposed their country developing its own nuclear weapons in a poll released in June. In 2021, 74 percent of Canadians supported their country joining the TPNW, and 80 percent supported the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons in general.

Yet the authors seem content to ignore the question of whether the citizens of these countries want nuclear weapons at all; it seems to go without saying that the United States could go above their heads to bestow an independent nuclear-weapons force on their leaders. Not that this is a substantial departure from the fundamental assumptions of much of mainstream nuclear-weapon policymaking, which too often unapologetically holds that decisions about weapons that could decide the most fundamental question of human self-governance — whether or not we as a species will continue to exist — as too important to be subject to democratic decision-making.

All three of these countries are covered by what’s called “extended deterrence,” which means that, should they be the target of a nuclear attack, the United States will, at least in theory, target the attacker with its own nuclear weapons. In some cases, this goes further: Germany hosts US nuclear weapons at military bases in the country and Canada participates in joint military planning with the United States under the binational North American Aerospace Defense Command.

Public opinion is somewhat warmer in these three countries toward extended deterrence: a substantial majority of Japanese poll respondents supported discussing nuclear sharing, whereby Japan would host US nuclear weapons, with the United States in May 2022. One can take a scold’s attitude toward this, that these populations want the security that nuclear weapons in theory afford without the danger, pollution, expense, and responsibility that come with having them. But one can just as easily read this as a basically rational assessment of the world as it is: as long as nuclear weapons exist, they’re a threat that needs to be taken seriously, but eliminating them safely will require nuclear-armed states to take action. Adding more nuclear-armed states to the world will only make this goal more difficult to achieve.

If you’re tuned into the rhythms of nuclear-weapons politics, the choice of these three countries almost echoes the three countries that, following the fall of the Soviet Union, found themselves hosting Soviet nuclear weapons, which were removed to the Russian Federation as the designated nuclear-armed successor state to the Soviet Union. Below the confidence in America’s power to shape the global status quo seems to lurk a quiet admission that the American empire is fracturing, and that it must do its best to try to learn from the past, in order to fall in a way that protects what the authors see as its most important responsibilities.

Canada, Germany, and Japan each possesses the scientific and industrial capacity to successfully develop nuclear weapons on its own. For instance, Canada’s role as a major supplier of fissile material provides the basis for a joint effort to make these new nuclear capabilities a reality. What the three allies would need — and what the United States can and should provide — is public support and diplomatic cover for their transition to becoming nuclear-armed states, as well as technical and doctrinal guidance to ensure robust command and control safeguards.

This continues the peculiar retiring tone taken by center-aligned foreign policy leaders who have often declined, in recent years, to come out strongly against allied declarations of interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world by nearly any conceivable metric. But the authors of the Foreign Affairs article manage somehow to overstate that power. Wrongly, they believe that the United States can grant nuclear-weapons privileges without fear of other countries doing the same to their allies. The article also confusingly claims that the US role in maintaining the nonproliferation regime amounts to bestowing or withdrawing “public support or diplomatic cover,” rather than fully acknowledging the range of economic and institutional levers the United States has at its disposal to influence the behavior of its allies.

The normalization of talk of nuclear proliferation has not come out of nowhere. It is instead the latest and most overt articulation of an unease around questions of American power within the American foreign policy elite.

Fundamentally, though, this line of thinking misunderstands the global dynamics of nuclear-weapons policy and the role of the United States in crafting it. The United States has long based its negotiations with those nuclear-armed states it sees as adversaries on the explicitly stated norm of nonproliferation. Its failure to take seriously its obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue disarmament has demonstrably weakened its ability to prevent proliferation to countries like North Korea or to diplomatically counter China’s rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal. To openly encourage proliferation is to fully abandon all existing bases of arms-control negotiation; effectively, to admit that it is no longer a priority, and indefinite arms-racing is the only imaginable option going forward.