Can Trump 2.0 defuse the nuclear threat? These Washington heavyweights fear not

Bob Woodward is doing his best to remain optimistic in the face of an impending second Donald Trump presidency. “Don’t give up on America’s democracy!”

But when the topic turns to the president’s unique responsibility for US nuclear strategy, his sunny outlook grows dim.

Illustration by Simon Letch.Credit:

“It’s frightening,” says the noted American journalist and close student of the last 10 US presidents. “We are all walking on eggshells,” Woodward tells me. “Trump is totally unpredictable, he never plans, he operates on instinct.”

Not necessarily because he fears that Trump will recklessly fire off atomic weapons but because he worries about Trump’s ability to deter other powers from doing so.

Woodward, whose initial fame was in breaking the Watergate stories with co-author Carl Bernstein, has interviewed Trump dozens of times over 35 years and chronicled his political career in four books ripe with insider anecdotes.

Woodward was most impressed with Joe Biden’s management of the nuclear threat from Russia two years ago when Vladimir Putin was threatening to attack Ukraine with a tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapon. He sets out in detail in his new book, War, how Biden’s administration confronted Moscow, including a phone call from US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu:

“It wouldn’t matter how small the nuclear weapon is,” Austin told Shoigu, according to the transcript of the call that Woodward obtained. “If you do this, it would be the first use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world in three-quarters of a century, and it could set in motion events that you cannot control and we cannot control.”

Bob Woodward: “There is nothing steady and there is nothing purposeful in Donald Trump’s leadership.”Credit: AP

The US would review all the self-imposed restraints it had imposed in supporting Ukraine’s war effort, Austin told him.

Separately, Biden called China’s President Xi Jinping to enlist his help. Beijing’s economic support keeps Russia solvent through its war. So, Xi’s opinion matters in the Kremlin.

“If Putin were to break the seal on nuclear use, that would be an enormous event for the world,” Biden told Xi, according to the book. China’s president agreed and undertook to warn Putin off. He did so publicly when he said: “Nuclear wars must not be fought.”

America’s Cold War-era plans for nuclear and conventional escalation with the Soviet Union were reworked and refitted for war with Putin’s Russia.

Woodward says he was shocked to learn that, during this episode, the US intelligence assessment of the risk that Putin would actually use a battlefield nuke had started at a 10 per cent chance but peaked at 50 per cent. Putin, of course, ultimately did not act on his threat.

The Biden administration showed “unique, steady, purposeful, informed leadership” in handling the risk from Russia, says Woodward. “It’s a road map for how you avoid a nuclear catastrophe.”

He adds: “There is nothing steady and there is nothing purposeful in Donald Trump’s leadership. He’s focused on himself and his own instinct.”

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton: “He has neuron flashes, not thought processes – he’s ad hoc, episodic and transactional.”Credit: Louise Kennerley

But John Bolton was less impressed with Biden’s performance. The hawkish veteran diplomat who served as Trump’s national security adviser for 13 months says the Russian threat to deploy a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine was never confirmed to be real.

“There was never any overhead [satellite] evidence that Putin was beginning to move his nuclear forces around,” Bolton tells me. “I don’t think they were serious threats.”

But Bolton, who emerged from the Trump White House as a fierce critic of Trump, agrees with Woodward in his assessment of the once and future president as dangerously erratic: “He doesn’t do policy in the conventional way. He has neuron flashes, not thought processes – he’s ad hoc, episodic and transactional.

“For example, when we met Kim Jong Un in Singapore, out of nowhere, Trump tells him, ‘I’m not going to hold the annual war games with South Korea.’” These exercises are designed to improve military readiness and to deter aggression from Pyongyang. “It was a unilateral concession; we got nothing for it, and it undermined the confidence and preparedness of our allies.”

Biden restored the annual exercises.

Donald Trump told Bob Woodward how well he understood the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.Credit: AP

Woodward has his own example of Trump’s towering faith in his own instincts in dealing with Kim. The Washington Post journalist recalls Trump telling him how well he understood the North Korean dictator. “He’s very smart,” said Trump. “But I said, ‘The CIA said he’s stupid.’”

Trump contradicted him and declared him to be very smart. “How do you know?” inquired Woodward. “I know – only I know,” replied the then-president, who had declared his “love” for “Little Rocket Man”.

Woodward, reasonably enough, thinks this claim absurd. “Where’s the stability? Where’s the plan? Where’s the team? Where’s he going to get advice from? If you were worried, notch it up to 10 factor.”

But there is an obvious rejoinder to the claim that Trump is a particular nuclear risk: he’s already served a term as president without nuclear incident. Where was the crisis?

It’s true that his record of nuclear diplomacy is unimpressive; Trump strutted into a meeting with Kim, claiming that he’d solve the problem of North Korea’s nuclear program, yet the net result was that Kim only intensified his nuclear and missile development.

Trump ostentatiously withdrew the US from the nuclear deal with Iran under which the ayatollahs had stood down their uranium-enrichment capabilities, yet Tehran’s response has been to resume its enrichment and forge ahead with its nuclear ambitions.

But no other president, including Joe Biden, has succeeded in halting the Kim dynasty’s advances.

And China is engaged in a major build-up of nuclear missiles, but Xi Jinping began planning this well before Trump was elected in 2016. By 2014, when Barack Obama was president, Xi issued secret orders to expand nuclear capability.

“Xi has overturned previous leaders’ constraints on the military’s nuclear modernisation, giving the military an important mandate to fast-track nuclear development,” writes Tong Zhao of the Carnegie Endowment.

Likewise, Trump can’t be blamed for Putin’s designs on Ukraine. Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 while Obama was president.

Biden himself has pinned the blame for Putin’s expanding ambitions on Obama. “They f---ed up in 2014,” Biden told a friend, according to War. Obama should have responded more forcefully to the Russian aggression. Said Biden: “That’s why we are here. We f---ed it up. Barack never took Putin seriously.”

Further, Biden has freshly undercut the credibility of his own threats to punish any nuclear use by Putin. Woodward’s book records that Biden privately had decided that the US would not unleash any nuclear response on Russia.

So Trump’s record of nuclear diplomacy and deterrence of America’s enemies is unimpressive, but so was that of the Democrats who went before and after him. And there was no nuclear incident on Trump’s watch.

The concern about Trump rests on his chaotic and erratic method of decision-making and his personal preference for dictators over democrats – for America’s traditional enemies over its allies.

Right now, says Woodward, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky would be feeling “terrified” at the prospect of Trump favouring Putin in a prospective peace negotiation, while Putin’s cronies are ecstatic at Trump’s victory.

But there is a new factor that Trump will have to confront. “All of US Cold War nuclear strategy was bipolar – it was the US and the USSR,” Bolton says. “With China’s rapid nuclear build-up, [the] strategy will have to be tripolar.”

So, a president given to simplistic plans and impulses must deal with a whole new level of nuclear complexity for which neither he nor the US system is yet equipped. Woodward need not fear contradiction on this point: “This is such a dangerous time.”

Peter Hartcher is international editor.