How Trump could win a Nobel Peace Prize

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It’s no secret that Donald Trump is obsessed with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which is one reason why he’s pushing Ukraine and Russia so hard toward ceasefire negotiations.

The way the U.S. president is going about it won’t earn him any favor in Oslo, though, because so far he mainly seems to be coercing Ukraine to capitulate.

But Trump has another path to the Nobel, and the whole world, including his haters, should root for him: He could win it by lowering the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

In his first term, Trump tried and failed to launch trilateral talks among the U.S., Russia and China about capping or even reducing nuclear weapons. (The U.S. and Russia each have more than 5,000 nukes, while China, in third place, has about 600 and is racing to pull even with the other two.)

Trump had already withdrawn from one arms-control treaty with Russia and then refused to renew the only remaining one, leaving the extension to his successor, Joe Biden. But even that agreement, called New START, expires next February.

In the U.S. that means upgrading warheads as well as the bombers, submarines and missiles to deliver them — at a cost of $1.7 trillion over 30 years, or $75 billion a year this decade, although the costs and the timelines keep expanding with every estimate.

The risk of nuclear war is rising even faster than these numbers suggest, because countries are also tweaking the types of nukes they have and the strategies for using them. Russia in particular is building more “tactical” or “theater” weapons; it has an edge of about 10-1 over the U.S. in that category, which is not covered by New START. The U.S. is also considering giving these limited nukes a greater role again.

Tactical nukes are loosely defined as weapons that are meant as a last resort to prevent defeat in battle. (By contrast, strategic nukes are built to destroy an enemy’s homeland in retaliation for an incoming nuclear strike.) Tactical weapons can still pack several Hiroshimas in explosive power. But because they have lower “yields” than the strategic kind, they’re considered more usable. Even so, war games suggest that any use, no matter how limited, would immediately lead to uncontrollable escalation, and possibly Armageddon.

Add to these trends a recent pattern of reckless taboo-breaking. The leaders of Russia and North Korea keep rattling their atomic sabers. And members of Trump’s first administration want to resume testing live nuclear bombs. Once you factor in the risk of miscalculation by someone somewhere under pressure, or the imponderable role of artificial intelligence in nuclear decisionmaking, it becomes clear that the world is entering the greatest danger since the Cuban missile crisis.

Trump, despite all the chaos he’s causing in international affairs, understands that peril. Moreover, his worldview, which is anathema to international law and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, happens to be well-suited to nuclear realities.

The problem, of course, is that each nuclear superpower has different and conflicting interests. Russia knows that it’s economically and militarily weaker than the U.S. and would lose a conventional war. So it values tactical nukes as a psychological deterrent and a last-ditch means to “escalate to de-escalate” in its own favor.

China is the only nation that has an official policy of “no first use,” but it still wants parity with the U.S. to avoid being coerced, especially if it ever comes to blows over Taiwan. The U.S., meanwhile, is wondering whether it should keep matching only its strongest nuclear opponent, Russia, or needs numerical balance against Russia and China combined, lest these two gang up in a crisis.

And yet they all have one interest in common: preventing nuclear war, which, as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev memorably put it, “cannot be won and must never be fought.” Moreover, they can all accept the logic of their mutual “security dilemma,” in which anything one of them does forces the others to respond, in what threatens to become a spiral toward war.

Trump could start small, by suggesting that the U.S. and Russia informally stick to the caps in New START whether it lapses or not, pending a new arrangement. He could also press for resuming mutual inspections to build confidence.

Meanwhile, Trump and his counterparts, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, need to agree on a format. Trump wants Yalta-like talks among this trio. Russia prefers talks among all five nations designated by the Non-Proliferation Treaty as legitimate nuclear powers, including France and the UK. Some day, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (which has never officially declared its arsenal) must be brought in as well.