I invited Bob Holley on the podcast to discuss the article he recently published here, Fracturing the Security Map, warning that the return of Donald Trump, coupled with Ukraine’s defeat, could spark a stampede to redraw the world’s nuclear security arrangements. Discussed in the podcast This is the remarkably prescient article by John Measheimer I mentioned: The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent America First I’ve been thinking about this problem since the first Trump presidency. I’ve explicated my own arguments about this risk in these and other articles: Five Alarm Fire: The 118th Congress is destroying the world our grandparents built. At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945—when a ball of fire rose in gold, violet, grey, and blue over the Jornada del Muerto desert, melting the sand into light green radioactive glass and illuminating every peak and crevasse of the nearby mountain range with a searing white light—American statesmen began a frantic, desperate effort to forestall the emergence of precisely the world we are now ushering into being. “[T]he US is basically making the case to all states that they should try as hard as they can to develop nuclear weapons,” writes the war historian Phillips O’Brien … There is nothing wrong with his logic. His observations are correct and so is his reasoning. But the same logic applies to every other power in the world that would prefer not to suffer Ukraine’s fate. The United States is pursuing a feckless, shortsighted policy that will lead to moral disgrace, generational shame, global nuclear proliferation, and an uncontrolled, multipolar nuclear arms race. We’re not pursuing it deliberately. It isn’t what we mean to do. But we could not be pursuing this policy more industriously if we had dedicated all the resources of our federal bureaucracy to the goal. America First means nuclear war. The inevitable end point of losing the world's trust is uncontrolled nuclear proliferation: … Here’s where a devout cadre of Trump’s supporters jump in on Twitter and say to me, “Great! All these freeloaders can start paying for their own defense!” No. That’s not what’s going to happen. No single country can conceivably match the power of the full NATO alliance. That’s why we had it. It would be a catastrophe if every country with the ability to do it acquired the Bomb. Never mind whether they would use them in anger, it would multiply the risk of an accident, which we already know is insanely high. But they’re going to to do it if we keep this up. Any American who owns a gun, even though rationally they grasp that fewer Americans would die if there were no guns in America, should understand the calculation other countries are now apt to make. Is it a rational thing for the world to do? No. Rationally, the world will be, objectively, less safe if everyone acts on that impulse.But the world isn’t a rational place. People want safety for themselves, even if it means putting the world at greater risk. The inevitable end point is uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. What “America First” means, in the end, is “Nuclear war.” If you missed it the other day, here is the case for believing that under these circumstances, the risk of an accidental nuclear war would be insanely high. If you’re unconvinced by this case, you may be suffering from one of these common cognitive errors. It’s Happening This is no longer theoretical. We’re not discussing an abstruse theory in international relations, or something that might happen. It’s happening now. The news is scarcely being reported in the United States, crowded out by discussion of Trump’s Cabinet picks, but as soon as the election was called for Trump, the world began to change: “NATO or Nukes.” Why Ukraine’s nuclear revival refuses to die: Addressing a European Council meeting in Brussels on October 17, Zelensky invoked Ukraine’s decision to surrender nuclear weapons inherited from