The deepening crisis in the Korean Peninsula and the stalled nuclear talks with Iran together are a powerful reminder to the United States that its nonproliferation policies are not working in Asia. If George W. Bush attempted muscular approaches - including preventive war and regime change - to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, his successor Barack Obama has put greater emphasis on coercive diplomacy through international sanctions.Both approaches have failed. The American problem has less to do with the different stratagems that Bush and Obama adopted - the former emphasising unilateralism and the later multilateralism. It has everything to do with rigid American political assumptions about the meaning and implications of proliferation of nuclear weapons.
First, after the Cold War, the American strategic community has elevated the proliferation of nuclear weapons to the highest possible level - as an existential threat to international peace and security. American liberals and conservatives alike whipped themselves into a frenzy about the dangers of nuclear proliferation.While the US managed to live with an expansive nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union that saw both sides build thousands of nuclear weapons and deploy them around the world, Washington convinced itself it just can't accept the spread of any nuclear weapon capability, especially to regimes like Iran and North Korea. Paradoxically, the proliferation alarmism in the US has turned into a powerful incentive for those regimes seeking to draw American political attention. The argument here is not for minimising the dangers from the spread of nuclear weapons. It is to suggest that a more measured approach to the nuclear question will make it much easier for the US to pursue its larger interests in different parts of Asia.
