Armed and Insecure: Explaining Foreign Policy Aggression after Nuclear Weapons Acquisition

Abstract

How does nuclear weapons acquisition affect a state’s foreign policies? Despite the importance of this question it remains decidedly under-studied. Most of the work to date is limited to stand-alone inferences as to how nuclear weapons have, do and should affect foreign policies, with little in the way of organised and systematic investigation. Within this body of work two primary threads have emerged. The first draws on Kenneth Waltz’s theory defensive realism; a pillar in the neorealist tradition. By deploying Waltz’s vision of security-seeking states, observers argue that the security gains of nuclear weapons will relieve states of the need to compete for their survival in anarchy, allowing these nuclear-armed states to withdraw into a peaceful existence in the international status quo, pacifying their foreign policies. In more recent years a competing school of thought has emerged that aligns with defensive realism’s neorealist antipode: offensive realism. Arguing that states inherently seek hegemony, this scholarship asserts that, far from being content with security under a nuclear blanket, nuclear weapons acquisition will embolden states to engage in ‘expansive’ and ‘assertive’ foreign policies in further growing their power and international position. Neither of these optimistic or pessimistic views of the foreign policy implications of nuclear weapons acquisition represents a coherent research program, but rather a series of stand-alone inferences implicitly organised around competing neorealist premises. There has been no systematic attempt to formalise the underlying theories or test their respective explanatory powers. It is to this task that this study commits itself. By drawing on the competing neorealist theories of defensive and offensive realism to develop and test competing theories of nuclear weapons and foreign policy, this study aims to impose an epistemological framework on this emerging debate, determining which provides the best explanation of foreign policy behaviour following nuclear weapons acquisition. The core empirical work of this study comes in the form of three in-depth case studies of past and present nuclear-armed states (Pakistan, South Africa and Israel), with these findings supplemented by a statistical evaluation of foreign policy change subsequent to nuclear weapons acquisition across all nuclear-armed states. Overall, this study seeks to refine a systemic theory of nuclear weapons and foreign policy; that is, one that explains how the acquisition of nuclear weapons causes foreign policy outcomes by constraining state responses to the structural determinants of international behaviour – anarchy and self-help. Such a theory can provide both a basis for predicting the foreign policy behaviour of future proliferators, as well as a theoretical foundation for further studies of nuclear weapons and foreign policy. An understanding as to how nuclear weapons acquisition affects states’ foreign policies is also an important input in developing policy responses to, and normative positions on nuclear proliferation, an issue likely to increase in relevance to contemporary policy makers as the technological barriers to nuclear weapons development break down, and as the decline of US unipolarity creates new opportunities and incentives for nuclear acquisition. If nuclear weapons acquisition pushes states toward ‘aggressive’ and ‘expansive’ foreign policies (as per offensive realism), we would expect proliferation to attend with increasing regional instability, putting the neighbours of proliferators on notice and placing a higher premium on non-proliferation efforts. If nuclear weapons reduce aggressive behaviour (as per defensive realism), on the other hand, the opposite would be true. Neighbours of proliferative states should welcome nuclear weapons acquisition as a way of reducing the security-seeking expansion of the acquiring state, and the international community should exercise tolerance for a state’s decision to proliferate.