To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
The international community has worked for decades to combat the spread of nuclear weapons, but while some efforts succeeded in halting or even rolling back that spread, many others have backfired with dangerous consequences. As a result, those hoping to combat ongoing proliferation are left asking, of all these imperfect options, which policies work best, and do some actually do more harm than good? To answer these questions, Petrovics uses original data from 1945-2012 and within-case analysis of Iran and North Korea to test the effectiveness of common engagement strategies for combating nuclear proliferation. She shows that often cooperative inducements are more effective than coercive strategies, leading to nuclear reversal more often and with a lower risk of inadvertently increasing proliferation instead. But not all states are equally capable of combating proliferation; cooperation is most effective when offered by a rival power. However, this does not mean that great powers, or even superpowers, are always more effective. In fact, when these states instead choose to coerce they risk spurring greater proliferation. This work provides important policy insights for ongoing proliferation challenges today.
Ariel Petrovics
Ariel Petrovics is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis. Her research examines the effectiveness of foreign policy strategies with specific application to national security and nuclear reversal. She previously held the Herbert York Fellowship with the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation and a Research Associate position at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research.
