A fractious NATO summit—including, apparently, an implied threat by President Donald Trump to leave the alliance—shows it’s not too early to be thinking about a post-alliance future. So in this post, I intend to unpack some thoughts about the future shape of nuclear deterrence in Asia. If the US hub-and-spoke alliances in Asia were to fall over, who would be the principal nuclear actors in Asia, and what would be the effect on nuclear proliferation?

Australians appreciate the enormous value of the ANZUS alliance, but some of them, at least, imagine that extended nuclear deterrence—the doctrine under which the US agrees to run nuclear risks on behalf of its allies—is now, like the weapons themselves, an artefact of a bygone world, the loss of which can comfortably be borne in an era of cyberwar and precision strike.

Well, let’s scrape the current extended nuclear deterrence commitments off the strategic map and look at it afresh. With Trump shying away from costly commitments—and remember he cancelled the US–South Korean exercises ostensibly because of the expense involved—what would the pattern of residual nuclear deterrence look like?

China, the rapidly rising regional power, would still deploy a nuclear arsenal—an arsenal of growing sophistication though relatively constrained in its size. So too would Russia, and it has a considerably bigger arsenal than China, and more practice in leveraging its nuclear capabilities for diplomatic and strategic gain.

On the subcontinent, India and Pakistan would remain as nuclear-weapon states, although neither is formally accorded that status under the NPT (which recognises only the P5 members as fitting into that category). Pakistan relies on its nuclear weapons to offset Indian conventional superiority. India, meanwhile, hopes its smaller nuclear arsenal will deter Pakistan from crossing the threshold, while simultaneously offsetting China’s conventional superiority.

And we mustn’t forget North Korea, of course: even if Kim Jong-un is attempting to set his country on a new trajectory, he’s unlikely to be giving away all his nuclear weapons anytime soon.

So China, Russia, India, Pakistan and North Korea would be the nuclear-armed players on the Asian chessboard. True, the US would remain a nuclear power, and a strong one at that. But its priority would be central deterrence (defence of the US homeland) rather than the protection of former allies. America first, right?

It’s not a pretty picture. Of the five remaining regional nuclear-armed countries, three are authoritarian states, two of which are great powers keen to revise the international order. By contrast, only one—India—could really be called a democracy, and its strategic history is one of non-alignment. It’s difficult to describe Pakistan’s system of governance, but however we do so, nuclear command and control seems to lie with the armed forces rather than the civilian government.

A collapse of NATO would still see Britain and France, two advanced Western democracies, remain as European nuclear powers. But there are no comparable nuclear-armed regional Western democracies in Asia. Putting it bluntly, a post-San Francisco strategic order would bring us face-to-face with an unpleasant truth—that nuclear weapons in Asia are, in fact, distributed in ways that would reinforce the looming regional power shifts rather than help to offset them.

Frankly, that maldistribution of nuclear capabilities would be a first-order strategic problem for a range of regional countries. Japan, South Korea and Australia—all the beneficiaries of previous US extended nuclear assurances—would sense a new vulnerability in their strategic environment. But so too would other states, like Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam, all of whom previously derived a set of second-order benefits from the nuclear ‘presence’ of the US in the region.

Today, US extended nuclear deterrence is a background feature of the current regional security environment. That’s appropriate, because nuclear weapons in general have tended to be less prominent in Asian strategic relationships than elsewhere. China, for example, doesn’t typically resort to nuclear coercion to get its way. But the collapse of the US alliances would elevate the question of nuclear weapons to the forefront of regional thinking.

No other state could replicate the current US system. Authoritarian nuclear powers wouldn’t be acceptable guarantors of the security of advanced democracies. And no other non-authoritarian nuclear power possesses a nuclear arsenal sufficiently large and diverse to be able to carry the weight of protecting other countries’ core interests as well as its own, let alone the strategic disposition to do so.

True, Britain and France both carry some of the weight of nuclear deterrence in Europe, but that’s because their national strategic redlines are tied to their immediate region. Nuclear balancing in Asia would be a bridge too far for both of them.

And that leaves only a set of unpalatable options for countries like Japan, South Korea and Australia. They can either head down the path of developing indigenous nuclear arsenals, or they can attempt to dilute the advantages that nuclear weapons confer—advantages which would otherwise accrue to a set of states that did not wish them well.

At a time when NATO–Russia relations are arguably at their lowest ebb since NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, major military exercises are designed to send a message. Russia’s Zapad 2017 military manoeuvres, which took place from 14 to 20 September in Belarus, parts of Western Russia, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, proved to be no different. The secrecy that cloaked this year’s Zapad not only made the manoeuvres appear more threatening, but highlighted once again the competing values that have long plagued NATO–Russia relations.

Moscow sought to calm its neighbours, calling the war games that pitted Russian and Belarussian forces against fictional Western nations ‘absolutely defensive in nature’. In the words of Russian deputy defence minister Alexander Fomin, the primary aim was to practice combatting ‘terrorism’—featuring a scenario that simulated repelling a terrorist attack on Belarus.

Ukraine, and the NATO members that share a border with Belarus—namely, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia—saw the muscular posturing differently. There were fears that Russia wouldn’t withdraw its troops from Belarus, or that the manoeuvres could be used as a smokescreen to assault neighbouring countries—especially Ukraine.

Zapad 2017 didn’t come close to delivering the alarmist scenarios some media outlets offered, but it’s worth studying because of what it reveals about Moscow’s thinking.

Over the past decade, Russia has demonstrated a willingness to break the OSCE’s (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s) Charter of Paris and its guiding principles for the post–Cold War period; that is, respecting a country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the inviolability of its borders. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, annexation of Crimea in 2014, and ongoing involvement in the Donbass brazenly violated those norms.

While all nations have the right to exercise their forces, there’s an expectation that those within the OSCE zone will adhere to the organisation’s confidence- and security-building measures. Under the OSCE’s 2011 Vienna document—which is a political agreement, not an international treaty—countries must provide six weeks’ notice for drills that involve more than 9,000 troops. For exercises involving 13,000 troops or more, they’re obliged to invite other OSCE countries to send observers. As one of the cornerstones of the Cold War security order, the agreement is designed to reduce the risk of misunderstandings that could lead to conflict.

To avoid extensive foreign monitoring, Russia declared the participation of just 12,700 troops. There’s enough open-source information, however, to conclude that the overall number of troops reached approximately 48,000. This isn’t the first time that Moscow has been accused of being ‘economical with the truth’. It increasingly takes advantage of the loophole under paragraph 10.3.3—a category not subject to the notification requirement—by conducting unannounced ‘snap’ exercises involving up to 100,000 troops. Between 2013 and 2017, Russia is said to have held 43 of these exercises.

Indeed, the Kremlin’s lack of transparency is at the heart of a much broader clash over the orientation of the post-Soviet states. As researchers from the Brookings Institution (PDF) explain, one of the fundamental points of contestation between the West and Russia centres on the status of countries like Belarus that were once Soviet republics. The West views them as sovereign nations, free to join Western institutions if they please, while Russia considers them part of its exclusive sphere of influence.

Ever since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the government has put together a narrative to downplay the real cost of Western sanctions—insisting that isolation is actually good for Russia. Despite the Kremlin’s desire to reassert influence over its neighbours, it’s unlikely to reconstitute the Soviet Union anytime soon: the reality is that the Russian economy can no longer subsidise the former Soviet states. What the Kremlin wants instead is to deny its close neighbours the freedom to choose their own foreign-policy course.

The key purpose of Zapad, Emily Ferris writes in Foreign Affairs, ‘was for Russia to remind Belarus who the senior partner in the bilateral relationship is’. In purely strategic terms, Belarus is critical to Russia: the country’s pipelines carry a large chunk of the oil and gas that Russia sells to Western Europe. Because it is almost entirely dependent on subsidised Russian crude for its two oil refineries, Belarus is deep in Moscow’s orbit. Moscow, in turn, has used those subsidies to bolster its political influence. But with Moscow cutting its oil deliveries, and forcing Minsk to pay its debts, the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Belorussian president Alexander Lukashenko has come under increased strain.

Minsk may well be overdependent (PDF) on Russia financially, but its state institutions and foreign policy are not. For the country’s elites, the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine raised fears that Belarus could someday be next. Since then, maintaining Belarus’ sovereignty has become a much more prominent part of Lukashenko’s foreign-policy agenda. On the war in Ukraine, the president has carved out a neutral stance, insisting that he would never allow Belarus to be used as a springboard to attack another state. And, more recently, he even rebuked Russian calls to establish a new air base on Belarussian territory.

In the current geopolitical environment, the Zapad exercises demonstrated the level of distrust that exists between Moscow and NATO members. The necessity of strengthening the Vienna document is beyond question, but the Kremlin still refuses to modernise the agreement. Until such steps are taken—which would go a long way to reassuring its neighbours—it appears that Russia is intent on turning the clock back to a time when great powers decided the fate of smaller nations and Europe was divided into spheres of influence.

In her address to the United Nations Security Council Debate on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) held in New York in October, Ambassador Marriët Schuurman, NATO Secretary General’s Special Representative on WPS said:

‘Gender equality is not optional. It is essential. Why? Because it allows us to respond better—and smarter—to the many complex security challenges that we face today. She went on to add that Gender equality is about credibility and capability…the readiness of our forces and the effectiveness of our operations.’

Ambassador Schuurman succinctly captured what NATO had learned after 15 years of implementing UNSCR 1325 on WPS. There’s no argument that NATO, and its allies and partners, have made tangible progress to advance the WPS agenda in its operations in Afghanistan and Kosovo over the past few years. Certainly, NATO recognises that its core tasks of collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security can’t be realised if women don’t participate feely in all aspects of conflict prevention, management and resolution, or if their rights aren’t respected.

The Australian Defence Force has been a key contributor to the development and implementation of NATO’s action plan on UNSCR 1325, aligning its implementation of the Australian National Action Plan (NAP) on WPS with NATO’s key WPS principles, and making significant progress on mainstreaming gender perspective into its core business.

As a result, we’ve strengthened the nexus between Defence’s efforts to increase women’s participation and opportunities for leadership, and the importance of a gender perspective and women’s enhanced role in peacebuilding as a major component of achieving sustainable peace and security.

However, challenges to implementing UNSCR 1325 remain. Here are eight reflections that I believe will enhance Australia’s WPS efforts and lead to change in the long term:

 1. While women’s equality and empowerment in conflict are WPS principles, they’re also national concerns. We should strive to address and develop public policies on inequalities and barriers for women, and set standards and role-model workplace behaviour that supports those ideals. That will put us in a position to support and enact global commitments on equality and empowerment for women.

2. The principles of UNSCR 1325—protection, prevention, participation and gender perspective—can be applied in non-conflict environments. To do so allows us to tackle inequality, promote women’s participation and leadership, and prevent sexual and gender-based violence. Gender perspective is about identifying the different needs and concerns of men and women and developing appropriate responses. Equality doesn’t mean being the same.

3. Senior leadership commitment to mainstreaming gender perspective is essential for buy-in and implementation. That means senior leaders and commanders must demonstrate their commitment through public policy, corporate plans, cultural reform and resourcing. The ADF has been exemplary in its leadership on, and international engagement with, NATO and other armed forces on strategies to increase women’s participation, and to embed gender considerations in operations, missions, training and military exercises.

4. A network of Gender Advisors is necessary to embed gender perspective into the core business. They should be a senior appointment, with appropriate experience, skills and training, with direct access to senior leaders. They should attend all key committee meetings to ensure that gender perspective is seen as a cross-functional theme across divisions and lines of operations and to raise the profile of the mandate. And one person can’t do it all: a network of Gender Advisors and gender focal points is essential to the effective mainstreaming of gender perspective. (Defence’s network has grown from just me in 2013 to nine formal positions in 2016, and many more less-formal gender focal points.)

5. A program or plan with specific goals and strategies, developed in consultation with relevant stakeholders, and agreed by senior leadership, is essential to drive the agenda. This ensures that issues, gaps, and challenges are identified, that specific and targeted initiatives are developed and implemented, and that the program is resourced.

6. Cross-pollination of ideas and initiatives with other relevant agencies helps to promote national approaches to mainstreaming gender perspective. One of the successful elements of Defence’s NAP strategy has been the formation of a working group of ADF and Defence representatives to progress NAP implementation. Enhancing that group with representatives from civil society and academia provides new perspectives and encourages collaboration.

7. Education, training and communication are essential to deliver gender perspective outcomes. Regardless of their gender, the Gender Advisor requires in depth knowledge of WPS, an understanding of operational and planning processes, and experience in gender issues. And they must also be able to communicate effectively across ranks and divisions. This may be in relation to explaining their purpose, the UN mandates and how they apply in the broader global context, or indeed, the operational benefit derived from analysis of gender issues.

8. It’s essential to build strong and resilient relationships with key people and stakeholders. This results in information sharing, opportunities to include gender considerations in the planning and execution of operations and ensuring that the implementation of UNSCR 1325 isn’t overlooked. Defence’s strong and trusted partnership with NATO has increased its standing in the international community and enabled a streamlined approach to implementation of WPS into military business.

The key theme arising from both NATO and the ADF’s work in this area is how women’s participation and gender perspective impacts the operational strategy to effect security, stability, governance and reconstruction in conflict areas. Women’s equality and empowerment remains an imperative to their inclusion and participation in those processes. I firmly agree with Ambassador Schuurman’s assessment that ‘…equal participation is not a favor to women. It is a hard core security requirement. It is essential….to the effectiveness of our forces…..But, above all, it is fundamental to achieving lasting peace’.

The United States has lost two asymmetric wars in modern times: one against the Vietcong in Vietnam, and another against terrorist groups in the Middle East. When its defeat became apparent in Vietnam, the US pivoted away from the region, leaving the victor to clean up the mess—and, ultimately, to join the ASEAN structure of security and cooperation. The Middle East has been more difficult to leave behind, despite America’s best efforts, and remains wracked by conflict and shaken by shifting alliances.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the region’s turmoil represents an important opportunity. By gaining a foothold in the Middle East, he hopes to revive Russia’s long-faded image as a world power, restore its status as America’s main geopolitical foil, and gain bargaining chips with which to promote his more immediate concerns in Russia’s near-abroad. Success in these areas, he calculates, will cement his power and popular support at home.

On these fronts, Putin has made some progress, embedding Russia firmly within Middle Eastern politics. But Russia’s position in the region remains fragile. It isn’t currently capable of helping to establish—much less oversee—a new regional order, for a simple reason: the Kremlin lacks true allies there.

To be sure, Russia does wield substantial influence in Syria (a Cold War legacy), and shared interests have enabled Putin to bond with some regional powers. But no Middle Eastern country today is a captive client of the Kremlin in the way that, say, Egypt was during the Cold War.

Russia’s recent cooperation with Iran, for example, is no sign of a budding friendship, as some experts believe. Though both governments support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Iran allowed Russia to use its airbases in the fight against ISIS, Iran is keen to retain its role as Assad’s main patron. Moreover, Iran would not want to jeopardise its efforts to rebuild its economic relations with the West—an objective that underpinned the international agreement on its nuclear program concluded in 2015. As for Russia, cooperating with Iran in a broader Middle East policy would destroy its standing among the region’s Sunni powers.

Meanwhile, countries like Turkey and Egypt are largely engaging with Russia in a kind of protest, amid tensions with their closer allies in the West. Turkey, for example, was, until recently, at loggerheads with Russia over Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane near its border with Syria last November. But Turkey has now reconciled with Russia, and wound down its role in the fight against Assad, Russia’s main partner in the region.

This doesn’t reflect some realisation on Turkey’s part that Russia is a critical actor worth keeping on side. Rather, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants Russia’s help in Turkey’s fight against Syria’s Kurds, whose nationalist ambitions Erdogan is eager to contain, lest they incite separatism among Kurds in Turkey.

Erdogan is frustrated with Turkey’s Western allies, which have done his country no favours on the Kurdish issue. On the contrary, the Syrian Kurds are America’s most efficient partner in the war against the Islamic State (ISIS), which both Turkey and Russia are also fighting. Arming the Kurdish militias, as US President Barack Obama is now considering, would push Erdogan further into Putin’s arms. Given Putin’s interest in dividing NATO, he would warmly welcome such an outcome.

There are also economic incentives for the Russia–Turkey pairing, including about $30 billion in annual trade. Russia, weighed down by low commodity prices and persistent Western sanctions, is also eager to boost energy exports to Turkey.

But the potential of the Turkey-Russia relationship is limited. For starters, whatever tensions exist between Erdogan and the West, the Turkish president knows better than to risk the security guarantees afforded by NATO. Given this, any collusion with Putin in Syria is likely to be shallow and short-lived.

Russia, for its part, has no interest in bolstering Turkey’s position as a major regional power. After all, it has long competed with Turkey for influence in the Black Sea and the Middle East. Russia’s reaction to Turkey’s rapprochement with its erstwhile ally Israel—with which it had been at loggerheads since 2010, when Israeli commandos stormed a Turkish ship that was part of a flotilla seeking to deliver aid to Gaza—reflects this rivalry.

At first, Russia’s reaction was lukewarm, largely because, given Israel’s role as a rising energy power in the Middle East, the reconciliation jeopardised Russia’s plans of boosting energy exports to Turkey. But Putin subsequently endorsed the move, not because he likes the idea of Turkey, which also has close ties with Hamas, gaining a greater say in the affairs of Gaza, but because he wanted to present Russia as a key regional actor.

Indeed, Putin next announced that he would be willing to host peace talks between Israel and Palestine. As he surely knows, Russia lacks the leverage, economic and otherwise, that would be needed to produce a deal. But he seems to have decided that the suggestion would reinforce the view of Russia as a regional player rivalling in importance Turkey or even the US.

The truth, however, is that the US remains indispensable to any solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict. More broadly, the urge for Western-style freedom and democracy remains the dream of the Middle East’s younger generations; it’s merely been obscured by the autocratic response to the Arab Spring uprisings, and the subsequent proliferation of radical Islamists.

The US is now focused on a rising Asia. Instead of employing the weapons of war, it is using the tools of globalisation—in particular, trade and investment linkages—to help shape the region’s development. When the Middle East is ready, the US will surely do the same there. And when that happens, whatever isolated military footholds and ephemeral alliances Russia has maintained will quickly be lost. Like the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe, today’s Russia has no place in a region undergoing socioeconomic reform and democratic transitions.

If Donald Trump were to become President, the United States would have a problem with many dimensions. So would the world.

To begin with, the problem would be his unfathomable vulgarity. America has seen many things, but not a potential president discussing the size of his penis during a televised debate.

The problem would also be his pathological hatred of women. In a 1992 conversation with architect Philip Johnson, reported in New York magazine, he said, ‘You have to treat ’em like shit.’ He still views them as disgusting creatures, with—as he said of Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly—‘blood coming out of [their] wherever.’

The problem would also be his unabashed racism. This is a man who, according to his first wife, long kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches on his bedside table, and who blithely calls blacks ‘lazy,’ derides Mexicans as ‘rapists,’ and judges Muslims collectively guilty for Islamist terrorism.

The problem would be his anti-Semitism, too, lurking in table talk about not wanting his money counted by anyone other than ‘little short guys that wear yarmulkes,’ or in tweets emphasizing the comedian Jon Stewart’s Jewishness, or in his angry remark last December to the Republican Jewish Coalition. ‘You’re not going to support me,’ he said, ‘because I don’t want your money!’

The problem would be his gross lack of knowledge, not just of the world, but also of his own country. A few days before the referendum on Britain’s continued membership in the European Union, he didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘Brexit.’ This month, he showed that he doesn’t know how many articles the US Constitution contains.

But, most seriously and worryingly, the problem would be that the leader of the world’s leading power would have a catalogue of simplistic ideas in the place of a geopolitical vision. And it is a catalogue that, despite Trump’s promise to ‘Make America Great Again,’ would undermine US prosperity and security.

Consider his idea, floated in early March and probably inspired by his private bankruptcies, of renegotiating the US national debt. The idea was idiotic (the American government, which holds a monopoly on issuing the world’s leading reserve currency, has nothing to ‘renegotiate’). But had Trump been in power when he proposed it, the consequences would have been devastating: an immediate hike in interest rates; a tanking dollar; and a breach of confidence between the US (now seen as behaving like Argentina or Greece) and everyone else.

Or consider his statement, during his nomination acceptance speech in Cleveland, that, if elected, he would revise NATO’s policy of automatic support for threatened members of the Alliance. In the world according to Trump, Russia would then be able to follow through on its threat to reexamine the legality of the process that led to the Baltic states’ independence. It would be free to adjust its border with one neighbor or come to the rescue of a Russian-speaking minority ‘held hostage’ by another. It could invade Poland or, of course, Ukraine. And why would Russia stop with NATO and its neighbors? It could pick a fight with Japan or any other Western allies in the Asia-Pacific region.

And then of course there is Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, whose praises Trump never misses an occasion to sing. As he once told CNN’s Larry King (while promoting his bestseller Think Big and Kick Ass), Putin is a great leader who did a ‘great job … rebuilding Russia.’ In September 2013, he described as a ‘masterpiece’ a commentary signed by Putin in the New York Times that criticized US policy in Syria. In September 2015, after almost two years of a Cold War-like standoff over Ukraine, he told Fox News that Putin deserved an ‘A’ for leadership.

The truth is that Trump’s personal ties with Russia are old and close. They date from the time in the early 2000s, when Trump, having been blacklisted by US banks, turned to Russian investors to finance projects in Toronto, SoHo, and Panama.

And reports are beginning to surface of a galaxy of influences and interests that formed around him at that time for his benefit: a firmament of Gazprom directors, former lobbyists for Ukrainian dictator Viktor Yanukovych (including Paul Manafort, now Trump’s campaign manager), and prominent organized-crime figures.

Some observers, like Franklin Foer, regard Trump as ‘Putin’s puppet.’ Others, like George Stephanopoulos, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, speculate about possible organic links between Trump’s campaign and the Russian regime.

And now the Russians appear to be behind the leak, two days before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, of 19,252 email messages detailing how Democratic Party leaders favored Hillary Clinton over her rival, Bernie Sanders. Worse, Trump then suborned cyberespionage by a foreign power against his opponent: ‘Russia, if you’re listening,’ he told a press conference, ‘I hope you’re able to find 30,000 emails that are missing.’

The implications of Trump’s election would be truly terrifying. The problem would not only be his vulgarity, sexism, racism, and defiant ignorance. It would be his possible infidelity to America itself. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan has been commandeered by a corrupt demagogue who betrays not only his country’s ideals, but also its fundamental national interest.

American vertigo. Global disaster.