The United States’ extraordinary efforts to slow, halt, and even reverse nuclear proliferation— what I have labeled the strategies of inhibition (Francis J. Gavin, “Strategies of Inhibition: U.S. Grand Strategy, the Nuclear Revolution, and Nonproliferation,” International Security 40 [1], 2015)—generate important historical puzzles. In particular, why did the United States target its allies, the very countries the United States considered critical to its other Cold War goals? And how did it adjudicate competing grand strategic claims, balancing between the US desire to inhibit proliferation while encouraging its friends to support its efforts to contain the Soviet Union?

Jeffrey W. Taliaferro takes on these important questions in his compelling new book, Defending Frenemies: Alliance Politics and Nuclear Nonproliferation in US Foreign Policy. Taliaferro is especially interested in how the United States dealt with the nuclear ambitions of what he calls “frenemies,” in particular, Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, and Pakistan. How did the United States balance between its preference that these states remain non-nuclear and the hope that they would contribute to America’s geopolitical goals vis-à-vis the Soviet Union? What mix of tools and leverage did the United States deploy as it balanced these often-competing goals? Relying on what he calls neoclassical realism, Taliaferro challenges the claim made by recent scholars that the United States threatened to abandon these allies if they continued seeking nuclear weapons (the two key works advancing this argument are Gene Gerzhoy, “Alliance Coercion and Nuclear Restraint: How the United States Thwarted West Germany’s Nuclear Ambitions,” International Security 39 [4], 2015; and Alexander Lanoszka, Atomic Assurance: The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation, 2018). Analyzing both regional balances of power and varying time horizons while applying a dollop of domestic politics, he argues that US policy makers typically prioritized the grand strategic mission of containing the Soviet Union over inhibition.

Taliaferro has an excellent command of the growing literature on nuclear proliferation and nonproliferation and has done extensive research in published primary documents, especially the Foreign Relations of the United States series, US Declassified Documents Online, and various collections published by the National Security Archive. His overall conclusion in this well-crafted study is sound, if common sense: the United States mixed its inhibition strategies depending on the circumstances and sometimes prioritized containment of the Soviets. Inhibition was successful with two allies, South Korea and Taiwan, and failed in two other cases, Israel and Pakistan.

My main puzzle involves Taliaferro’s case selection. What made a country a frenemy of the United States, as opposed to an ally, neutral, or adversary? Today, although the relationship has certainly evolved since the 1970s, few people would describe Israel as a “frenemy,” as opposed to a friend. South Korea has been understood as a full-fledged ally for some time, whereas Pakistan might be seen as more of a difficult and troublesome state with which the United States sometimes is forced to do business. Taiwan, because of its odd historical and geopolitical status in both international relations and American foreign policy, is sui generis. In other words, it is not clear how comparable these cases are to each other. And why choose these four states over other possible cases? A number of independent states allied with or at least friendly to the United States, like Australia, Japan, Italy, and Sweden, are not in the study’s universe of cases, yet as new historical research has revealed, they among others seriously considered nuclear weapons (see especially the extraordinary archival research and scholarship produced by the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/nuclear-proliferation-international-history-project).

Furthermore, the four cases that the study examines would always be very challenging inhibition targets for the United States for several reasons. First, they had what might be thought of as “stand-alone” strategic relationships with the United States. In other words, unlike European aspirants in NATO, they were not part of a collective security arrangement. Nuclear aspirants in NATO could feel like they were involved in decision making through vehicles like the Nuclear Planning Group. Even the nuclear states inside of NATO were not especially independent: Great Britain and even, in time, the French coordinated their nuclear plans with the United States. Second, of the so-called frenemies, only in South Korea were US conventional forces directly exposed to enemy attack (a case where, not coincidentally, the strategy of inhibition was successful). Absent forward deployed troops, any US security commitment toward Israel, Pakistan, or Taiwan was far less credible and inhibition much harder. Third, the security priorities of the United States and the four frenemies were often out of synch. NATO’s primary consideration was to prevent a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, and the United States and Western Europe were able to pool their military resources for this shared cause. This made it somewhat easier for the United States to pursue both inhibition and containment at the same time with countries like Italy and West Germany. This was not the situation in the cases selected by Taliaferro. Where the United States believed the Soviet Union was the key global threat, the “frenemies” saw the world much differently. Israel worried most about the Arab states, Pakistan feared India, South Korea focused on North Korea, and Taiwan’s great concern was the People’s Republic of China. None of these four states believed they could fully trust the United States to protect them from what they believed were existential local threats, based on bitter, unresolved territorial and sovereignty issues. For all four, the US Cold War strategy of containing the Soviet Union was a secondary consideration in their grand strategy.

Fourth, and related to the third reason, the United States spent as much time trying to restrain the frenemies as protecting them. Often its strategy was shaped as much by preventing Israel from attacking its neighbors, Pakistan from provoking India, South Korea from invading the north (at least in the early years), and Taiwan from declaring independence. US grand strategy was complicated by trying to avoid being entrapped in unwanted regional conflicts while also trying to pursue containment and inhibition. The fifth issue involves the question of timing. As Taliaferro demonstrates, the Kennedy administration placed enormous pressure on Israel not to go nuclear. In response, Israel simply lied to the United States and hid its program until it was a fait accompli. A key actor for each of the other three cases was the administrations of Richard Nixon. Not only was Nixon the postwar president least dedicated to the inhibition mission; he and his immediate successors pursued US grand strategy at a time of relative weakness during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam period, giving the United States far less power to pursue both inhibition and containment.

Needless to say, grand strategy is difficult and involves complex trade-offs and varying time horizons. During the Cold War, the United States had three main grand strategic missions: to incentivize a global order that encouraged and supported open political and economic systems, contain the Soviet threat, and inhibit nuclear weapons Often these missions were complementary, but at other times they were at odds and one had to be prioritized over the other. The United States also had a range of tools to pursue these interests, from building up its forward military capabilities to encouraging international law, norms, and treaty regimes.

On the whole, and perhaps without fully realizing it, Taliaferro demonstrates how successful the strategies of inhibition have been. Inhibition was always a daunting mission. Yet in his four tough cases of frenemies, two stayed non-nuclear, and the other two succumbed to US pressure not to test their weapons (a pledge Pakistan eventually violated; see Or Rabinowitz and Nicholas L. Miller, “Keeping the Bombs in the Basement: U.S. Nonproliferation Policy toward Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan,” International Security, 40 [1], 2015; Rabinowitz, Bargaining on Nuclear Tests: Washington and its Cold War Deals, 2014). In a counterfactual world where the United States did not care about nuclear proliferation and did not pursue strategies of inhibition—as the famous international relations theorist Ken Waltz would have predicted and preferred (“The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Better,” Adelphi Papers, no. 171, 1981)—in all likelihood, South Korea and Taiwan would also be nuclear, and Israel and Pakistan would have felt more free to be open about their weapons. It is hard not to be impressed with the record of the strategies of inhibition. In the end, Taliaferro’s deeply researched, engaging study expertly highlights the complex, consequential, and difficult trade-offs that the United States’ grand strategists made during the Cold War.