Trump’s Nuclear Disarmament Idea Could Be His Greatest Peace Deal
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance yesterday signed a new memorandum of understanding – also signed by the leadership of Iran – to end hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon. I thank God for that achievement – there’s no overstating its value. But I also want to draw attention to another, quieter victory that Trump set in motion this week in what may turn out to be an even more historic moment than the signing of the initial peace deal.
I’m talking about the moment when Trump, speaking to G7 leaders in France, floated the idea of a formal nuclear disarmament agreement between the U.S., Russia, and China. It was a magnanimous sentiment, coming from the U.S. – historically at odds with Iran and its proxies – and directed at two nations that have often been supportive of the Islamic Republic. But his argument for such a deal was both politically clever and deeply rooted in the Just War Tradition.
The Political Gambit: Snatching Peace from the Jaws of Neocon ‘Forever Wars’
First, Trump has appeased every hawkish pressure group that called for escalation by telling them nearly every day for the last several months that his mission was to make sure “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.” By riding that line hard all the way to the finish line of this week’s peace agreement, Trump has put himself in a better position than any president before him to force the hand of the pro-war crowd and bend their own rhetoric toward peace.
“Your horror at the possibility of nuclear war with Iran is legitimate,” his argument goes. “Let’s apply that thinking to ourselves – and to the whole world.”
The real cleverness of Trump’s maneuver this week is in its simplicity. The kind of simplicity that comes from grounding your convictions in the first principles written on every human heart by our Creator. When you speak from that grounding, you speak with authority, and I believe that listeners all around the world will be able to tell Trump is speaking the truth about nuclear weapons – not just giving voice to the bloodless, arbitrary, merely strategic abstractions of man-made ideology.
Just War Theory: Trump Finds Himself Walking on Holy Ground
As I argued in my own policy white paper making the case for nuclear disarmament, the first principle at play here is the same one contained in the Just War tradition curated over the centuries by the best minds in the Catholic Church: that the direct and intentional taking of innocent human life is intrinsically evil. And as Pope Leo XIV has articulated several times since his election, some modern weapons – especially nukes – are so inherently noxious to innocent human life that their use cannot be justified.
“Despite being reduced from their Cold War-era peak, nuclear weapon arsenals still have such sheer destructive power as to threaten humanity’s future while also violating basic principles of military ethics,” my white paper states in the introduction.
“The tradition of military ethics known as Just War Theory holds that uses of military force 1) must discriminate between military personnel and civilians and 2) must not cause so much harm as to outweigh whatever good the use of military force is intended to achieve,” the paper explains:
Nearly all conceivable uses of nuclear weapons fail to meet either of these Just War requirements. To remedy this situation, strategic nuclear doctrine needs to be radically changed and the sizes of nuclear stockpiles need to be dramatically reduced. Nuclear nonproliferation also needs to be given top priority. The United States has an important role to play in all these efforts and can benefit from their success.
Trump’s brief remarks this week suggest that he may be willing to take on that important role.
And his straight-talking presentation of the case for it could be just the thing needed to see it through.
There’s power in the fact that he bases the case for a denuclearization deal in the same flatly undeniable principle he expressed earlier in the same week when discussing Israel’s way of conducting war – an inhumane approach that two-and-a-half years of bloodshed in Gaza has already convinced people throughout the world to reject almost universally.
“Too many people are being killed,” he simply said, citing Israel’s offensive in Lebanon – which Israeli officials have explicitly said they are modeling on the Gaza genocide. “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you.”
These are innocent civilians. Thoughtlessness of innocent human life in war is unjust. That’s the whole case – and Trump is making it at a time and in such a way (by referencing Israeli aggression after two and a half years of mounting international outrage against it) as to make that case optimally convincing.
The application of the traditional principle is also clearest when it comes to nukes. As Trump put it at the G7 summit, “We ought to make a denuclearization deal” because “we don’t need to be able to blow up the whole world 300 times over.”
There is something morally intolerable about maintaining arsenals whose strategic value depends on a credible willingness to annihilate civilian populations.
It’s as simple as that. “It’s terrible, really,” Trump said. “If we could do a denuke deal, I’d love it.”
The Legacy of a Peacemaker
Trump has said on numerous occasions that what he wants above all else is to leave a legacy of peacemaking. Frankly, his peace deal with Iran is only a small step in that direction – especially given the tragic role he has played in the deadly and wildly unpopular Iran conflict.
But imagine if, thanks to Trump, we become the generation that lives to see a global nuclear pact.
Yes, Trump would get the legacy of a peacemaker, alright. But more importantly, every civilian living under nuclear threat, every soldier who dreads the day he may be faced with an order that violates his deepest convictions, and every future generation in every nation would benefit from that legacy. And the benefit would be a deeper and more just assurance of a world that honors their inviolable dignity.
Republished with Permission from the Jason Jones Show substack.
