America's nuclear umbrella is fraying, and Washington has no plan for what replaces it

For eight decades, U.S. allies in Europe and Asia have forsworn their own nuclear arsenals in exchange for Washington's promise to answer any nuclear attack on their behalf. In a sweeping essay for Foreign Affairs, Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press argue that this arrangement — audacious even during the Cold War, when the stakes were existential for the United States itself — has quietly lost its logic in a world of regional flashpoints rather than superpower survival. Allies from Warsaw to Seoul increasingly ask whether an American president would truly risk Chicago to save Tallinn or Taipei, a doubt sharpened by the unpredictability of the current administration and by Russia's and China's expanding arsenals. The authors are not nuclear abolitionists pleading for restraint; they are realists warning that a credibility gap left unaddressed will not stay theoretical. If Washington keeps offering reassurance without adapting the strategy behind it, they write, more capitals will conclude that only their own bomb can guarantee their survival — beginning a proliferation cascade the postwar order was built to prevent. Their prescription is not withdrawal but redesign: clearer regional consultation, forward-deployed capabilities allies can see and trust, and honesty about what the umbrella can and cannot promise in a multipolar world.