How Trump Could Ensure His Legacy as a Peacemaker

DAVID GROSS, DANIEL HOLZ, JUAN MANUEL SANTOS, and BRIAN SCHMIDT

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SANTA BARBARA – US President Donald Trump’s recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska was the first encounter between the leaders of the world’s two largest nuclear powers since 2021. Now, if Trump truly wants to put America first and establish a legacy as a peacemaker, he should put nuclear-arms control high on his agenda.

Trump himself has already hinted at what needs to be done. One month into his second term, he sought to persuade Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to scale back their nuclear spending. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons,” he argued. “We already have so many.” Yet in July, he approved a sharp increase in the US Defense Department’s funding for its nuclear forces; and just a few weeks later, in response to Russian nuclear saber-rattling, he announced that he was sending US nuclear submarines to the “appropriate regions.”

Trump is right to fear a new arms race. As he himself noted, building more warheads will not secure America’s future. Of course, conflicts can always reignite, and arsenals can always be rebuilt. But we cannot bomb our way to peace. We need to chart a course that does not stake humanity’s survival on the knife’s edge of chance. Whoever can do that will have secured his place in history.

There are pragmatic, achievable steps that Trump can take right now to begin building such a legacy. In July, dozens of Nobel laureates and nuclear experts convened in Chicago to identify measures to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict while preserving national security. The resulting declaration, endorsed by 129 Nobel laureates, calls for immediate action to strengthen safeguards, prevent miscalculation, and halt the slide toward a new arms race. On the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the declaration was presented to the Pope along with a symbolic gift of pencil leads crafted from graphite bricks used in the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction. However, implementing our recommendations requires not just American involvement, but American leadership.