DEI Nuclearism Fakhry Al-Serdawi June 24, 2025 Current discourses on the question of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East are not new. Western establishments almost always fail to paint their efforts to stop nuclear proliferation as political; the spectacle of high-ranking diplomacy, negotiations, sanctions, Orwellian lying, espionage, cyberattacks, assassinations, airstrikes, all-out war and regime change, or what the Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, calls “the dirty work,” all this makes what is supposed to be a technical matter look like a clash of civilizations in a game of technological monopoly. It is under such circumstances that the Western anti-imperialist Left can't help but provide a concomitant apolitical cultural-liberal critique of the Western management of the international non-proliferation regime. Western response to the first Chinese nuclear test in 1964 shares a lot with today. While president Lyndon B. Johnson, unlike Trump, accepted the fact that China became a nuclear state, stating that  such developments does not alter significantly the balance of power the East Asia, he still had a condescending moralistic attitude against what he considered back then as a rouge state, by stating that the Chinese nuclear weapons program is a “tragedy of the Chinese people,” stating that the economic resources which could have been used to improve their wellbeing have been used to produce this program that would only increase their insecurity. This attitude of putting oneself as the authoritative judge on who gets to possess or not to possess nuclear weapons (like when liberal elites talk about how Ukraine should never had given up its weapons) comes from the phenomenon of Nuclear Orientalism. Hugh Gusterson talked about such a phenomenon against  the backdrop  of the Western official and media response to the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan in 1998 and to Iraqi proliferation efforts years earlier. Gusterson avoided a vulgar postcolonial and critical-race analysis of Western alarmism towards the dangers of nuclear weapons in Third World countries. Instead, he focused on how the behavior of Western elites is based mainly on projecting the problematic nature of nuclear policy at home onto newer nuclear states. Under such pretense, there is no scientific way to measure the aggregate threat of nuclear war and nuclear accidents because the “nuclear problem” becomes “their” problem, not “ours.” All problems related to nuclear weapons in First World countries are exported exclusively to the Third World. The problem of a high nuclear defense budget that continues while the material situation of the local population deteriorates is also a problem in the West. The instability of deterrence is also a problem in the West. The political distrust of the hawkish elites having control over the nuclear codes is also a problem in the West. The Western Anti-imperialist Left does not overcome this discourse, but assists in perpetuating it from a different position, as it considers nuclear proliferation as an emancipatory potential for the smaller states and “oppressed” peoples. Black Communist Claudia Jones visited China in 1964, and during an interview there she declared  that “The news that China successfully exploded its first atomic bomb has panicked imperialists and reactionaries from around the world, but it has heartened the world’s people, especially the anti-imperialist peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America.” This is, of course, “reverse” nuclear orientalism, where the peoples of the East become vindicated in their pursuit of nuclear power against the “irredeemable” Western oppressor. A number of “Non-Aligned” states used this kind of mental compartmentalization when they signed  the African Union’s Cairo Declaration of 1964, urging all states to refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons, while weeks later, many of these states seemed to express implicit or explicit approval of the Chinese testing. Both First World and Third World statists consider themselves to be a “good nuclear self” against a “bad nuclear other.” Robert Jay Lifton describes  this nuclear nationalism and nuclear identitarianism when he claims that those who embrace the bomb for themselves are aware that these weapons are instruments for evil. Yet they suppress this awareness “while justifying the acquisition of such power with the claim that it will be used for noble purposes.” The final outcome of this is that “only one's enemies, rather than the weapons themselves, become the repositories of evil.” Lifton describes this mentality, curiously, in a context of “trickle-down nuclearism.” International nuclearism was indeed the most important predecessor to neoliberalism and at the same time was the last remaining acceptable  form of Keynesianism in a bargain between the forces of deindustrialization and the military industrial complex, making the power for mass destruction the only viable competence of what used to be the state of the New Deal, the state of mass construction. The adoption of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty  in 1968, promoted both by the United States and the Soviet Union, created a precursor to the international neoliberal class, which is the global nuclear class. The treaty divides nations into the majority of non-nuclear weapon states, and those who are mentioned in Article 9, the nuclear weapons states that have “manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January 1967.” Since China had made its first nuclear test three years prior, this was an implicit invitation for it to join the nuclear club. On the other hand, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea would use realpolitik to force themselves into that global class. Attempts from anti-nuclear activists and humanitarian diplomats to resist against this nuclear hegemonic order spanned from calls to apply Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for “good faith” negotiations in the near future; to the complete nuclear disarmament of Nuclear Weapon States; to calls for a Middle East zone free from nuclear weapons since the 1970s, which has been vetoed by the US  several times, especially after the failure of the Middle East peace process; to the actual adoption  of the antithesis of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2017, the egalitarian Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, of which Article 4 for calls for complete nuclear disarmament. However, the obsolete nature of the international disarmament machinery has led the professional managerial class to adopt social justice performative approaches  to disarmament, in hopes that Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion would break the impasse. Even in 2023, a Biden appointee at the National Nuclear Security Administration called  for the “queering of nuclear weapons.” If DEI proliferation provides legitimacy for Third World countries to nuclearize themselves, DEI disarmament legitimizes First World countries' indefinite possession of nuclear weapons by acting as if they are doing something moralistic about it. The controversy of “wokefying the nukes” by the previous Democratic administration, condemned by many conservative commentators in America, is a reminder of the connection between nuclearism and postmodernism. As a conservative anti-capitalist, George Kennan was a vehement opponent  of nuclear weapons. Kennan was the father of the containment policy against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, who aimed for containment not to be a goal in itself, but to have an end: the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War, thus reintroducing it as a “third force” that would allow America to focus on its internal issues. When that failed, Kennan became a neo-isolationist critical of the professional managerial class of the Cold War, and subsequently, a critic of its reliance on nuclear weapons and their modernization during the Carter and Reagan eras, a reliance, he thought, that was a part of the historical technological advancements that led to the weakening of American Society at home. Not only was postmodernism an unhealthy reaction to the Second World War and its horrors, but it was also a coping mechanism with the atomic bomb itself and its capacity to freeze modernity. Birzeit University social science professor, Khaled Odetallah critiques the implicit nuclearism of Western postmodernist thinkers like Michel Foucault and his ilk, saying  that “Postmodernist philosophies, with their tremendous deconstructive power, are merely the other side of the weapons of mass destruction wielded by colonial powers. It doesn’t hurt a philosopher, whether French, German, or American, to consider postmodernism and the end of certainty and truth, as long as he philosophizes under the shadow of a state that protects him, with its fighter jets and warships, plundering the world to provide him with a retirement pension at the end of his service.” The deterrence of nuclear weapons freezes history, even the future history of their own overcoming and disarmament. Nuclear Weapon States have not adopted “good faith” measures to renounce their nuclear club membership. The global nuclear order rests on three main pillars: non-proliferation, peaceful use of nuclear energy, and disarmament. Nuclear Weapon States want mainly to be vigilant of one pillar, “non-proliferation,” without guaranteeing the other pillar, the “disarmament” of already existing weapons. This, in its turn, makes non-proliferation unstable and impossible from a realist point of view. While some might be right in arguing that only “idealists” call for disarmament, the Catch 22 here is that calling for non-proliferation without disarmament is also the work of political idealism. In the nuclear world, the international community has to choose between two packages: disarmament and non-proliferation or non-disarmament and proliferation. Bush, Obama, and Trump all used different methods to solve the issue of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East without addressing the elephant in the room: the deep political imbalance of power in the region caused by the Israeli nuclear monopoly. Ironically, anti-imperialists sympathetic with Iran have always argued that the “oppressed” should be allowed nuclear power, and this is the exact kind of identitarian mentality that prompted the Israeli leadership to build their nuclear program in the 1960s. Right now, we are in a closed loop: anti-imperialists will keep saying that the regional imbalance in the Middle East legitimizes proliferation, and the Western elites will keep insinuating the smug and condescending suggestion that even the thought of proliferation legitimizes this imbalance.