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President Prabowo Subianto told the country's business leaders at Istana Negara on July 31 that his evenings now follow a grim liturgy. "Every evening, every night, we watch the news: escalation, escalation, escalation." He then named the sequence now organizing the Middle East: Iran is said to have the bomb, Saudi Arabia wants one, and if Riyadh acquires one, the Emirates, Qatar and Egypt will not stay behind.
On July 23, Washington and Riyadh signed what the United States Department of Energy called a peaceful nuclear co-operation agreement, opening the Saudi civilian nuclear program to US firms. The word doing the heaviest lifting there is "peaceful."
The President's anxiety is structurally correct. But it contains two very different propositions, and Indonesian diplomacy will be effective only if we stop conflating them. The first — that more nuclear states are inherently more dangerous — is contested, and the evidence is not on the alarmist side. The second — that ambiguity about who holds what, under what doctrine, is destabilizing — is not contested at all. It is the one we should be pressing.
