The third lesson that can be learned from this case is the importance of decision-
makers exercising security dilemma sensibility. Understanding the role that one’s
own actions might have played in provoking fear on the part of an adversary and
designing policies that promote reassurance are crucial to the building of trust
between adversaries. Carasales appreciated the importance of this and he argued that
one of the most important lessons of the Argentine–Brazilian nuclear rapprochement
was that:
You have to be sincere since no moves in this field can have the slightest
chance of success if they are taken with the ulterior motive of cheating the
other party, or guiding it into a false sense of security. As a first step, a country
should open itself to the other party on the understanding that this policy will
be reciprocated.^69Even if nuclear decision-makers are persuaded that the threat posed by another state
might be fear-based rather than the consequence of ambition – always a hard call^70
- operationalising security dilemma sensibility into policies that signal a state’s
peaceful/defensive intentions in the way that Argentina and Brazil did will be
very difficult to achieve if this entails accepting a level of vulnerability that could
lead to unacceptable costs if trust proves misplaced. I argued above that vulner-
ability is an integral property of trust, but trust is easier to promote when, as in
the Argentine–Brazilian case, there is a margin of safety such that states are not
dangerously exposed if their acts of trust are exploited by their adversaries.^71 The
quandary here is that unless leaders are prepared to make their countries (and
themselves) vulnerable in situations where they perceive little or no margin of
safety (the latter is always open to interpretation, and attitudes to it will vary over
time), how can they communicate that they can be trusted in situations of high
distrust and suspicion?
The Argentine–Brazilian nuclear rapprochement took place under favourable
conditions for trust-building, but it still stands as an important rebuttal of the
offensive realist logic which predicts enduring security competition between major
regional powers, and a struggle for relative nuclear advantage. Perhaps these
dynamics have been only temporarily suppressed in South America, and future
leaders of Brazil and Argentina will preside over a competition for regional hege-
mony that will have a nuclear dimension. From his ‘defensive realist’ perspec-
tive Waltz would argue that a future nuclearisation of the Argentine–Brazilian
relationship will not, contra Mearsheimer, negatively impact on their security.
However, there are good reasons for thinking that this case shows that there can be
an alternative to both Mearsheimer’s and Waltz’s nuclear worlds in which trust has
replaced the fear that leads states to seek security in the bomb. The challenge that
this successful experiment in nuclear trust-building leaves us with is how to develop
policies that apply the positive lessons from this case (the importance of policy-
makers exercising security dilemma sensibility, the significance of democratisation,
and the agency of leaders and officials) to those hard cases of nuclear distrust where
262 Beyond Waltz’s nuclear world