Asia hedges against a US-led order it no longer trusts
Asia hedges against a US-led order it no longer trusts
WRITTEN BY DEBODIPTA NANDAN
9 July 2026
As the 11th Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference convened in New York from 27 April to 22 May 2026, the most consequential responses to the order it governs were taking shape elsewhere. The Iran war, waged in the name of that non-proliferation order, has reinforced a lesson for Asia’s major powers: the protection the US-led order extends to them is conditional, granted or withheld at Washington’s discretion.
That lesson runs through two different guarantees. For Japan and South Korea, it was the nuclear umbrella. Confronted with a non-proliferation regime applied by alignment rather than rule, they have been institutionalising nuclear latency — the capacity to build a weapon quickly without actually doing so — as deliberate policy. For China, the world’s largest oil importer, it was the security of sea lanes. Two decades of strategic petroleum stockpiling have kept China’s economy steady through a global oil shock. The latent bomb and the filled tank are two forms of the same hedge: each reduces reliance on protection that Washington alone decides whether to provide — or to disrupt.
A treaty enforced by alignment
When the US and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in February 2026, both governments justified the strikes as action to stop Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — enforcement, in effect, of the non-proliferation order anchored in the NPT. Tehran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Global oil supply fell by around eight million barrels per day in March, the largest disruption ever recorded.
The wider consequence should trouble the order’s managers most: its most capable members have quietly concluded it will not protect them and have started insuring against its failure.
The NPT rests on a 1968 distinction between states that already possessed nuclear weapons and those that did not. Jaswant Singh, then a senior adviser and later India’s foreign minister, called that formal division “nuclear apartheid” in 1998: a treaty that reserved the bomb for five states while preaching restraint to everyone else. Since then, a second, unwritten division has emerged: states aligned with Washington maintain nuclear arsenals outside the treaty or face only cautious diplomacy when they acquire one, while states outside that alignment face sanctions, isolation, and, in 2026, military strikes.
Israel, an undeclared nuclear power that has never signed the NPT, participated as a co-belligerent in strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. India tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and faced only brief penalties before Washington negotiated a civil nuclear agreement and, in 2008, secured a Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver — making India the only nuclear-armed state outside the NPT permitted to trade openly in nuclear material. North Korea sits outside US alignment and operates under heavy economic sanctions, yet it has never been attacked: it finished its weapons, and deterrence now protects it, while Iran stopped short and its facilities were bombed.
That hierarchy is no longer a quiet contradiction. In November 2025, a Foreign Affairs piece argued that the US should encourage Canada, Germany, and Japan to acquire nuclear weapons, framing this as “selective proliferation” that would strengthen the global order. The Carnegie Endowment and others have warned that it would only drive proliferation more widely. The significance for governments across Asia lies less in the debate than in its premise: that enforcement follows Washington’s preferences, not the treaty’s terms — an assumed discretion now stated openly.
One can take the threat of an Iranian bomb seriously and still recognise that the rules against it are applied unevenly, protecting allies under deterrence while striking adversaries. Many states have rejected this order outright: in 2017, 122 states, most from the Global South, adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in protest at a regime they argued shielded the arsenals of the powerful. Iran, which voted for the treaty’s adoption but never signed it, has long invoked its right to peaceful enrichment under Article IV of the NPT. Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing have reached the same conclusion by a different route. If the order’s protection follows alignment rather than rule, a state that cannot count on it must build its own hedge.
First hedge: nuclear latency in Japan and South Korea
For decades, Japan has held the practical capability to build a nuclear weapon within months of a decision to do so — the product of a 1987 US–Japan nuclear agreement that granted Tokyo advance consent to reprocess spent fuel. The result is concrete: Japan held roughly 44.4 tonnes of separated plutonium at the end of 2024, enough for several thousand warheads. That stockpile has become a source of bargaining power within its alliance with the US, a standing reminder that Tokyo could move quickly towards a bomb if it ever judged the alliance’s protection insufficient.
South Korea has moved further. At the Lee Jae-myung–Trump summit at APEC Gyeongju in October 2025, Washington agreed to support South Korea’s pursuit of civil uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing under the bilateral 123 Agreement, and approved the construction of nuclear-powered attack submarines, ending decades of US restrictions on Seoul’s fuel-cycle ambitions. President Lee has himself called open nuclear armament debates unrealistic, but the strategic substance is unambiguous: expanding South Korean enrichment and reprocessing effectively grants Seoul nuclear latency.
The precedent was already set: the 2021 AUKUS agreement gave Australia access to US naval nuclear propulsion. The South Korea agreement extends the same logic — selective accommodation for trusted allies — and turns what was once a quiet exception into formal policy. The war has put latency’s assumptions under scrutiny: one regional analysis observed that Iran’s threshold capability invited attack rather than deterring it, and asked whether Japan’s and South Korea’s programmes might one day draw similar attention from their adversaries. Alliance standing is what has separated the outcomes so far. For planners in Tokyo and Seoul, a war in which Washington bombed an adversary’s programme while widening fuel-cycle access for its allies confirmed that the hedge holds its value only inside the alliance.
None of this is open weaponisation. Japan and South Korea remain inside the NPT and are not building nuclear weapons; what they are building is a deliberate policy of latency, one Washington actively supports for trusted allies even as it denies the same capability to others. Latency is attractive precisely because it stops short of a declared bomb: it preserves the option while avoiding the sanctions, alliance rupture, and regional arms race that open weaponisation would invite.
Second hedge: China’s strategic stockpile
While Japan and South Korea are insuring against an unreliable nuclear guarantee, China is insuring against the same dependence in another domain — a US-managed maritime order it neither controls nor can trust to stay open. China holds the world’s largest strategic oil inventories: total onshore crude storage is estimated at roughly 1.3 billion barrels, equivalent to about four months of seaborne imports, with capacity intended to exceed two billion barrels by the end of 2026.
The supply mix has shifted alongside the storage build. The share of Chinese seaborne crude imports transiting the Strait of Hormuz fell from 51 per cent in 2025 to about 44 per cent in early 2026, driven by a sharp rise in purchases of Russian seaborne crude that bypass the strait. Once domestic production and the overland pipelines from Russia are counted, Hormuz-linked flows account for about one third of China’s total crude supply. Beijing has converted a chokepoint that was once an acute strategic vulnerability into a manageable cost — one it can absorb through an extended closure without rationing or policy capitulation.
The contrast with the rest of Asia is sharp. Japanese crude imports fell 33 per cent year-on-year in March 2026, South Korean imports 37 per cent, and India’s 17 per cent. None of those states held buffers comparable to China’s, or built diversification at a similar scale. The Iran war has stress-tested the assumption that energy security can be borrowed from a US-managed maritime order. Beijing began building this hedge in 2004, judging that entrusting its energy lifelines to US-policed sea lanes was too great a risk to carry indefinitely. The 2026 crisis has borne that judgment out sooner than expected.
Self-insurance in a selective order
The 11th NPT Review Conference ended without consensus for the third consecutive review cycle, due to deep divisions over disarmament, nuclear rhetoric in ongoing conflicts, and modernisation programmes. Yet the real shift is not in the rules but in how states hedge against the very order they sustain. In Tokyo and Seoul, nuclear latency is becoming policy with formal US consent. In Beijing, two decades of stockpiling now insulate a USD 19 trillion economy from the global oil crisis. In every other Asian capital, the question is whether the rest of the decade should be spent building or only watching.
Both responses predate the Iran war, which has done no more than confirm their value, and the confirmation cuts differently for each. For Japan and South Korea, it deepens a quiet dependence: their latency lasts only as long as Washington tolerates it, which leaves the alliance, not the treaty, as the real arbiter of their security. For China, it vindicates a bid for autonomy, a buffer thick enough to outlast a chokepoint closure without bending its foreign policy to whoever controls the strait. The wider consequence should trouble the order’s managers most: its most capable members have quietly concluded it will not protect them and have started insuring against its failure. From here, the likelier trajectory is slow erosion from within, hedge by hedge. Each new stockpile and each latent programme devalues the order’s guarantees and makes it easier for the next state to conclude that it too should provide for itself. The formal architecture may stand; what drains away is the weight anyone is willing to place on it.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent those of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Debodipta Nandan is an independent public policy professional working at the intersection of policy analysis and strategic communications. She writes on regulations, digital policy, and Asia-Pacific-related geopolitical issues. All views expressed are personal. Image credit: US Navy/Flickr.