Tom McTague and Peter Nicholas review Trump’s foreign policy record, and at one point they make a very peculiar claim:

Those close to Trump and those who had interacted with him—officials, aides, diplomats—described another impulse: an apparently genuine desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Trump, many of them told us, does not care about Iranian aspirations for Middle East hegemony, nor the philosophy of its regime (in the same way, we were told, that he does not care about Russia’s or China’s aspirations, only each regime’s willingness to trade). But he does fear Tehran’s getting the bomb. “He was obsessed about nuclear weapons and getting rid of them,” Fiona Hill, Trump’s adviser on European and Russian affairs until July 2019, told us.

This may be what the reporters were told, but it doesn’t make any sense to say that Trump desires the elimination of nuclear weapons. Everything he has done since becoming president has been to wreck the arms control agreements that exist to constrain the number and deployment of these weapons, and his foreign policy has been defined by the effort to blow up the nonproliferation deal negotiated by the previous administration. His decision to renege on the nuclear deal with Iran was a direct attack on a successful nonproliferation agreement that blocked every path to an Iranian nuclear weapon. He has repeatedly mused about pursuing a massive nuclear build-up to undo all of the work of arms controllers for the last fifty years, as he did in a meeting in 2017:

President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest-ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.

Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.

This hardly sounds like someone who seeks the abolition of nuclear weapons. Whatever the reason for it, it sounds as if he wants the opposite.

If preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was his main concern, he would have kept the U.S. in the JCPOA and done nothing to jeopardize the agreement. Instead, he has relentlessly sought to destroy one of the best nonproliferation agreements ever negotiated. So I don’t believe for a minute that he is obsessed with getting rid of nuclear weapons. Even his mishandling of North Korea negotiations confirms that he is more concerned with the public relations side of that problem than he is with reducing or capping North Korea’s arsenal.

The sections in the Atlantic article on the nuclear deal and arms control with Russia don’t line up at all with what we know about the administration’s policies. Trump does not act like someone obsessed with getting rid of nuclear weapons. He acts like someone who wants to knock down all of barriers that currently limit the number and type of deployed nuclear weapons. It is credulous in the extreme to claim that he seems like a “nuclear-zero guy” when he is doing everything possible to detonate the last remnants of arms control. It is not an accident that he has filled his administration with hard-liners that want to get rid of arms control, because he seems entirely in agreement with their goal.

The farcical negotiations connected with the renewal of New START are a good example of what I mean. If the president had a far-reaching goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, he would have seized on the chance to extend the treaty years ago and then built on that foundation. Instead, he and his officials have dragged their feet and run out the clock with the poorly-concealed intention of killing the treaty. Killing New START clearly doesn’t move the world towards a future free of nuclear weapons, and it very likely means the start of a new and very expensive arms race.

The authors explain the contradiction between Trump’s record and his supposed desire by claiming it is overridden by his desire to dominate, but the simpler explanation is that Trump’s real intentions are reflected in what he does and not what he sometimes says he wants. It may be that Trump has said that he wants good relations with Russia, but he has done almost everything he can to make sure those relations remain poor. Arms control is one area where he could have pursued cooperation with Russia without controversy, and he would have even received praise for doing the responsible thing, but this is one area where he insisted on sticking to a hard-line position. For all intents and purposes, Trump acts like someone who wants a new arms race, and he has done all that he can to make that happen.

The article tries to square the circle by giving Trump undue credit for wanting the right things but going after them in the wrong way:

This gets to the heart of Trumpism as a foreign policy. The president appears to have had genuine bipartisan goals of reducing the risk of nuclear weapons, and identified strategic flaws—whether on Iran, multilateralism, overextension, or bipartisan naïveté about China. But in trying to address these issues, he focused solely on using unilateral strength, and instead exacerbated some problems.

As far as arms control and nonproliferation are concerned, this conclusion doesn’t hold up. He didn’t share “genuine bipartisan goals of reducing the risk of nuclear weapons.” He deliberately tore up a working nonproliferation agreement, quit an advantageous arms control treaty when he didn’t have to, and refused to extend another one that was working perfectly. He brought the U.S. closer to nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula than it had ever been before. These are not the actions of someone who wants to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons, so let’s not credit him with good intentions when he has been operating in such obvious bad faith.