Politics & Power Quote by Alfonso G. Robles

Sovereignty is doing double duty here: it shields a state from being coerced into disarmament, and it shields its neighbors from being coerced out of it. Robles, a Mexican diplomat and chief architect of the Treaty of Tlatelolco, is laying out the legal and moral logic of Latin America’s nuclear-weapon-free zone with the calm firmness of someone who knows the real fight isn’t abstract principle but veto power.

The sentence is built like a trap for bullies. First clause: no one can be forced in. Second clause: no one gets to block others. That symmetry is the point. During the Cold War, “security” often meant great powers treating smaller states as chessboard squares. Robles flips the script: a region can opt into restraint as an affirmative act, and external pressure (or regional hardliners) can’t claim “strategic necessity” as a right to sabotage that choice. He’s also speaking to domestic skeptics who hear “nuclear-free” and think “defenseless.” His formulation insists the regime is not a surrender but an exercise of jurisdiction “within their own territories,” the phrase that turns disarmament into self-possession.

Subtext: nonproliferation works when it’s framed as freedom, not submission. The “total absence” language is deliberately absolute, because half-measures invite loopholes and, in diplomacy, loopholes become policy. Context gives it bite: after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Latin America had lived through what it means to host other people’s apocalypse. Robles is arguing for a third path - neither joining the arms race nor being frozen out of security decisions - by making abstention itself an un-blockable right.