Comment by strogonoff

When top officials and other generally influential people transparently behave like self-centered sociopaths or psychopaths, it is difficult to see them too worried about survival and prosperity of citizens. Themselves those people are not going to have trouble surviving a nuclear winter (a thought experiment is needed to determine whether they will even suffer from it all that much on a personal level, compared to ordinary people many of whom would just perish).

Especially with MAD, but with modern technology in general, caring about survival and prosperity of your own citizens means caring about peaceful coexistence with other countries.

In this context, a degree of nationalism is not bad and may in fact be important (if another country is being hostile and you do nothing, that is not a peaceful coexistence); it’s isolationism that is actually worrying: having every mature participant depend on each other is a great way to make them usually not want to eliminate each other.