Arms Control for Dummies Trump is right to nix a treaty that Putin has violated for a decade.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/arms-control-for-dummies-1540250764
Donald Trump says the U.S. plans to withdraw from the 1987 INF nuclear arms-control treaty that everyone agrees Russia has been violating for a decade. Yet somehow this is said to be reckless behavior by—Donald Trump? Welcome to the high church of arms control in which treaties are sacrosanct no matter the violation.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty bans ground-fired ballistic and cruise missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers and is an artifact of the late Cold War. Ronald Reagan and NATO deployed mid-range missiles in Europe in the early 1980s to counter Soviet deployments. After years of tense negotiation, Mikhail Gorbachev finally agreed to the modest INF accord on U.S. terms that traded U.S. missiles for Russia’s. This was hailed as a diplomatic triumph.
Yet when the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union collapsed over the next few years, nuclear arms control faded in importance. Which is the key point. Arms control didn’t make the world safer; the fall of the Soviet Union did that. Arms control tends to work when it is between countries that get along, while it fails with adversaries that can’t be trusted.
Enter Vladimir Putin, who has been developing a new medium-range cruise missile since the mid-2000s. The U.S. believes Moscow first tested the new missile in 2008, but the Obama Administration hid that intelligence from the Senate when it debated and ratified the New Start treaty with Mr. Putin in 2010.
The Obama Administration first went public with this news in 2014, and the State Department has noted Russian noncompliance every year. Moscow started deploying its new missiles in late 2016. This is in addition to a new ballistic missile Russia has tested that may be INF compliant only because it can travel slightly farther than 5,500 kilometers.
The question has been whether the U.S. was ever going to do something about it. The diplomatic impulse is to keep quiet about violations and work behind the scenes to prod an adversary to comply, but that clearly hasn’t worked. Mr. Putin wants the new missiles as a show of Russian power and as leverage over Europe in a conflict. Why would he give them up if the U.S. and Europe look the other way?
As he so often does, Mr. Trump has now broken this reverie by showing there will be costs to noncompliance. By pulling out of the accord, the U.S. would be free to develop a missile of comparable range to counter the Soviet threat. This would restore an element of mutual deterrence to the European theater. It also shows Mr. Putin that he can’t use a violation of one treaty to prod Mr. Trump to sign another, which was the hope the Russian expressed this summer at the fiasco summit in Helsinki.
Withdrawal also recognizes the emerging reality of other global nuclear threats. China isn’t a party to INF and has been developing its own medium-range missiles that threaten U.S. naval deployments and Pacific bases. The U.S. shouldn’t tie its hands against China in order to abide by a 30-year-old treaty that only the U.S. is honoring.
You’d think the arms controllers in particular would understand that doing nothing about violations undermines the rationale for new arms agreements. One reason the Obama Administration finally went public about Russia’s INF violations was to show the Senate that it would take potential violations of the Iran nuclear deal seriously. By withdrawing from INF, Mr. Trump is sending a similar signal with more fortitude to Iran and North Korea.
Yet the immediate response to Mr. Trump’s decision has been to blame him for daring to acknowledge nuclear reality. “The world doesn’t need a new arms race that would benefit no one and on the contrary would bring even more instability,” said a statement from the European Commission. But the instability is caused by Mr. Putin, and a new “arms race” won’t stop simply because the West chooses not to compete.
At least the Brits showed sterner stuff, with Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson noting that “it is Russia that is in breach and it is Russia that needs to get its house in order.”
Senate Democrats are also criticizing Mr. Trump, though these are the same worthies who have spent two years arguing that the U.S. President is a secret Putin agent. Once again, Mr. Trump appears to be adopting a tougher policy in response to Russian aggression than Barack Obama ever did.
Comments are closed.
