Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Tuesday that the United States will suspend its obligations under the 30-year-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that eliminated short- and intermediate-range nuclear and conventional missiles from the U.S. and Soviet arsenals.
The INF was one of the signature agreements of the Reagan administration. It eliminated all nuclear and conventional missiles with a range of 310–3,420 miles. The treaty, together with the 1991 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that reduced the number of long-range missiles, marked a tremendous pullback from the nuclear precipice. Within three years of the INF’s ratification, nearly 2,700 missiles in the arsenals of the Soviet Union and United States had been disabled or destroyed. The treaty is the last Cold War agreement between Russia and the United States remaining in force.
In February, however, the Defense Department issued its quadrennial Nuclear Posture Review in which it catalogued alleged Russian violations, saying that the Kremlin’s “decision to violate the I.N.F. treaty and other commitments all clearly indicate that Russia has rebuffed repeated U.S. efforts to reduce the salience, role and number of nuclear weapons.”
In late October, in brief remarks at a campaign rally at the airport in Elko, Nevada, Donald Trump confirmed what had been hinted at in press reports and announced that the United States would pull out of the INF treaty. He blamed President Obama for not having pulled out or renegotiated it despite evidence of Russian violations since 2014.
In fact, the Obama administration had quietly confronted Russia over its prohibited testing of a ground-launched cruise missile and sought to bring it back into compliance. Until early this year, the Trump regime had done likewise. But in April, ultra-hawk John Bolton became Trump’s National Security Adviser. Bolton has long been a foe of the INF and most other arms-control treaties, having successfully pushed to get the United States to leave the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001.
And just days after Trump’s Elko speech, Bolton was in Moscow letting the Kremlin know that the Washington was on the verge of taking steps to withdraw from the treaty.
Pompeo made the policy official in a short speech to NATO Tuesday. The United States, he said, will opt out of the INF on the grounds that the Russian Federation has been violating the agreement for years and has refused to stop doing so despite repeated and patient efforts by Washington to get the Kremlin to stop:
Pompeo said [...] “We either bury our head in the sand or we take common sense action” over Russia’s contravention of the pact.
Accusing Russia of “cheating at its arms control obligations,” Pompeo said a six-month notice period for leaving the treaty would start in 60 days.
The Russians have their own complaints. Much has changed since the INF was negotiated in 1987. For instance, Moscow considers America’s armed drones a violation of the INF Treaty. More importantly, they see the U.S. deployment of Aegis Ashore missiles in Romania and, come 2020, in Poland as a big problem:
"There is a new problematic issue, which has caused, perhaps, our greatest alarm and which we have started to raise before the United States in the bilateral format in the context of the treaty. It relates to the ground-based deployment of universal Mk-41 launchers as part of Aegis Ashore systems being deployed in Europe allegedly for solving solely anti-missile tasks," the high-ranking Russian diplomat said.
"However, contrary to the treaty, the above-mentioned launchers allow for the combat use of Tomahawk medium-range cruise missiles and other strike armaments from the ground. We consider this as a direct and flagrant breach of the INF Treaty," Ryabkov stressed.
And that’s not all.
With Bolton still in Moscow, Igor Korotchenko, editor of the Russian magazine National Defense, tweeted, "Tomahawks with nuclear warheads could be loaded up at anti-missile sites in Romania and Poland as soon as the U.S. leaves INF Treaty." That, he said, could bring the world to the brink of nuclear war, as in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, with U.S. nuclear missiles deployed near Russia's borders:
Vladimir Frolov, a foreign policy analyst in Moscow, argues that the Kremlin has long undermined the treaty — but wanted the U.S. to be the one to rip it up.
"This is one of Vladimir Putin's big diplomatic achievements, which he was striving toward for almost all his years as the country's leader," Frolov wrote on the Russian news site Republic. "For Russia's military-industrial complex and security services, the INF Treaty was always like a bullfighter's red cape; it symbolized the country's defeat in the Cold War."
Bolton walked into a trap as Russia already has short- and medium-range missiles at its disposal, according to Frolov, while the U.S. still needs to develop such weapons and will face barriers in deploying them to Europe.
A key issue Pompeo and others have pointed out over the past few years is that the INF is bilateral and doesn’t stop other nations, most especially China, from developing and building as many short- and intermediate-range missiles as they wish.
If the United States does withdraw, which seems quite likely, the Russians will be free to step up building the 9M729 (also known as the R-500) cruise missile at the heart of the U.S. complaint but also the RS-26 intermediate-range missile. The United States currently does not yet have similar missiles with which to confront the Russians if they were to follow this path. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad at The New York Times reported in October:
The Pentagon has already been developing nuclear weapons to match, and counter, what the Chinese have deployed. But that effort would take years, so, in the interim, the United States is preparing to modify existing weapons, including its non-nuclear Tomahawk missiles, and is likely to deploy them first in Asia, according to officials who have been briefed on the issue. Those may be based in Japan, or perhaps in Guam, where the United States maintains a large base and would face little political opposition.
The U.S. territory of Guam, of course, is hardly going to launch political opposition. But Japan, South Korea, and some members of NATO definitely could be expected to do so. How successful they might be at stopping such a deployment is arguable.
What’s clear, however, is that a decision to withdraw rather than work toward the kind of treaty that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came to agreement on three decades ago will mean stepping back up to the nuclear cliff that their negotiations edged us away from. Difficult as it would be to negotiate, a new treaty that takes into account new technology, a pact that includes China and other nations, say Iran—one that makes the INF obsolete instead of merely abandoned—ought to be on the table. But neither Donald Trump nor Vladimir Putin are the kind of men to bring that about.