There are two big reasons President Trump is pulling the U.S. out of the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, agreement as of August.
The first is solid U.S. intelligence that Russia has been violating the agreement for years, with the deployment of its SSC-8 ground-launched, mobile cruise missile system. “We really have no choice,” said Trump, arguing that you can’t have an arms control agreement that only one side is upholding.
Russia complains that America’s Aegis Ashore missile defense sites, operational in Romania and under construction in Poland, also violate the treaty, a charge the U.S. vigorously refuted in a State Department fact sheet last year.
The second reason is that the Cold War-era treaty applied only to the U.S. and Russia, not China.
In the bipolar days of the Cold War, the U.S. might have continued to work within the agreement to address the accusations of violations from both sides. But in today’s world, missiles abound and bilateral agreements that ignore China and other countries are fast becoming an anachronism.
“Perhaps we can negotiate a different agreement, adding China and others,” Trump said in his State of the Union address, “or perhaps we can’t, in which case we will outspend and out-innovate all others by far.”
The arms race is already on. A recent Defense Intelligence Agency report concluded that China now leads the world in the production and deployment of medium- and intermediate-range precision strike systems, in large part because the U.S. and Russia have been constrained by the INF agreement.
That quantitative, if not qualitative, advantage could be a factor if the U.S. were to be dragged into war with China over the defense of Taiwan.
Trump mused this month he would like to “get everybody in a very big and beautiful room and do a new treaty that would be much better,” adding, “but you have to have everybody adhere to it.”
Multilateral treaties are even more difficult to negotiate than bilateral ones, and if the U.S. can’t depend on Russia to abide by a two-party treaty, adding other countries will not make Moscow more trustworthy. China has no interest in limiting its military power as it seeks to rival the United States, and other potential signatories such as India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea have their own interests.
None of which bodes well for the last remaining major arms agreement with Russia, the New START strategic forces treaty, which expires in two years.
For now, the agreement makes sense because the United States and Russia are the only two countries with big enough arsenals of nuclear weapons to be covered by the 10-year treaty, which entered into force in February 2011.
Both the U.S. and Russia are in compliance with New START, which limits the number of fielded strategic nuclear weapons and warheads, and can be extended another five years upon agreement from both sides.
The Trump administration is not saying whether it wants to scrap the treaty, but before he became Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton made clear his view in a 2017 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington.
“The next step in the bilateral relationship with Russia is for this administration to abrogate the New START treaty so that we have a nuclear deterrent that is equal to our needs to prevent future conflict,” Bolton said. “That would be a signal to Vladimir Putin.”
The State Department point person on arms control told reporters at a breakfast last month that the U.S. is in no hurry to address the status of New START.
“We’ve got until 2021, so it’s not a treaty that needs to be renewed now,” said Andrea Thompson, under secretary for arms control and international security. “It actually is a fairly simple treaty. It’s fairly easy to renew if and when that decision is made.”
If the U.S. embarks on a new nuclear arms race, it will be expensive. The latest Congressional Budget Office estimate is that the 10-year cost of the current plan to upgrade or replace all three legs of America’s nuclear triad — bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles — has jumped 23 percent in the last two years, from $400 billion to $493 billion. The 30-year estimate is now $1.2 trillion.
Arms control advocates lament the passing of the age of treaties for another reason: They provide a framework for talks and continued engagement.
“One by one, we’re losing ways of vehicles of dialogue with the Russians on nuclear issues,” said former Defense Secretary William Perry, who now runs a project aimed at ending nuclear threats.
“Our treaties have been a very important vehicle in the past. They have provisions for discussing the issues including discussion of disagreements about compliance,” Perry said. “When we withdraw from treaties, we are losing this important vehicle of dialogue.”
Because the New START treaty doesn’t expire until February 2021, its fate could rest on who occupies the White House.
