President Trump will withdraw the United States from a landmark nuclear arms control pact due to ongoing Russian violations, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Friday.
“When an agreement is so brazenly disregarded and our security is so openly threatened, we must respond,” Pompeo told reporters. “Russia has jeopardized the United States’ security interests and we can no longer be restricted by the treaty while Russia shamelessly violates it.”
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The formal process of the U.S. withdrawal will begin Saturday. Pompeo put Russia on notice that the move was coming because of Russia’s deployment of land-based intermediate range cruise missiles that were banned by the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in 1987. The withdrawal process stipulated by the treaty takes six months.
The development of Russia’s weapons are part of a broader effort to “de-link European security from U.S. security” by raising the prospect of “limited nuclear war” on the continent, the civilian chief of the NATO alliance told the Washington Examiner earlier this week.
“So, these weapons, they can only reach Europe,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said during a Sunday interview. “The theory is that you can limit a war because you use weapons which are not aimed at or not capable of reaching the United States.”
“Our security is indivisible,” Stoltenberg added. “Any idea about any kind of limited nuclear war is dangerous because it reduces the threshold and it increases the likelihood of any potential use of nuclear weapons in the conflict.”
[Opinion: NATO’s secretary general is wrong: The US must do more to counter Russian tactical nuclear weapons]
Russia has denied breaching the deal in recent years, including through a series of meetings that took place with U.S. and European officials since the NATO Foreign Minister Summit in December.
“The logic of all US approaches, which were voiced yesterday, was only that: ‘You are violating the treaty, we are not violating it, therefore you, Russia, are obliged to do what we are demanding from you and we won’t have to do anything,'” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in January. “Of course, this position won’t get you far. It’s clear that this is the demonstration of a course towards breaking all agreements on strategic stability.”
Pompeo brushed off Russia’s denials again Friday. “There’s no mistaking that the Russians have chosen to not comply with this treaty,” he said.
The disagreement over the INF Treaty dates back to former President Barack Obama’s administration, when the United States first went public with complaints of Russian violations. That culminated in Pompeo giving the Kremlin a last warning, in December, that the U.S. would begin the withdrawal process if Russia did not return to compliance over the ensuing 60 days.
