As Donald Trump prepares to manufacture a national emergency over his inability to get everything he wants from Congress on the domestic front, his negotiation skills—or lack thereof—are about to generate an even bigger crisis, one that represents a genuine emergency for the whole planet. Under the leadership of Under Secretary of State Andrea Thompson, the United States has been negotiating with Russia about concerns a Russian weapon is in violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Unable to reach an agreement, the Trump White House has another solution—it’s pulling out of the treaty.
As Reuters reports, U.S. forces will no longer comply with the 21-year-old agreement that was meant to limit the deployment of weapons designed to menace a region without following the ballistic arc of a longer-range weapon. The INF covers all ground-based nuclear weapons with a range between 1,000 km (621 miles) and 5,500 km (3418 miles). The original point of concern in the negotiations is Russia’s recently deployed SSC-8 missile, a cruise-missile-style low-flying weapon that’s an extended version of a missile with a range of less than 300 miles. U.S. and NATO analysts have put the range of the SSC-8 solidly in the middle of that covered by the INF. Russia claims otherwise.
There are sound reasons to believe that: Russia is lying; deploying the SSC-8 is absolutely a violation of the treaty; and Russia has been wanting out of the treaty for more than a decade. That last thing is particularly easy to believe—because it’s what Russian media has been saying since at least 2005.
The problem is that, by taking its ball and going home, the U.S. is giving Russia exactly what it wants. The elimination of the INF Treaty is equivalent to giving permission for Russia to deploy an unlimited number of fast, low-flying missiles that can strike anywhere in Europe with little warning. On the flip side, elimination of the INF gains the U.S. … nothing. Not unless U.S. allies in Europe are keen on having more U.S. nuclear missiles deployed on their soil. And they’re not.
Negotiating a reasonable accommodation on the INF was certainly going to be difficult. But since allowing it to fall generates a completely lopsided outcome, one that increases Vladimir Putin’s leverage at a time when Trump has already done everything possible to weakening the NATO alliance—including considering pulling out of NATO—ending the INF would seem to generate both a sharp increase in global insecurity and yet another blow to U.S. influence in Europe.
But somehow, the State Department is treating this as a win—because Thompson seems positively itching to get at building new weapons.
Thompson is indicating that the United States will stop adhering to the treaty as early as this weekend. As she told Reuters, “We are then also able to conduct the R&D and work on the systems we haven’t been able to use because we’ve been in compliance with the treaty. Come February 2, this weekend, if DoD (the U.S. Department of Defense) chooses to do that, they’ll be able to do that.”
The odds that the Department of Defense will not begin making more hemispheric weapons seem about as good at this point as the odds of a successful outcome to these negotiations.
Yes, Russia was already cheating on the agreement. And yes, it’s been looking for an excuse to get out. Successfully negotiating an outcome that limited Russia’s ability to extend its threat to Europe and kept a lid on the situation going forward was always going to be difficult. But simply walking away from the treaty and letting Russia do as it will isn’t the answer—it’s the problem the treaty was created to solve 21 years ago—by that noted soft-on-Russia guy, Ronald Reagan.
Unfortunately, the destruction of the INF Treaty seems all but sure. And it’s unlikely to be the last nuclear weapon treaty destroyed in the next two years.