By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Is the INF Treaty so important that the Russians should
be allowed to cheat on it without consequence?
That’s the implication of the criticisms of President
Donald Trump for saying that he’s pulling out of the Cold War-era arms-control
agreement. Mikhail Gorbachev deemed Trump’s stated intention “unacceptable” and
“very irresponsible,” although it isn’t the U.S. that has been flagrantly
violating the treaty for years.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in
1987, was a central achievement of the Reagan-Gorbachev diplomacy of the late
1980s. The Soviets had deployed intermediate-range SS-20 missiles that could
hit NATO countries from bases in the Soviet Union. The U.S. countered by
deploying its own intermediate-range missiles in Europe. At the same time,
President Ronald Reagan proposed the “zero option” to eliminate such missiles
from the arsenals of both countries. As he sought to save the doomed Soviet system,
Gorbachev agreed.
The Russians have recently made obvious their contempt
for Gorbachev’s handiwork. The State Department has determined since 2014 that
Russia is in violation of the treaty, via the 9M729 ground-launched cruise
missile. Tests of the noncompliant missile go back to 2008, and the Obama
administration first told Congress of its concerns in 2011.
Supporters of the treaty say we should just pressure the
Russians to comply rather than pull out. But when confronted with their
cheating, the Russians simply deny it. Meetings of the Special Verification
Commission, the treaty’s mechanism for addressing compliance issues, have
achieved nothing.
The Kremlin has remained unmoved, even though we have
made it clear that we have them nailed. We have provided Russia the names of
the companies involved in developing the missile and the coordinates of the
locations of tests.
If Moscow cared to come into compliance with the treaty,
it had ample opportunity, and warning. Legislation has expressed the sense of
Congress that Russia’s actions have “defeated the object and purpose of the INF
Treaty.” Secretary of Defense James Mattis has called the Russian cheating
“untenable.”
The Russians have persisted in it for the simple reason
that it is in their interest. The former head of the Russian General Staff has
commented that intermediate-range missiles would provide Moscow “national
security assurance” — by threatening Poland, Romania and the Baltics, the
missiles would “cool the heads of these states’ leaders.”
One thing that the U.S. and Russians can agree on is that
it’s senseless that they are the only two countries in the world that are
notionally forbidden from possessing this category of weapon. “Nowadays,” a
Russian defense official complained in 2014, “almost 30 countries have such
missiles in their arsenals.”
China in particular is outdoing itself. The head of U.S.
Pacific Command, Adm. Harry Harris, told Congress last year that the Chinese
military “controls the largest and most diverse missile force in the world,
with an inventory of more than 2,000 ballistic and cruise missiles. This fact
is significant because the U.S. has no comparable capability due to our
adherence to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia.”
According to Harris, 95 percent of the Chinese missiles “would violate the INF
if China was a signatory.”
Given Russian cheating, the INF treaty as a practical
matter only prohibits the U.S. from
having such missiles. What sense is there in that? Arms controllers often fall
back on the argument that U.S. self-restraint has a symbolic effect,
discouraging other countries from developing weapons by the force of our
example, but this is manifestly untrue. Despite our efforts to minimize the
role of nuclear weapons in international affairs, the 2018 Nuclear Posture
Review notes that “since 2010, no potential adversary has reduced either the
role of nuclear weapons in its national security strategy or the number of
nuclear weapons it fields.”
There’s no reason to limit our capabilities and
flexibility for the sake of an INF Treaty that doesn’t even constrain its other
signatory.
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