National Review Online
Friday, February 01, 2019
The Trump administration today suspended the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, giving formal notice that the
U.S. intends to withdraw in six months. It’s the right policy to counter
increasing Russian cheating and to ensure that the U.S. can adapt to the
changing strategic environment in the Pacific. Besides that, it’s a policy this
magazine has advocated for decades.
In the March 4, 1988, issue of National Review, David J. Trachtenberg suggested that the treaty,
long opposed by NR’s editors, was an “Invitation to Cheat.” Without “safeguards”
to ensure Soviet compliance with the treaty’s ban on intermediate-range nuclear
and conventional missiles, he predicted, “the INF treaty will be an exercise in
self-deception” for the U.S. and NATO. We would comply with its terms, the
Russians would flout them, and arms-control advocates would insist that the
only path forward was to redouble our commitment to the treaty.
For a time, both the U.S. and Russia followed the INF,
which was struck by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 and ended the
tense buildup of Pershing II and SS-20 missiles in Europe and Russia. But
recent history has since vindicated Trachtenberg’s prediction. Russia has
built, tested, and deployed intermediate missiles in brazen violation of the
treaty beginning at least in 2014, and probably before.
In theory, the INF forbids both the U.S. and Russia to
develop ground-based conventional and nuclear missiles of a certain range. In
practice, the treaty constrains only one of its signatories — the United States
— to our profound disadvantage. Evidence began to mount in 2008 that Russia was
developing missiles that violated the INF, but the Obama administration
remained silent, pushing ahead with the misbegotten New START arms-control
treaty and waiting until 2011 to mention its concerns to Congress. In 2014, the
administration declared for the first time that Russia was in violation of the
treaty for testing a ground-launched missile. No matter: In 2017, Russia
deployed that missile, the SSC-8, near Volgograd.
Obama’s embrace of more arms control and his gentle
efforts to coax the Russians back into compliance failed. Trump’s break with
that unsuccessful approach is welcome and, by the way, is a step that he almost
certainly wouldn’t take were he secretly working to advance Russian national
interests.
Russian misbehavior aside, this ostensibly bilateral
treaty is obsolete in a multilateral world, giving a strategic advantage to
other adversaries. China has aggressively expanded its intermediate-range
missiles to assert its influence in the Pacific while the U.S. is constrained
by the INF, threatening both our posture in that theater and the security of
our Pacific allies.
Advocates of the deal insist that leaving the treaty
removes any chance that Russia would return to compliance, but Moscow has had
ample opportunity to do that already. They insist, too, that leaving confers no
advantages. But there are significant costs to remaining in the treaty, which
complicates the testing of American missile-defense systems and sends a signal
that the U.S. is not serious about enforcing the terms of its agreements with
other countries.
The INF set up an enforcement regime that was reasonably
effective in the first decades of its signing. It no longer works, and it
hamstrings us in other key domains. Barack Obama forgot Reagan’s doctrine that
“to be serious about arms control is to be serious about compliance.” Trump
remembered it, and not a moment too soon.
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