By Tim Morrison
Friday, March 06, 2020
President Trump recently declared that he wants to
include China in the next nuclear-arms-control treaty, an objective consistent
with his National Security Strategy (NSS) and his Pentagon’s National Defense
Strategy (NDS). While this seems like a policy goal that arms-control and U.S.
nuclear-disarmament advocates would embrace wholeheartedly, they didn’t. Why?
When the White House released the NSS in December 2017,
it marked the first time since the Cold War that the United States recognized
that the era of strategic competition with a peer rival has returned, with the
Russian Federation largely displaced by the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The NSS stated: “For decades, U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support
for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order
would liberalize the Chinese Communist Party. Contrary to our hopes, China
expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others.” A new Cold
War? Not quite. A return to great-power rivalry? Yes, and one that had actually
been underway for some time.
The NDS, released in January 2018, shortly after the NSS,
was also a revolutionary document. It announced that the era of the post–Cold
War “peace dividend,” in which the United States and the West would have to
worry only about small terrorist movements, was over. It stated, “The central
challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the
National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers,” which includes
the PRC.
The strategies were not criticized when issued. In fact,
a bipartisan commission of Republican and Democratic “graybeards” charged by
Congress to evaluate the strategy widely praised its central premise: the
long-term security competition of powers like the PRC.
The NSS recognized the many tools available to the United
States to ensure the security of the American people — and that arms control
could be one. At the same time, the administration has made clear in words and
deeds that arms control would not be considered sacrosanct.
For example, when it came to the Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action (JCPOA) with the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the Russian Federation, President Trump spent
years trying to find deals that better served American security, and when
improvements couldn’t be made or even basic compliance enforced, he withdrew.
At the same time, President Trump directed his
administration to develop options to bring the PRC into nuclear-arms control
because, as a long-term strategic competitor, its nuclear forces could not be
allowed to continue to grow without limits.
One U.S. nuclear-disarmament advocate wrote in The New Republic that, “while China’s
ever-advancing capabilities are a cause for concern, proposals to
‘trilateralize’ nuclear arms control are nothing more than a poison pill” and
“will be a wild goose chase.” But how can this be?
In a lengthy, unclassified statement in May 2019 at
Hudson Institute, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) director Lieutenant General
Robert Ashley described the activities of the key nuclear-weapons actors in the
world, including the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China.
It is unusual for a senior leader of the intelligence
community to give such public remarks about nuclear-weapons programs of
adversaries. But his remarks were part of a campaign to educate the American
people, on behalf of the entire U.S. intelligence community, about why the
president felt it was important to begin to focus on China’s nuclear arms.
General Ashley stated, “Over the next decade, China will
likely at least double the size of its nuclear stockpile in the course of
implementing the most rapid expansion and diversification of its nuclear
arsenal in China’s history.” He also noted that “China will soon field its own
version of a nuclear triad” and its “military will be fully transformed into a
first-tier force by 2050.”
A first-tier force? Double the size of its nuclear
stockpile? Based on these statements, not only should the PRC be included in
nuclear-arms control but, in fact, it must be. And controlling the growth of
this nuclear stockpile should be a primary goal of all who claim to be
concerned by proliferation of nuclear weapons.
However, instead of praising the president’s move, the
nuclear-disarmament clerisy — a very small, but very loud and well-funded D.C.
interest group — is focused on the extension of the New START Treaty and is
fearful that talk of including the PRC is somehow an effort to kill it. But New
START doesn’t expire until February 2021, and focus on it shouldn’t come at the
expense of controlling growing nuclear stockpiles of the United States’ key
strategic competitor. If and when President Trump makes a decision to extend
the treaty, it can be done quickly and with no new negotiation.
The president is entirely right to try to bring the PRC
into nuclear-arms control. It is already a party to the Biological Weapons
Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention and a signatory to the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. So, while it’s not opposed to arms control, the
PRC has enjoyed a free ride on nuclear-arms control for too long. The United
States and its allies cannot afford to wait until China goes from approximately
400 warheads to 800 warheads or 1,500 warheads before bringing the Chinese to
the table.
Arms control is supposed to be about limiting threats to
the United States and allies, not simply extending agreements that ignore major
new threats. By standing in opposition to bringing China to the table, the U.S.
nuclear-disarmament community runs the risk of undermining its core belief that
arms control is a central pillar of national security. Because if the
nuclear-disarmament community believes it isn’t a top national-security
priority to bring the PRC into nuclear-arms control, maybe nuclear-arms control
isn’t a national-security priority for it after all.
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