Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Trump Threatens Withdrawal from INF Treaty
Back in 1987, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to get rid of all the short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in their respective arsenals under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [INF]. Missiles that could travel anywhere from 310-3,240 miles and their launchers became illegal, save a handful for static display. By May 1991, almost 2,700 missiles had been eliminated. On-site inspections followed. President Trump has said he wants to withdraw from it. This journal thinks it is another attempt by him to take credit for putting out a fire he himself started.
The INF treaty was an important political agreement in that it proved to Europeans that the US and USSR were serious about nuclear arms reduction. Both sides of the Iron Curtain benefited from it. It was a net positive in global security.
Getting rid of such weapons, of course, was not a panacea. One doesn't need land-based missiles to fly 2,000 miles when submarine-launched missiles with that range are harder to detect. And a tactical weapon that travels a few miles if launched from the right spot can be an effective replacement as well. Eliminating a class of weapons just means that the strategists have to come up with different weapons to do the same job. The hope is that there is some kind of trust and a revelation of mutual self-interest that makes the desire to use such weapons diminish along with the number of weapons themselves.
Mr. Trump is not the first leader who announced the treaty had outlived its usefulness. That honor goes to Mr. Putin who said that in February 2007. Russia threatened to pull out over US deployment of its Ground-Based Midcourse Defense missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. President Bush put the system in Poland and Romania instead, and the Russians stayed in the INF.
The US has accused Russia of violations as its pretext for withdrawal, and National Security Advisor John Bolton is in Moscow right now discussing it, and other issues. The game is painfully obvious. The American president announces a dangerous withdrawal from a decades old treaty, and the world panics. Then, he has talks with the affected parties, demanding some minor shift no one could possibly care about and to which they accede. The agreement is saved, and Mr. Trump takes a victory lap.
The right notes that the INF agreement binds the US and Russia but not China. Therefore, they feel a need to get out from under the terms of the INF deal so they can address Chinese aggression. One wants to buy them a good atlas. The main targets in China are along its hundreds of miles of coastline, where submarine-launched missiles are easier to use. Bombers also have their place, given the US has strategic bombers in South Korea and Japan, both unsinkable bases of operation. If the Chinese are stockpiling intermediate range weapons, they hardly constitute a threat to the US, and if the Japanese and South Koreans don't care, neither should the US.
No, Mr. Trump will not tear up the treaty. He will get a few irrelevant changes and then boast to his ill-informed followers that he has made America safer. It’s a tedious performance.
© Copyright 2018 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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