Comment
U.S. President Donald Trump intends to pull out the INF arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia that is there since 1987. The decision heralds the beginning of a new cold war era, but for different reasons than you might think.
Although allies are too often alienated by it, there is a foreign policy under U.S. President Trump that follows a clear pattern and is consequent. The pattern is the withdrawal of international treaties, contracts, agreements, multilateral or bilateral, which in all cases upsets its partners. It is consequent because it really happens. Trump ended NAFTA, pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, he trashed the nuclear deal with Iran, and to be honest, the World Trade Organization took its damage as well. Now, the next treaty that soon becomes history is the INF treaty, which more or less symbolically secures peace in Europe. On 21st of October 2018, Trump announced, surprisingly, as usual, the withdrawal of the U.S. from the INF treaty, for the reason that Russia violates its regulations.
The decision, of course, provoked an outcry in Moscow and European capitals. For good reasons: it is harming peace and stability in Europe. NATO allies in Europe face a new potential arms race on the continent. Eventually, anti-Americanism will help nationalist movements on their rise.
For Russia, however, the perception must be different. The Russian foreign policy follows a clear pattern as well: this is, in contrast to the U.S., the existence inside international treaties, contracts, and agreements, while consistently breaching its rules and purposes and going away with it. Moscow’s certain violation of the INF treaty is just one of many examples. This time, however, Russia loses with the INF treaty the shielding framework of an international agreement. For the moment, this helps president Putin’s domestic approval rates. For the long term, however, Putin cannot count anymore on the international frameworks, in which he has been maneuvering successfully for so long.
The abolition of international frameworks is dangerous for the world order. This is why the U.S. foreign policy consists of a third pillar: re-negotiation. The re-negotiation of annulled agreements to new terms is risky, dangerous, questionable, but in case of the INF treaty it is not completely invalid for three reasons:
First, the INF treaty has been there, to prevent an outbreak of war in Europe and an import step toward the dissolution of the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev signed the treaty in 1987, he needed to do so otherwise he would have lost the Soviet Union even quicker. The true intention of the INF treaty was void right after the end of the cold war when the Soviet Union as NATO’s adversary ceased to exist.
Second, the INF treaty’s relevance is growing in the spring of the new cold war. With an ineffective mechanism to prevent breaches and an outmoded terminology that does not reflect technologies of today, there is enough reason to renew the treaty. We should not forget the political impetus for the rapprochement that a renewed treaty could have similar to the achievements of the New START treaty in 2010.
Third, the most important point the new constellation of the global order. The U.S., as much as Russia is facing new security challenges in a growing multipolar world in which bipolar arms reduction treaties have disruptive effects on the national security agenda. Both, Russia and the U.S. are looking towards China as a third global military power. This is probably why president Trump’s security adviser, John Bolton, went to Moscow, to explain the U.S. strategy of the INF withdrawal. The inclusion of China in a new treaty would certainly be welcomed in Moscow.