Right idea, wrong approach

The Nuclear Pact may not suit American interests anymore, but simply walking away will not improve the United States’ competitive position.

THE administration of President Donald Trump has a habit of addressing real problems in club-footed and counterproductive ways. If Trump’s recent remarks are to be believed, the White House is about to give the United States another self-inflicted wound by announcing its intention to terminate a key arms control treaty with Russia.

Trump is right that this Cold Warera pact, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, no longer suits American interests. But he’s wrong if he thinks that simply walking away will improve the United States’ competitive position.

The INF Treaty, signed in 1987, prohibits the United States and Russia from producing or deploying ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500km and 5,500km. The treaty represented a radical arms control breakthrough because it was the first time that the superpowers agreed to eliminate an entire class of nuclear delivery systems, and it symbolised the dramatic reduction of East-West tensions that ended the Cold War two years later.

Yet the treaty has been living on borrowed time for years due to developments in Europe and Asia.

In Europe, the problem is simple: Russia is cheating. Moscow has been developing and testing a groundlaunched cruise missile known as the SSC-8 that violates the treaty. By early 2017, the Kremlin had reportedly deployed the SSC-8 in two separate locations. These deployments have been accompanied by a buildup of short-range Russian nuclear forces (not prohibited by the INF Treaty) and other military capabilities in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania, two Eastern European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato).

One does not have to be a firebreathing unilateralist to agree that the United States gains no advantage from being the only country that observes an arms control treaty – and that it sets a terrible precedent to allow violations of nuclear weapons agreements to go unpunished.

Numerous US officials have observed that the current situation is untenable and the Pentagon has been conducting research and development (permitted under the treaty) of an intermediate-range, ground-launched nuclear-capable cruise missile.

The treaty has also come under pressure in Asia. China, not a party to the accord, has developed the world’s most expansive arsenal of ground-launched cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, and would use them against US allies, military bases and aircraft carriers in the event of war.

Should such a war break out, the United States might find an arsenal of conventionally armed, INF-range missiles quite useful in sinking Chinese ships and targeting Chinese military capabilities on the main- land, particularly because US aircraft carriers won’t get close enough to China’s coastline to be effective. Yet Washington is handcuffed by a treaty that effectively binds it and no one else.

The question, then, is not whether the United States should begin preparing to extricate itself from the accord or find other ways of penalising Moscow for violating it. The question is how to do it. And here, the Trump administration could take a page from the playbook that produced the treaty in the first place.

The road to the INF treaty began with the Soviet Union’s deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles that could target virtually all of Western Europe in the late 1970s. In response, the United States began developing Tomahawk cruise missiles and Pershing-II ballistic missiles that would be deployed in European countries and could, in the case of the Pershing-II, strike Soviet and Warsaw Pact targets in minutes.

The proposed deployment of these missiles was enormously controversial in Europe. So the administrations of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan worked laboriously to bring the allies along by pledging to first seek an arms control agreement that would reduce or even prohibit the missiles in question, and then to deploy the Tomahawks and Pershings only if negotiations failed.

Dubbed a “dual-track” approach, it was critical in holding Nato together, giving European governments the cover they needed to deploy US missiles on their soil, and thereby providing the alliance with the leverage it would use to negotiate the INF Treaty.

A modern-day rerun might have looked something like this. The United States would intensify research and development of INFcapable missiles while studying, in cooperation with key allies, how those missiles might be used and where they might be stationed in Europe and the Pacific.

Because it will take years for these capabilities to be ready for deployment, the administration would also make a diplomatic effort aimed at bringing Russia back into compliance with the INF Treaty and perhaps inducing China to join.

This diplomatic gambit would probably fail. The Chinese are too reliant on INF-range missiles to neutralise US power-projection capabilities, and the Russians deny that the SSC-8 violates the treaty despite all the evidence to the contrary.

But making the effort would let the administration credibly argue that it had exhausted all options for saving the accord, which would substantially lower the diplomatic costs of withdrawing from it and developing whatever capabilities the United States and its allies require.

To all appearances, the Trump administration has laid none of the diplomatic groundwork. Should it withdraw from the treaty, it will invite criticism that it, not Russia, is destroying a landmark arms-control agreement. It will alienate Nato allies who are fed up with Russian prevarication and provocation but do not wish to see Nato-Russia tensions escalate further unless there is no alternative. It will surely be hard pressed to find allies willing to host INF-capable US missiles.

There’s already been some European hand-wringing over the impending demise of a treaty that Nato has called “indispensable”, and even Republican senators such as Bob Corker of Tennessee have questioned whether the administration is moving too hastily. The tragedy of Trump’s policy is not that the problem is wrongly diagnosed, but that the solution causes a self-inflicted wound.

This is more than a pity. It is strategic folly. The United States has such a strong position over challengers such as Russia because it has dozens of allies that act as force multipliers for American power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin knows this and realises that he can only get the best of the United States if he can divide Washington from its friends. One can only imagine that he’s pleased right now because the Trump administration is doing this work for him.