How they see us: Shooting down Open Skies
America’s allies are aghast at President Donald Trump’s casual murder of yet another international pact, said Véronique Le Billon in Les Echos (France). Trump announced last week that he was pulling the U.S. out of the Open Skies Treaty, which allows 35 countries—including the U.S., Russia, and many European nations—to conduct unarmed observation flights over one another’s territory so they can check “military movements and stocks of armaments.” The idea is that the more rival powers know about each other, the lower the chance of war. Signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, the agreement helped build trust between Russia and the West in the post–Cold War era. But in recent years, U.S. officials have complained that Moscow blocks flights over key areas, including Kaliningrad, a heavily militarized Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania. The U.S., said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, will not remain a party to arms control agreements “that are actively being used not to support but rather to undermine international peace and security.” From Europe’s perspective, though, some flights are better than none, said Alexandra Brzozowski in Euractiv.com (Belgium). U.S. withdrawal “would end overflights of Russia by the remaining members, weakening European security at a time that Russian-backed separatists are holding parts of Ukraine and Georgia.”
Trump claims he’ll keep the U.S. in the treaty if Russia shapes up, said Julian Borger in The Guardian (U.K.), but the timing is suspicious. By starting the six-month notice period for withdrawal now, Trump ensures that even if he loses the November election, “the U.S. will have left the treaty before a Joe Biden administration takes office.” Most defense experts believe that Trump is making a big mistake. Pulling out of a treaty that is valued so highly by America’s allies “is a propaganda coup for Moscow,” said Kingston Reif of the U.S.-based Arms Control Association. Open Skies, he adds, “has been an important tool for responding to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.”
The timing is suspicious for a different reason, said Yuri Gavrilov in Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russia). In recent years, Russia began using a new, specially equipped reconnaissance aircraft for Open Skies flights. The Tu-214ON is equipped with digital aerial cameras, infrared and conventional video cameras, and side-scan radar all integrated together; most other countries’ Open Skies planes are fitted with little more than an old-fashioned film camera. Our plane is perfect for scanning U.S. military facilities in Alaska, where “the sky is covered with clouds for more than 300 days a year,” making surveillance from space difficult. Now that we can see what the Americans are up to in Alaska, they want to cancel our overflights. Of course, the Americans can still use their many satellites to spy on us, so they won’t miss Open Skies. Their European allies, though, have few spy satellites and depend on overflights for “documentary evidence that the movements of our troops in border areas are not a threat.” Trump doesn’t care that his actions “will do them more harm than good.”