This Administration* Is Playing Russian Roulette for Idiots

Those of us who grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, those of us who were herded into the basement of our Catholic elementary school every afternoon for 13 days in October of 1962, those of us who remember being warned never to look directly at the blast because you'd hurt your eyes, as though you wouldn't already have been vaporized into a human shadow already, we all remember learning the words, "nuclear proliferation" from the evening news.

We remember something called the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty as something that seemed to unburden our parents of nameless terrors. (Looking back through time, we see it as the last great act in the presidency of John F. Kennedy.) Therefore, we know quite well the kind of idiot's Russian roulette this administration is playing. We lived our entire childhoods knowing that somebody, somewhere, was always spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger.

From the Washington Post:

The demise of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty raises fears of a new nuclear arms race, although U.S. officials discount the risk. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States is suspending participation in the agreement, starting a six-month countdown to a final U.S. withdrawal. That leaves a slim chance that Russia could end missile programs widely seen as a violation, salvaging the treaty. The United States accuses Moscow of violating the agreement since 2014.

“For years Russia has violated the terms of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty without remorse,” Pompeo said, adding that the United States has continued to meet its obligations while seeking to get Moscow to come into compliance. “When an agreement is so brazenly disregarded and our security is so threatened, we must respond,” he added.

(Can we pause here for a moment and remember that Mike Pompeo is a jumped-up Tea Party congressman from Kansas who is in the upper levels of the national executive only because he climbed aboard the Trump Train and was standing there when it was determined that Rex Tillerson needed to go? He has enabled all of the president*'s worst instincts on foreign policy, and this move is only the latest example. There is no "good" member of this Cabinet—only fools, grifters, and incompetents. It is quite striking in its uniformity in this regard.)

I'm not sure how giving Vladimir Putin everything he wants is supposed to hurt him, but I am not the Secretary of State. This is an odds-on decision to start another nuclear arms race in Europe, which can only hype up the ambitious Russian ganglord's dreams of a gangster-capitalist new USSR. The INF Treaty was one of the Reagan Administration's shining accomplishments, and one of the first indications that Mikhail Gorbachev was a real reformer.

It was the first arms-control agreement that required a reduction in nuclear weapons rather than simply freezing the number of them in place. It brought Europe out from under a dark shadow. (These were the days in which nuclear war was again thought to be feasible, if not imminent.) It allowed people in Europe to breathe a little easier. For all his faults, Reagan made the INF Treaty a landmark in nuclear diplomacy, and it led directly to President George H.W. Bush's START treaty which cut in half the nuclear arsenals of both countries. Whereupon, of course, a short time later, there was no Soviet Union any more. You want my blogger's guess? The START agreement is due to expire in 2021. That will be the next target for this administration*'s reckless vandalism, if this president* were to be re-elected.

If your partner in a treaty cheats, you use the mechanisms of the treaty to hold the partner to account. You don't simply abandon the treaty—unless, of course, you want to start arming up in Europe all over again and (maybe) don't mind much if Russia does the same thing. Were I an ordinary Czech, say, I might wonder if two oligarchs weren't actually working together to dominate the European landscape. Several months ago, arms-control expert Joseph Cirincione made this very point when the idea of abandoning the INF agreement was first floated.

Maybe that is why no one wants them. No government in Europe or Asia is calling for these weapons or offering to host them. In the 1980s, deployments of nuclear weapons into Europe brought millions of Europeans into the streets in sustained protests. This time, the decision to pull down yet another security pillar in the trans-Atlantic alliance will deepen an already growing divide. “Of course, it will widen the rift between Europe and America,” former British diplomat and director of the European Leadership Network Adam Thomson told me this week, “European governments will look even more intensely at how they can provide for their own security.” It will not be as insulting to European leaders as Trump’s violation of the Iran anti-nuclear deal, he said. Europeans saw that agreement as the crowning achievement of European Union security diplomacy. But it will burn.

Cirincione further argued that the real vandal here wasn't Pompeo, but, rather, National Security Adviser John Bolton, a truly bloodthirsty crackpot who'd tear down the entire global political order if it made him feel like Julius Caesar. Cirincione wrote:

Perhaps that is why the decision to jettison the INF Treaty did not come from the State Department (which normally has jurisdiction over treaties), but out of Bolton’s National Security Council. Bolton has an obsession with tearing down the treaties, legal arrangements, and global governance councils created by Republicans and Democrats over the past 70 years. He views treaties as tools of the global Lilliputians to tie down the American Gulliver. Bolton insists that maintaining U.S. global dominance requires that the U.S. have a massive spectrum of conventional and nuclear options. “Violations give America the opportunity to discard obsolete, Cold War-era limits on its own arsenal, and upgrade its military capabilities to match its global responsibilities,“ Bolton wrote with former Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General John Yoo.

Scotching the INF Treaty is such a bad idea that you have to wonder whether or not the administration* is doing the Putin government another favor. If Putin lards up his western frontier with new generations of intermediate missiles, what will this administration*'s response? Bolton will want to arm up in equal measure. The president*'s truckling to the Russian president will collide with that. What does Bolton think the "global responsibilities" of the United States actually are? Can't anyone here play this game? Which way to the basement?

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Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.