The Washington Times featured a typical piece of MAGA cheerleading. The United States is poised to withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. The article is cheering the decision and dismissing the threat from Russia to start a new arms race: “bring it on.” This is absurd to wish for.
First, let’s review the reasons behind the INF and how it fits into nuclear strategy. The USSR developed an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM), the SS-20, capable of delivering multiple nuclear warheads with a range of approximately 4,000-5,000 km, depending on warhead, using solid rocket fuel, from a road mobile launcher. This meant that all of Western Europe was under threat from a strategic nuclear weapon (1+ megaton warheads), whose preparation and deployment could not be detected early. The United States in response deployed its own mobile IRBMs to Western Europe, the Pershing II and the Ground Launched Cruise Missile (a variant of the Naval Tomahawk cruise missile), with 5-150 kiloton warheads. Both systems were theater level tactical nuclear weapons and not directly analogous to the SS-20, but were what the US had. IRBMs were not covered under the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT I and SALT II) which had a range of 5,500 km as the definition of an ICBM. The INF eliminated the IRBM as a class of weapons.
There are several reasons why the INF Treaty is obsolete. First, from Russia’s perspective, the United States’ withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in order to develop ballistic missile defense (BMD) technologies to handle the threat of rogue regimes has increased Russian anxieties over the viability of its own nuclear deterrent. The argument is bogus, because the size of Russia’s ICBM arsenal could easily overwhelm any deployed BDM system, and Russia wants tools with which to coerce Western Europe and to counter China’s IRBM arsenal. Second, China was not a party to the INF, and has a large arsenal of IRBMs that threaten both US and Russian interests in Asia. IRBMs are a core piece of China’s security architecture given its geography. China is a continental power bordered by two peer rivals, Russia and India, and is economically dependent on Pacific trade that must transit choke points defined by two rings of archipelagoes. Therefore, deterring rivals by land and extending hegemony to the archipelagoes are crucial to Chinese security. Furthermore, it reinforces the imperial ambitions of China as it emerges from its “century of humiliation” and remakes the world order. It permits them to extend nuclear terror (or more kindly, a nuclear umbrella for allies) over the near abroad and is an important tool for denying US access to the Western Pacific.
Russia has already violated the INF with the testing of a new class of ground launched cruise missile. The INF did not ban research and development, but did ban testing and deployment. Thus, the United States is now threatening to formally withdraw from the agreement and a prelude to developing new capability, the most likely candidate is the reintroduction of an updated GLCM.
This is how we got here. This is a development that should not be cheered. As numerous analysts have pointed out (e.g., here, here, and here), it raises the risk of miscalculation and nuclear war in Europe, encourages proliferation, and wastes resources better spent elsewhere. As long as nuclear weapons remain in the hands of normal states and not crazy states (Dror, Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem), they are weapons designed never to be used. Thus, an arsenal larger than a certain size is absurd. The essence of nuclear strategy is having a reliable second strike capability. The idea is that an adversary is deterred from attempting to eliminate your nuclear weapons with a first strike, because enough will survive to guarantee destruction of the adversary in a counter-strike, hence the so-called nuclear triad: (1) ICBMs, (2) aircraft delivered bombs, and (3) submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).
Arms control agreements, contrary to popular belief, are not tools towards the abolition of nuclear weapons, because they don’t eliminate the scientists and engineers necessary to have a nuclear weapons program. They are tools nuclear powers use to prevent wasteful arms races. IRBMs were never necessary to maintain a strategic deterrent, but they were destabilizing to European politics–for example, the fear of a limited first strike and abandonment by allies. The elimination of IRBMs stabilized European politics.
Realist international relations theory says that due to the lack of a supranational authority to enforce agreements, states will abide by agreements as long as the benefits to remaining in the agreement outweigh the costs of abiding by the agreement. It also predicts that cheating on the agreement is the best of all, which is why agreements need vigorous enforcement mechanisms and also why states tolerate spying rather than defining it as an act of war. Spying reduces the amount of private information and therefore increases the knowledge of adversary intentions and capabilities. It lowers the likelihood of miscalculation and war.
Some scholars in the realist tradition think that nuclear proliferation is a good thing, because it will reduce the likelihood of war. For example, the father of structural realism–the idea that it is the structure of the interstate system itself that causes war–Kenneth Waltz speculated that more nuclear weapons may be better for stability. And John Mearsheimer, who is the father of offensive realism theory, and whose The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a masterful analysis of the cause of World War I–essentially, German unification in 1862 destabilized the balance of power in Europe established after the Napoleonic wars, has advocated nuclear weapons as a means of securing the independence of small states.
On balance, however, the stability offered by proliferation is only evident when (a) all parties have a viable second-strike capability and (b) are normal states. Viable second strike capabilities do not spring forth fully formed from the head of Zeus. During the early phase, the system is not stable. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in part caused by the lack of a viable Soviet second-strike capability. At the time, the USSR was struggling with its SLBM and ICBM programs and they thought that the size of the US Air Force meant that its bombers may not reach their targets in the continental US. Therefore, they undertook a plan to covertly deploy IRBMs in Cuba that could threaten the US eastern seaboard. The US responded with a blockade of Cuba (called a quarantine for reasons of international law), that almost resulted in the use of a nuclear weapon by a Soviet submarine (surprisingly like the scenario of Crimson Tide). Under conditions of bounded rationality is not at all clear that small states won’t always behave according to rational choice theory, hence normally. It is always possible that a state would behave according to normal political considerations. For example, the apocalyptic scenarios as a consequence of Iranian nuclear breakout are predicated on Shia millenarianism driving the decision to use nuclear weapons against rational calculations.
But L. Todd Wood doesn’t get this sophisticated. He merely thinks that paleo-realist sources of power (cf., Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations) are determinative of the victor in an arms race. US economic might well mean that Russia loses the arms race, which is a perversion of the theory that the Cold War was won because of Reagan’s military build up. That victory in the Cold War was mainly a historical accident. It hinged on Gorbachev. Furthermore, L. Todd Wood, ignores how states other than the US and Russia will respond to a nuclear IRBM deployment in Europe. Trump has already denigrated NATO Article 5 and it is entirely possible that you may see a European arms race to deal with the threat. The likely scenario is a rejuvenation of the French nuclear arsenal to extend a European nuclear umbrella over Germany, but there is no guaranteeing that Germany might not decide to develop its own nuclear capability. Either response, actually reduces US relative power over the postmodern multi ethnic empire in the making that is the European Union. The tricky thing about European rearmament is that for the most part, weapons systems are not purely defensive and security dilemmas develop with potential for conflict.
The MAGA crowd may be tired of the United States underwriting European security, when the real conflict right now is with China, but the shift must be carefully managed and may not, in the long term, be in US interests. Dependency gives the US influence in European affairs it wouldn’t otherwise have.
I happen to think that on balance withdrawal is justified viz. the contest with China, because deployment of a new conventional IRBM capability is needed to deter a forceful reunification of Taiwan with the PRC, which would be a geostrategic disaster for US hegemony in the Pacific, and to deter a preemptive attack by China on US bases in the region. The development is to be lamented not cheered. Lamented because it is precisely a tragedy of great power politics.