The Collapse of Global Arms Control

by Jason Sibert

Early this month Russia renounced its membership in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), considered a pillar of European stability. The treaty, the Russian Foreign Ministry wrote in a report, “has become history for Russia once and for all.” North Atlantic Treaty Alliance countries quickly followed suit, suspending their treaty obligations.

The CFE represents just one arms control agreement to have been thrown onto the garbage heap of history in recent years. New START, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CNTBT), the Vienna document, and the Open Skies Treaty are all arms control treaties that have been hampered, suspended, or discarded as tensions have ratcheted between Russia and its adversaries, the United States and NATO.

These treaties were, for a time, successful because they helped ensure peace and reduced the chances of a full-scale war between NATO and Russia, both in its Soviet and post-Soviet forms.

Arms control agreements limit each country’s military activity and set up monitoring mechanisms to ensure compliance with the accords. Past agreements set limits to Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals and capped the size of active military forces in Europe. These agreements helped to minimize misunderstandings, prevent a further arms race, and build hard-earned trust between military rivals.

The arms control treaties were the results of decades of diplomatic efforts to stabilize the Euro-Atlantic world. As arms control treaties have become increasingly frayed, the norms they established have been torn.  Russia’s behavior has been key to the suspension of norms, as it withdrew from the New START treaty and de-ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty. Russia said it is seeking parity with the U.S., who has yet to ratify the treaty (CNTBT). But growing voices within Russia have called for Moscow to resume nuclear arms testing, something no country other than North Korea has done since the 1990s.

The Joe Biden administration sought to keep arms control talks on a separate track from the diplomatic breakdown in Russia-U.S. relations to keep the geopolitical tensions under control, and Russian officials have warned that arms control talks will be impossible while the US continues to support Ukraine.  In the years after the Cold War, these landmark treaties remained out of the public eye. In 2002, President George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the landmark Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which sought to restrain arms races by limiting missile defenses. He claimed the treaty to be unnecessary, even as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin described the move as a “mistake.”

“From that point on, I think Russia no longer saw the United States as a partner,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a former National Security Council staffer, who now works at the Federation of American Scientists, in a report. “Putin’s worst instincts were fanned and fed.”

In 2019, President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the INF Treaty after the US found Russia to be in violation of its treaty commitments. The treaty banned ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of 500 to 5,000 kilometers and led to the elimination of an entire category of nuclear weapons, said Hammer. Some arms control experts fear this generation of politicians don’t fear nuclear annihilation. 

Across the board, the three largest nuclear powers–the U.S., Russia and China–are upgrading their arsenals. China is in the process of rapidly building nukes, and it will likely double its nuclear arsenal to more than 1,000 warheads by the end of the decade.

There have been some recent developments that have sparked a modicum of optimism among arms control experts. On Nov. 6, Chinese and American officials met to discuss arms control issues, the first meeting of its kind since the Obama administration. While it is unclear whether the talks led to any tangible results, even a rare sit-down was welcomed as a positive sign.  

If the history of the first Cold War is any indicator, one side will have to establish defense dominance before significant arms control deals can be struck.  Diplomatic channels must find a way to cool geopolitical tensions before there are huge defense buildups on both sides of the world’s divide.