What Is at Stake Now. Mikhail Gorbachev
doctrines of NATO and the Warsaw Pact (which still existed then) were being revised. The plan was to strengthen their political components at the expense of military ones. The member states of NATO and the Warsaw Pact signed an agreement to cut their troop numbers.
Some of my critics reproach me to this day for not having insisted on a legally binding stipulation that would have prevented NATO from expanding into Eastern Europe in the future. But such a demand would have been absurd, even preposterous, because the Warsaw Pact still existed at the time. We would have been accused of destroying it with our own hands.
We achieved all that we could under the circumstances at the time. Russia was fully entitled to demand that the other side act in accordance not just with the letter, but also the spirit of these agreements and obligations. But the mutual trust that emerged with the end of the Cold War was severely shaken a few years later by NATO’s decision to expand to the east. Russia had no option but to draw its own conclusions from that.
What Is at Stake
The INF Treaty, which was of historic importance to world peace, is itself now history – and its demise is the fault of the USA. The same is true of the refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty for the limitation of missile defence systems.
If the INF Treaty is terminated by either of its two parties, the country in question must provide a notification stating the ‘extraordinary events the notifying Party regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests’. The country that takes such a serious step must explain to the world community why it has decided to destroy what has been built to date.
What happened? What threat has prompted the United States – whose military spending is many times higher than that of any competing power – to take this step?
Did the USA inform the UN Security Council, which was created for the purpose of resolving conflicts that threaten peace? It did not. Instead, Russia is being accused of alleged treaty violations that even experts have struggled to understand. This all has the tone of an ultimatum.
The argument put forward by the USA is that other countries – particularly China, Iran and North Korea – also have intermediate-range missiles. But this argument is not convincing. In fact, the United States and Russia together still control more than 90 per cent of the world’s existing nuclear weapons. In this sense, our two countries do remain ‘superpowers’. The nuclear arsenals of other countries are ten to fifteen times smaller.
If the process of reducing nuclear weapons were to continue, other countries would at some point have to join in, including the United Kingdom, France and China. These three states have repeatedly confirmed their willingness to do so. But how can they be expected to show restraint when one of the superpowers wants to lift the existing limitations and expand its nuclear arsenal?
One has to conclude that the USA has decided to withdraw from the treaty not for the reasons it claims, but for a very different purpose: the pursuit of military superiority and a burning desire to cast off any restrictions on rearmament. ‘We have more money than anybody else by far’, President Trump has said regarding the arsenal of the USA, ‘and we’ll build it up until they come to their senses.’ Build up the arsenal – why, to what end? To impose the country’s will on the world?
This is an illusion. In today’s world, it is not possible for a single country to achieve a hegemony. This has recently become clear. Even Washington’s most loyal allies are no longer prepared to stand to attention before their big brother.
The current destructive trend can only lead to destabilization and a new arms race. The global situation is becoming ever more chaotic and unpredictable. This, in turn, endangers the security of all states, including that of the USA.
The US president said his country was hoping to conclude a ‘new treaty that would be much better’. Let us not be deceived by this, or by the assertion of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the USA has ‘no plans to immediately start deploying new missiles’. This just means the USA does not yet possess such missiles.
Europeans have not been convinced by these assurances either. They are alarmed, and understandably so. Everyone remembers the early 1980s, when hundreds of missiles were stationed on our continent, Soviet SS-20s on one side, American Pershing and cruise missiles on the other. And everyone knows that a new arms race could be even more dangerous.
I welcomed the European attempts to save the INF Treaty. The European Union called upon the United States to think carefully about what withdrawing from the treaty would mean for its own security, the security of its allies and that of the entire world. German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who warned that terminating the INF Treaty would have ‘numerous negative consequences’, travelled to Moscow and Washington to mediate. Unfortunately, this was to no avail. It is therefore all the more crucial to continue these efforts, even now that the USA has withdrawn from the treaty and thus practically ensured its demise.
Too much is now at stake.
Opponents of the treaty claim that the world has changed substantially, so the agreement is simply outdated. The former is certainly true, the latter is completely false.
Despite all the changes in the world, we cannot do away with the agreements that laid the foundation for global security after the end of the Cold War. Instead, we must put our entire energy into achieving the most important goal: the total elimination of all nuclear weapons.
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