Looking Back: 50 Years of Foreign Policy

Conn Hallinan

Dispatches From The Edge

Sept.22, 2021

For over 50 years I have been writing about foreign policy, mostly America’s, but those of other nations as well. I think I have a pretty good grasp of countries like Turkey, China, India, Russia and many of the members of the European Union. I regret that I am less than sure-footed in Africa and Latin America.

During this time I have also learned a fair amount about military matters and various weapons systems, because they cost enormous amounts of money that could be put to much better use than killing and maiming people. But also because it’s hard to resist the absurd: the high performance US F-35 fighter jet–at $1.7 trillion, the most expensive weapons system in US history–that costs $36,000 an hour to fly, shoots itself, and can decapitate pilots who attempt to bail out. There are, as well, the $640 toilet seats, the $7,622 coffee maker, and the fact that the Department of Defense cannot account for $6.5 trillion in spending. 

I have also become fairly conversant with the major nuclear arms agreements and I know what Article VI of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty says (more on this later).

This is a farewell column, so I ask for your indulgence. Having (hopefully) beaten back cancer, I have decided to spend more time with my grandkids and maybe return to my three novels (I have at least one more in my head). But I would like a last hurrah about what I have learned about the world and politics over that last half century, so bear with me.

First, wars are really a bad idea, and not just for the obvious reason that they cause enormous misery and pain. They don’t work, at least in the sense that they accomplish some political end. 

The United States is finally withdrawing from Afghanistan and contemplating getting out of Iraq. Both were disasters of the catastrophic variety. If anyone in the Oval Office or the Pentagon had bothered to read Ruyard Kipling on Afghanistan (Arithmetic on the Frontier comes to mind) and DH Lawrence on Iraq (the Algebra of Occupation is worthwhile) they would have known better.  

But the illusions of Empire are stubborn. The US still thinks it can control the world, when every experience for the past 50 years or more suggests it can’t: Vietnam, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the last war we “won” was Grenada, where the competition was not exactly world class.

Americans are not alone in the delusion of confusing the present for the past. The British are sending the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth and a destroyer to the South China Sea–to do what? The days when Charles “Chinese” Gordon could scatter the locals with a few gun boats is long gone. What the People’s Republic will make of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s nostalgia for Lord Nelson and Trafalgar is anyone’s guess, but Beijing is more likely to be amused than intimidated by a mid-size flat top and a tin can.

China is not out to conquer the world. It wants to be the planet’s biggest economy and to sell everyone lots of stuff. In short, exactly what Britain wanted in the 19th Century and the US wanted in the 20th. The Chinese do insist on military control of their local seas, in much the same way that the US controls its east, west and southern coasts. Imagine how Washington would react to Chinese warships regularly exercising off of Pearl Harbor, San Diego, Newport News, and in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Are the Chinese heavy handed about this? Yes, indeed, and they have unnecessarily alienated a number of nations in the region including Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Japan. Demilitarizing the East and South China seas would reduce tensions and remove the rationale for Beijing’s illegal seizure of small islands, reefs and shoals in the area. China will have to realize that it can’t unilaterally violate international law through its claims over most of the South China Sea, and the US will have to accept that the Pacific Ocean is no longer an American lake.

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! Actually, no they are not, and it is time to stop the silliness about Russian hordes massing on the border ready to overrun the Ukraine or the Baltic states. What those troops were doing late last spring was responding to a plan by NATO for a huge military exercise, “Steadfast Defender.” Russia is not trying to recreate the Soviet Union. Its economy is about the size of Italy’s, and the current problems stem from the profoundly stupid decision to move NATO eastwards. The Russians are sensitive about their borders, with good reason.

We can thank presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for disinterring this particular aspect of the Cold War. Both presidents expanded NATO, and Bush unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and began deploying anti-missile systems in Poland and Romania. NATO claims the ABMs are aimed at Iran, but Iran doesn’t have missiles that can reach Europe and it doesn’t possess nuclear weapons. The Russians would be foolish to draw any other conclusion but that those ABMs are targeting Moscow’s missiles.

NATO has become a zombie alliance, staggering from one disaster to another: Afghanistan, then Libya, and now the US is pressing NATO to confront China in Asia (unlikely–Europeans view China as an invaluable market not a threat).

NATO should go the way of the Warsaw Pact, and the US should rejoin the anti-ballistic missile agreement. Removing the ABM missiles might, in turn, lead to re-establishing the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement, an extremely important treaty from which the US also unilaterally withdrew.

Israel needs to study some Irish history. In 1609, the native population of what became Northern Ireland was forcibly removed to Connaught in the island’s west, and replaced by 20,000 Protestant tenants. The upcoming census is almost certain to show that Catholics now constitute a majority in Northern Ireland. 

The moral? Walls and fences and apartheid policies will not make the Palestinians go away or cause them to forget that much of their land was stolen. 

In the short run, the rightwing settlers may get their way, just as the Protestant settlers did more than 400 years ago. But history is long, and the Palestinains are no more likely to disappear than the native Irish did. It would save a lot of bloodshed and communal hate if the Israelis removed the West Bank and Golan settlers, shared Jerusalem and let the Palistinains have their own viable state. Alternative? A one state, one person, one vote democracy.

The US should also end Israel’s “special status.” Why are we not as outraged with apartheid in Israel as we were with apartheid in South Africa? Why do we ignore the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons? When Americans lecture other countries about maintaining a “rules based” world, can you blame them if they roll their eyes? Why is it “illegal” for Iran to acquire nukes when Tel Aviv gets a pass?

The Biden administration is fond of using the term “existential” in reference to climate change, and the term is not an exaggeration. Our species is at a crossroads, and the time for action is distressingly short. By 2050, some 600 million Indians will have inadequate access to water. Vanishing glaciers are systematically draining the water reserves of the Himalayasians, the Hindu Kush, the Andes and the Rockies. While much of the world will face water shortages, some will experience the opposite, as Germans and Chinese recently discovered. Water is a worldwide crisis and there are few blueprints about how to deal with it, although the 1960 Indus Valley water treaty between India and Pakistan could serve as a template. 

There is simply no way that the world can tackle climate change and still continue to spend–according to the Stockholm International Peace Institute–almost $2 trillion a year on weapons. Nor can the US afford to support its empire of bases, some 800 worldwide, the same number as Britain had in 1885. 

However, climate change is not the only  “existential” threat to our species. Somehow nuclear weapons have dropped off the radar as a global threat, but currently there are major nuclear arms races underway involving China, India, Pakistan,North Korea,Russia and NATO. The US is spending upwards of $1 trillion modernizing its nuclear triad of aircraft, ships and missiles. 

Sanctions, as journalist Patrick Cockburn argues, are war crimes, and no country in the world applies them as widely and with such vigor as the US. Our sanctions have impoverished North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Syria, and inflict unnecessary pain on Cuba. They raise tensions with Russia and China. And why do we apply them? Because countries do things we don’t like or insist on economic and political systems that we don’t agree with. Washington can do it because we control the de facto world currency, the dollar, and countries that cross us can lose their ability to engage in international banking. The French bank BNP Paribas was forced to pay $9 billion in fines for bypassing sanctions on Iran. 

And sanctions have almost always failed.

On self-determination:

Dear Spanish government: Let the Catalans vote in peace and accept the results if they decide they want to go their own way. Ditto for the Scots, the people of Kashmir, and, sometime in the future, the Northern Irish. You can’t force people to be part of your country if they don’t want to be, and trying to make them is like teaching a pig to whistle: can’t be done and annoys the pig.

Refugees: The US and NATO cannot destabilize countries like Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya and then pull up the drawbridge when people flee the chaos those wars have generated. The colonial countries that exploited and retarded the development of countries in Africa and Latin America cannot wash their hands of the problems of post-colonialism. And the industrial countries that destabilized the climate can’t avoid their responsibility for tens of millions of global warming refugees. In any case, the US, Europe and Japan need those immigrants, because the depressed birth rates in developed countries mean they are heading for serious demographic trouble.

Hypocrisy: The world rightfully condems the assassination of political opponents by Russia and Saudi Arabia, but it should be equally outraged when the Israelis systematically kill Iranian scientists, or when the US takes out Iranian leaders with a drone attack. You don’t have the right to kill someone just because you don’t like what they stand for. How do you think Americans would react to Iran assassinating US Gen. Mark Milley, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff?

The world desperately needs an international health treaty to confront future pandemics and must guarantee that it includes the poorest countries on the globe. This is not altruism. If countries can’t provide healthcare for their residents, that should be a responsibility for the international community, because untreated populations give rise to mutations like the Delta variant. Ask not for whom the bells tolls. It tolls for us all.

American exceptionalism is an albatross around our necks, blocking us from seeing that other countries and other systems may do things better than we do. No other country accepts that Americans are superior, especially after four years of Donald Trump, the pandemic debacle and the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington. Who would want the level of economic inequality in this country, or our prison population, the highest in the world? Is being 44th on the World Press Freedom Index, or 18th on the Social Progress Index something we should take pride in? What we can take pride in is our diversity. Therein lies the country’s real potential.

Finally, to Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiation in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” Amen.

Pie in the sky? An old man’s wish list? Well, the one thing I have learned in these past 50 plus years is that things happen if enough people decide they should. So to quote that rather clunky line from Pete Seeger’s “One Man’s Hands,” sung widely during the ‘60s peace movement: “If two and two and 50 make a million, we’ll see that day come ‘round.”

And that’s all folks (for now).

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Tipping the Nuclear Dominos

Tipping The Nuclear Dominos

Dispatches From The Edge

June 12, 2020

 

If the Trump administration follows through on its threat to re-start nuclear tests, it will complete the unraveling of more than 50 years of arms control agreements, taking the world back to the days when school children practiced “duck and cover,” and people built backyard bomb shelters.

 

It will certainly be the death knell for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, passed by the UN’S General Assembly in 1996. The Treaty has never gone into effect because, while 184 nations endorsed it, eight key countries have yet to sign on: the US, China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel, Iran and North Korea.

 

Evan without ratification, the Treaty has had an effect. Many nuclear-armed countries, including the US, Britain, and Russia, stopped testing by the early 1990s. China and France stopped in 1996 and Indian and Pakistan in 1998. Only North Korea continues to test.

 

Halting the tests helped slow the push to make weapons smaller, lighter and more lethal, although over the years countries have learned how to design more dangerous weapons using computers and sub-critical tests. For instance, without actually testing any weapon, the US recently created a “super fuze” that makes its warheads far more capable of knocking out an opponent’s missile silos. Washington has also just deployed a highly destabilizing low-yield warhead that has yet to be detonated.

 

Nonetheless, the test ban did—and does—slow the development of nuclear weapons and retards their proliferation to other countries. Its demise will almost certainly open the gates for others—Saudi Arabia, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, and Brazil—to join the nuclear club.

 

“It would blow up any chance of avoiding a dangerous new nuclear arms race,” says Beatrice Fihn of the Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and “complete the erosion of the global arms control framework.”

 

While the Trump administration has accelerated withdrawal from nuclear agreements, including the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement, and START II, the erosion of treaties goes back almost 20 years.

 

At stake is a tapestry of agreements dating back to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty that ended atmospheric testing. That first agreement was an important public health victory. A generation of “down winders” in Australia, the American Southwest, the South Pacific and Siberia are still paying the price for open-air testing.

 

The Partial Test Ban also broke ground for a host of other agreements.

 

The 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) restricted the spread of nuclear weapons and banned nuclear-armed countries from threatening non-nuclear nations with weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, key parts of the agreement have been ignored by the major nuclear powers, especially Article VI that requires nuclear disarmament, followed by general disarmament.

 

What followed the NPT were a series of treaties that slowly dismantled some of the tens of thousands of warheads with the capacity to quite literally destroy the planet. At one point, the US and Russia had more than 50,000 warheads between them.

 

The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty reduced the possibility of a first-strike attack against another nuclear power. The same year, the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement (SALT I) put a limit on the number of long-range missiles. Two years later, SALT II cut back on the number of highly destabilizing multiple warheads on missiles and put ceilings on bombers and missiles.

 

The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement banned land-based medium-range missiles in Europe that had put the continent on a hair-trigger. Four years later, START I cut the number of warheads in the Russian and American arsenals by 80 percent. That still left each side with 6,000 warheads and 1600 missiles and bombers. It would take 20 years to negotiate START II , which reduced both sides to 1550 deployed nuclear warheads and banished multiple warheads from land-based missiles.

 

All of this is on the verge of collapse. While Trump has been withdrawing from treaties, it was President George W. Bush’s abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 that tipped the first domino.

 

The death of the ABM agreement put the danger of a first-strike was back on the table and launched a new arms race, As the Obama administration began deploying ABMs in Europe, South Korea and Japan, the Russians began designing weapons to overcome them.

 

The ABM’s demise also led to the destruction of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement (INF) that banned medium-range, ground-based missiles from Europe. The US claimed the Russians were violating the INF by deploying a cruise missile that could be fitted with a nuclear warhead. The Russians countered that the American ABM system, the Mark 41 Ageis Ashore, could be similarly configured. Moscow offered to let its cruise be examined, but NATO wasn’t interested.

 

The White House has made it clear that it will not renew the START II treaty unless it includes Chinese medium-range missiles, but that is a poison pill. The Chinese have about one fifth the number of warheads that Russia and the US have, and most of China’s potential opponents—India, Japan, and US bases in the region—are within medium range.

 

While Chinese and Russian medium-range missiles do not threaten the American homeland, US medium-range missiles in Asia and Europe could decimate both countries. In any case, how would such an agreement be configured? Would the US and Russia reduce their warhead stockpile to China’s 300 weapons, or would China increase its weapons levels to match Moscow and Washington? Both are unlikely.

 

If START II goes, so do the limits on warheads and launchers, and we are back to the height of the Cold War.

 

Why?

 

On many levels this makes no sense. Russia and the US have more than 12,000 warheads between them, more than enough to end civilization. Recent studies of the impact of a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan found it would have worldwide repercussions by altering rain patterns and disrupting agriculture. Imagine what a nuclear war involving China, Russia, and the US and its allies would do.

 

Partly this is a matter of simple greed.

 

The new program will cost in the range of $1.7 trillion, with the possibility of much more. Modernizing the “triad” will require new missiles, ships, bombers and warheads, all of which will enrich virtually every segment of the US arms industry.

 

But this is about more than a rich payday. There is a section of the US military and political class that would like to use nuclear weapons on a limited scale. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review explicitly reverses the Obama administration’s move away from nuclear weapons, reasserting their importance in US military doctrine.

 

That is what the recently deployed low yield warhead on the US’s Trident submarine is all about. The W76-2 packs a five-kiloton punch, or about one-third the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, a far cry from the standard nuclear warheads with yields of 100 kilotons to 475 kilotons.

 

The US rationale is that a small warhead will deter the Russians from using their low yield nuclear warheads against NATO, The Trump administration says the Russians have a plan to do exactly that, figuring the US would hesitate to risk an all-out nuclear exchange by replying in kind. There is, in fact, little proof such a plan exists, and Moscow denies it.

 

According to the Trump administration, China and Russia are also violating the ban on nuclear test by setting off low yield, hard to detect, warheads. No evidence has been produced to show this, and no serious scientist supports the charge. Modern seismic weapons detection is so efficient it can detect warheads that fail to go critical, so-called duds.

 

Bear baiting—and dragon drubbing in the case of China—is a tried and true mechanism for opening the arms spigot.

 

Some of this is about making arms manufactures and generals happy, but it is also about the fact that the last war the US won was Grenada. The US military lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, made of mess of Libya, Somalia and Syria, and is trying to extract itself from a stalemate in Yemen.

 

Just suppose some of those wars were fought with low-yield nukes? While it seems deranged—like using hand grenades to get rid of kitchen ants—some argue that if we don’t take the gloves off we will continue to lose wars or get bogged down in stalemates.

 

The Pentagon knows the Russians are not a conventional threat because the US and NATO vastly outnumber and out spend Moscow. China is more of a conventional challenge, but any major clash could go nuclear and no one wants that.

 

According to the Pentagon, the W76-2 may be used to respond “to significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” on the US or its allies’ “infrastructure,” including cyber war. That could include Iran.

 

Early in his term, President Trump asked why the US can’t use its nuclear weapons. If Washington successfully torpedoes START II and re-starts testing, he may get to do exactly that.

 

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Nuclear Powers Need to Disarm Before it’s Too Late

Dodging Nukes In South Asia

Dispatches From The Edge

Mar. 7, 2029

 

The recent military clash between India and Pakistan underscores the need for the major nuclear powers—the US, Russia, China, Britain and France— finally to move toward fulfilling their obligations under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

 

The Treaty’s purpose was not simply to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but to serve as a temporary measure until Article VI could take effect: the “cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

 

The 191 countries that signed the NPT—it is the most widely subscribed nuclear treaty on the planet—did so with the understanding that the major powers would de-nuclearize. But in the 50 years since the Treaty was negotiated, the nuclear powers have yet to seriously address eliminating weapons of mass destruction.

 

While over the years the Americans and the Russians have reduced the number of warheads in their arsenals, they—along with China—are currently in the midst of a major modernization of their weapon systems. Instead of a world without nuclear weapons, it is a world of nuclear apartheid, with the great powers making no move to downsize their conventional forces. For non-nuclear armed countries, this is the worst of all worlds.

 

The folly of this approach was all too clear in the recent India and Pakistan dustup. While both sides appear to be keeping the crisis under control, for the first time in a very long time, two nuclear powers that border one another exchanged air and artillery attacks.

 

While so far things have not gotten out of hand, both countries recently introduced military policies that make the possibility of a serious escalation very real.

 

On the New Delhi side is a doctrine called “Cold Start” that permits the Indian military to penetrate up to 30 kilometers deep into Pakistan if it locates, or is in pursuit of, “terrorists.” On the Islamabad side is a policy that gives front line Pakistani commanders the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons.

 

The possibility of a nuclear exchange is enhanced by the disparity between India and Pakistan’s military forces. One does not have to be Karl von Clausewitz to predict the likely outcome of a conventional war between a country of 200 million people and a country of 1.3 billion people.

 

Pakistan reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first. India has a “no first use” policy, but with so many caveats that it is essentially meaningless. In brief, it wouldn’t take much to ignite a nuclear war between them.

 

If that happens, its effects will not be just regional. According to a study by the University of Colorado, Rutgers University and UCLA, if Pakistan and India exchanged 100 Hiroshima sized nuclear warheads (15 kilotons), they would not only kill or injure 45 million people, but also generate enough smoke to plunge the world into a 25-year long nuclear winter.

 

Both countries have between 130 and 150 warheads apiece.

 

Temperatures would drop to Ice Age levels and worldwide rainfall would decline by 6 percent, triggering major droughts. The Asian Monsoon could be reduced by between 20 and 80 percent, causing widespread regional starvation.

 

Between the cold and the drought, global grain production could fall by 20 percent in the first half decade, and by 10 to 15 percent over the following half decade.

 

Besides cold and drought, the ozone loss would be between 20 and 50 percent, which would not only further damage crops, but harm sea life, in particular plankton. The reduction of the ozone layer would also increase the rate of skin cancers.

 

The study estimates that “two billion people who are now only marginally fed might die from starvation and disease in the aftermath of a nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India.”

 

In short, there is no such thing as a “local” nuclear war.

 

Article VI is the heart of the NPT, because it not only requires abolishing nuclear weapons but also addresses the fears that non-nuclear armed nations have about the major powers’ conventional forces. A number of countries—China in particular—were stunned by the conventional firepower unleashed by the US in its 2003 invasion of Iraq. The ease with which US forces dispatched the Iraqi army was a sobering lesson for a lot of countries.

 

In part, it is the conventional power of countries like the US that fuels the drive by smaller nations to acquire nuclear weapons.

 

Libya is a case in point. That country voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Less than seven years later Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by the US and NATO. At the time, the North Koreans essentially said, “we told you so.”

 

The NPT has done a generally good job of halting proliferation. While Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea obtained nuclear weapons—the first three never signed the Treaty and North Korea withdrew in 2003—South Africa abandoned its program and other nuclear capable nations like Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Iran, South Korea and Saudi Arabia have not joined the nuclear club—yet.

 

But it is hard to make a case for non-proliferation when the major nuclear powers insist on keeping their nuclear arsenals. And one can hardly blame smaller countries for considering nuclear weapons as a counterbalance to the conventional forces of more powerful nations like the US and China. If there is anything that might make Iran abandon its pledge not to build nuclear weapons, it is all the talk in Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia about regime change in Teheran.

 

There are specific regional problems, the solutions to which would reduce the dangers of a nuclear clash. The US has taken some steps in that direction on the Korean Peninsula by downsizing its yearly war games with South Korea and Japan. Declaring an end to the almost 70-yesr old Korean war and withdrawing some US troops from South Korea would also reduce tensions.

 

Halting the eastward expansion of NATO and ending military exercises on the Russian border would reduce the chances of a nuclear war in Europe.

 

In South Asia, the international community must become involved in a solution to the Kashmir problem. Kashmir has already led to three wars between India and Pakistan, and the 1999 Kargil incident came distressingly close to going nuclear.

 

This latest crisis started over a Feb. 14 suicide bombing in Indian occupied Kashmir that killed more than 40 Indian paramilitaries. While a horrendous act, the current government of India’s brutal crackdown in Kashmir has stirred enormous anger among the locals. Kashmir is now one of the most militarized regions in the world, and India dominates it through a combination of force and extra-judicial colonial laws—the Public Safety Act and the Special Powers Act—that allows it to jail people without charge and bestows immunity on the actions of the Indian army, the paramilitaries and the police.

 

Since 1989, the conflict has claimed more than 70,000 lives and seen tens of thousands of others “disappeared,” injured or imprisoned.

 

India blames the suicide attack on Pakistan, which has a past track record of so doing. But that might not be the case here. Even though a Pakistani-based terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) claims credit, both sides need to investigate the incident. It is not unlikely that the attack was homegrown—the bomber was Kashmiri—although possibly aided by JeM. It is also true that Pakistan does not have total control over the myriad of militant groups that operate within its borders. The Pakistani Army, for instance, is at war with its homegrown Taliban.

 

The Kashmir question is a complex one, but solutions are out there. The United Nations originally pledged to sponsor a plebiscite in Kashmir to let the local people decide if they want to be part of India, Pakistan, or independent. Such a plebiscite should go forward. What cannot continue is the ongoing military occupation of 10 million people, most of whom don’t want India there.

 

Kashmir is no longer a regional matter. Nuclear weapons threaten not only Pakistanis and Indians, but, indeed, the whole world. The major nuclear powers must begin to move toward fulfilling Article VI of the NPT, or sooner or later our luck will run out.

 

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Unwrapping Armageddon: The Erosion of Nuclear Arms Control

Nuclear Treaties: Unwrapping Armageddon

Dispatches From The Edge

Nov. 6, 2018

 

The decision by the Trump administration to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement (INF) appears to be part of a broader strategy aimed at unwinding over 50 years of agreements to control and limit nuclear weapons, returning to an era characterized by the unbridled development weapons of mass destruction.

 

Terminating the INF treaty—which bans land-based cruise and ballistic missiles with a range of between 300 and 3400 miles— is not, in and of itself, a fatal blow to the network of treaties and agreements dating back to the 1963 treaty that ended atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. But coupled with other actions—George W. Bush’s decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 2002 and the Obama administration’s program to upgrade the nuclear weapons infrastructure— the tapestry of agreements that has, at least in part, limited these terrifying creations, is looking increasingly frayed.

 

“Leaving the INF,” says Sergey Rogov of the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies, “could bring the whole structure of arms control crashing down.”

 

Lynn Rusten, the former senior director for arms control in the National Security Agency Council warns, “This is opening the door to an all-out arms race.”

 

Washington’s rationale for exiting the INF Treaty is that the Russians deployed the 9M729 cruise missile that the US claims violates the agreement, although Moscow denies it and the evidence has not been made public. Russia countercharges that the US ABM system—Aegis Ashore—deployed in Romania and planned for Poland could be used to launch similar medium range missiles.

 

If this were a disagreement over weapon capability, inspections would settle the matter. But the White House—in particular National Security Advisor John Bolton—is less concerned with inspections than extracting the US from agreements that in any way restrain the use of American power, be it military or economic. Thus, Trump dumped the Iran nuclear agreement, not because Iran is building nuclear weapons or violating the agreement, but because the administration wants to use economic sanctions to pursue regime change in Teheran.

 

In some ways, the INF agreement is low hanging fruit. The 1987 treaty banned only land-based medium range missiles, not those launched by sea or air —where the Americans hold a strong edge—and it only covered the U.S. and Russia. Other nuclear-armed countries, particularly China, India, North Korea, Israel and Pakistan have deployed a number of medium range nuclear-armed missiles. One of the arguments Bolton makes for exiting the INF is that it would allow the US to counter China’s medium range missiles.

 

But if the concern was controlling intermediate range missiles, the obvious path would be to expand the treaty to other nations and include air and sea launched weapons. Not that that would be easy. China has lots of intermediate range missiles, because most its potential antagonists, like Japan or US bases in Asia, are within the range of such missiles. The same goes for Pakistan, India, and Israel.

 

Intermediate range weapons—sometimes called “theater” missiles—do not threaten the US mainland the way that similar US missiles threaten China and Russia. Beijing and Moscow can be destroyed by long-range intercontinental missiles, but also by theater missiles launched from ships or aircraft. One of the reasons that Europeans are so opposed to withdrawing from the INF is that, in the advent of nuclear war, medium-range missiles on their soil will make them a target.

 

But supposed violations of the treaty is not why Bolton and the people around him oppose the agreement. Bolton called for withdrawing from the INF Treaty three years before the Obama administration charged the Russians with cheating. Indeed, Bolton has opposed every effort to constrain nuclear weapons and has already announced that the Trump administration will not extend the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) when it expires in 2021.

 

START caps the number of US and Russian deployed nuclear weapons at 1550, no small number.

 

The Bush administration’s withdrawal from the 1972 ABM treaty in 2002 was the first major blow to the treaty framework. Anti-ballistic missiles are inherently destabilizing, because the easiest way to defeat such systems is to overwhelm them by expanding the number of launchers and warheads. Bolton—a longtime foe of the ABM agreement—recently bragged that dumping the treaty had no effect on arms control.

 

But the treaty’s demise has shelved START talks, and it was the ABM’s deployment in Eastern Europe—along with NATO’s expansion up to the Russian borders—that led to Moscow deploying the cruise missile now in dispute.

 

While Bolton and Trump are more aggressive about terminating agreements, it was the Obama administration’s decision to spend $1.6 trillion to upgrade and modernize US nuclear weapons that now endangers one of the central pillars of the nuclear treaty framework, the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

 

That agreement ended the testing of nuclear weapons, slowing the development of new weapons, particularly miniaturization and warheads with minimal yields. The former would allow more warheads on each missile, the latter could increase the possibility of using nuclear weapons without setting off a full-scale nuclear exchange.

 

Nukes are tricky to design, so you don’t want to deploy one without testing it. The Americans have bypassed some of the obstacles created by the CTBT by using computers like the National Ignition Facility. The B-61 Mod 11 warhead, soon-to-be-deployed in Europe, was originally a city killer, but labs at Livermore, CA and Los Alamos and Sandia, NM turned it into a bunker buster, capable of taking out command and control centers buried deep in the ground.

 

Nevertheless, the military and the nuclear establishment—ranging from companies such as Lockheed Martin and Honeywell International to university research centers—have long felt hindered by the CTBT. Add the Trump administration’s hostility to anything that constrains US power and the CTBT may be next on the list.

 

Restarting nuclear testing will end any controls on weapons of mass destruction. And since Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires nuclear-armed powers to eventually disarm their weapons of mass destruction, that agreement may go as well. In a very short time countries like South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia will join the nuclear club, with South Africa and Brazil in the wings. The latter two countries researched producing nuclear weapons in the 1980s, and South Africa actually tested one.

 

The demise of the INF agreement will edge the world closer to nuclear war. Since medium range missiles shorten the warning time for a nuclear attack from 30 minutes to 10 minutes or less, countries will keep their weapons on a hair trigger. “Use them or lose them” is the philosophy that impels the tactics of nuclear war.

 

In the past year, Russia and NATO held very large military exercises on one another’s borders. Russian, US and Chinese fighter planes routinely play games of chicken. What happens when one of those “games” goes wrong?

The US and the Soviet Union came within minutes of an accidental war on at least two occasions, and, with so many actors and so many weapons, it will be only a matter of time before some country interprets a radar image incorrectly and goes to DEFCON 1—imminent nuclear war.

 

The INF Treaty came about because of strong opposition and huge demonstrations in Europe and the United States. That kind of pressure, coupled with a pledge by countries not to deploy such weapons, will be required again, lest the entire tapestry of agreements that kept the horror of nuclear war at bay vanish.

 

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Of Trump, Vipers, and Foreign Policy

Of Trump, Vipers & Foreign Policy

Dispatches From The Edge

Feb. 22, 2017

 

“Chaos,” “dismay,” “radically inept,” are just a few of the headlines analyzing President Donald Trump’s foreign policy, and in truth, disorder would seem to be the strategy of the day. Picking up the morning newspaper or tuning on the national news sometimes feels akin to opening up a basket filled with spitting cobras and Gabon Vipers.

 

But the bombast emerging for the White House hasn’t always matched what the Trump administration does in the real world. The threat to dump the “one-China” policy and blockade Beijing’s bases in the South China Sea has been dialed back. The pledge to overturn the Iran nuclear agreement has been shelved. And NATO’s “obsolesce” has morphed into a pledge of support. Common sense setting in as a New York Times headline suggests: “Foreign Policy Loses Its Sharp Edge as Trump Adjusts to Office”?

 

Don’t bet on it.

 

First, this is an administration that thrives on turmoil, always an easier place to rule from than order. What it says and does one day may be, or may not be, what it says or does another. And because there are a number of foreign policy crises that have stepped up to the plate, we should all find out fairly soon whether the berserkers or the rationalists are running things.

 

The most dangerous of these is Iran, which the White House says is “playing with fire” and has been “put on notice” for launching a Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile. The missile traveled 630 miles and exploded in what looks like a failed attempt to test a re-entry vehicle. Exactly what “notice” means has yet to be explained, but Trump has already applied sanctions for what it describes as a violation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Program of Action—UN Security Council Resolution 2231—in which Iran agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear energy program.

 

A 2010 UN resolution did, indeed, state, that Iran “shall not undertake activity related to ballistic missiles.” But that resolution was replaced by UNSCR 2231, which only “calls upon Iran not to test missiles,” wording that “falls short of an outright prohibition on missile testing,” according to former UN weapon’s inspector Scott Ritter.

 

The Iranians say their ballistic missile program is defensive, and given the state of their obsolete air force, that is likely true.

 

The Trump administration also charges that Iran is a “state sponsor of terror,” an accusation that bears little resemblance to reality. Iran is currently fighting the Islamic State and al-Qaida in Syria, Iraq, and through its allies, the Houthi, in Yemen. It has also aided the fight against al-Qaida in Afghanistan. As Ritter points out, “Iran is more ally than foe,” especially compared to Saudi Arabia, “whose citizens constituted the majority of the 9/11 attackers and which is responsible for underwriting and the financial support of Islamic extremists around the world, including Islamic State and al-Qaida.”

 

In an interview last year, leading White House strategist Steve Bannon predicted, “We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.” Since the U.S. has pretty much devastated its former foes in the region—Iraq, Syria and Libya—he could only be referring to Iran. The administration’s initial actions vis-à-vis Teheran are, indeed, worrisome. U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis recently considered boarding an Iranian ship in international waters to search it for weapons destined for the Houthi in Yemen. Such an action would be a clear violation of international law and might have ended in a shoot out.

 

The Houthi practice a variation of Shiism, the dominant Islamic school in Iran. They do get some money and weapons from Teheran, but even U.S. intelligence says that the group is not under Teheran’s command.

 

The White House also condemned a Houthi attack on a Saudi warship—initially Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer called it an “American” ship—even though the Saudi’s and their Persian Gulf allies are bombing the Houthi and the Saudi Navy—along with the U.S. Navy—is blockading the country. According to the UN, more than 16,000 people have died in the three-year war, 10,000 of them civilians.

 

Apparently the Trump administration is considering sending American soldiers into Yemen, which would put the U.S troops in the middle of a war involving the Saudis and their allies, the Houthi, Iran, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and various south Yemen separatist groups.

 

Putting U.S. ground forces into Yemen is a “dangerous idea,” according to Jon Finer, chief of staff for former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. But a U.S. war with Iran would be as catastrophic for the Middle East as the invasion of Iraq. It would also be unwinnable unless the U.S. resorted to nuclear weapons, and probably not even then. For all its flaws, Iran’s democracy is light years ahead of most other U.S. allies in the region and Iranians would strongly rally behind the government in the advent of a conflict.

 

The other foreign policy crisis is the recent missile launch by North Korea, although so far the Trump administration has let the rightwing Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe carry the ball on the issue. Meeting with Trump in Florida, Abe called the Feb. 12 launch “absolutely intolerable.” Two days earlier Trump had defined halting North Korean missile launches as a “very, very high priority.”

 

The tensions with North Korea nuclear weapons and missile program are long running, and this particular launch was hardly threatening. The missile was a mid-range weapon and only traveled 310 miles before breaking up. The North Koreans have yet to launch a long-range ICBM, although they continue to threaten that one is in the works.

 

According to a number of Washington sources, Barak Obama told Trump that North Korea posed the greatest threat to U.S. military forces, though how he reached that conclusion is puzzling. It is estimated North Korea has around one dozen nuclear weapons with the explosive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, about 20 kilotons. The average U.S. warhead packs an explosive force of from 100 to 475 kilotons, with some ranging up to 1.2 megatons. It has more than 4,000 nuclear weapons.

 

While the North Koreans share the Trump administration’s love of hyperbole, the country has never demonstrated a suicidal streak. A conventional attack by the U.S., South Korea and possibly Japan would be a logistical nightmare and might touch off a nuclear war, inflicting enormous damage on other countries in the region. Any attack would probably draw in China.

 

What the North Koreans want is to talk to someone, a tactic that the Obama administration never tried. Nor did it consider trying to look at the world from Pyongyang’s point of view. “North Korea has taken note of what happened in Iraq and Libya after they renounced nuclear weapons,” says Norman Dombey, an expert on nuclear weapons and a professor of theoretical physics at Sussex University. “The U.S. took action against both, and both countries’ leaders were killed amid violence and chaos.”

 

The North Koreans know they have enemies—the U.S. and South Korea hold annual war games centered on a military intervention in their country—and not many friends. Beijing tolerates Pyongyang largely because it worries about what would happen if the North Korean government fell. Not only would it be swamped with refugees, it would have a U.S. ally on its border.

 

Obama’s approach to North Korea was to isolate it, using sanctions to paralyze to the country. It has not worked, though it has inflicted terrible hardships on the North Korean people. What might work is a plan that goes back to 2000 in the closing months of the Clinton administration.

 

That plan proposed a non-aggression pact between the U.S., Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and the re-establishment of diplomatic relations. North Korea would have been recognized as a nuclear weapons state, but agree to forgo any further tests and announce all missile launches in advance. In return, the sanctions would be removed and North Korea would receive economic aid. The plan died when the Clinton administration got distracted by the Middle East.

 

Since then the U.S. has insisted that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons, but that is not going to happen—see Iraq and Libya. In any case, the demand is the height of hypocrisy. When the U.S. signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it agreed to Article VI that calls for “negotiations in good faith” to end “the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

 

All eight nuclear powers—the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan and Israel—have not only not discussed eliminating their weapons, all are in the process of modernizing them. The NPT was never meant to enforce nuclear apartheid, but in practice that is what has happened.

 

A non-aggression pact is essential. Article VI also calls for “general and complete disarmament,” reflecting a fear by smaller nations that countries like the U.S. have such powerful conventional forces that they don’t need nukes to get their way. Many countries—China in particular—were stunned by how quickly and efficiently the U.S. destroyed Iraq’s military.

 

During the presidential campaign, Trump said he would “have no problem” speaking with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. That pledge has not been repeated, however, and there is ominous talk in Washington about a “preemptive strike” on North Korea, which would likely set most of north Asia aflame.

 

There are a number of other dangerous flashpoints out there besides Iran and North Korea.

 

*The Syrian civil war continues to rage and Trump is talking about sending in U.S. ground forces, though exactly who they would fight is not clear. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent once called Syria a three-dimensional chess game with nine players and no rules. Is that a place Americans want to send troops into?

 

*The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—now America’s longest running war—is asking for more troops.

 

*The war in the Eastern Ukraine smolders on, and with NATO pushing closer and closer to the Russian border, there is always the possibility of misjudgment. The same goes for Asia, where Bannon predicted “for certain” the U.S. “is going to go to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years.”

 

How much of the White House tweets are provocation and grandiose rhetoric is not clear. The President and the people around him are lens lice who constantly romance the spotlight. They have, however, succeeded in alarming a lot of people. As the old saying goes, “Boys throw rocks at frogs in fun. The frogs dodge them in earnest.”

 

Except in the real world, “fun” can quickly translate into disaster, and some of the frogs are perfectly capable of tossing a few of their own rocks.

 

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