By John Erath
President Donald Trump has stated that he would like to commence talks with Russia and China aimed at reducing numbers of nuclear weapons. This is an encouraging proposal; the world would undoubtedly be safer with fewer, not more, nuclear weapons. It is also much easier said than done. Arms control diplomacy is difficult, painstaking work. The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, for example, took seven years to negotiate — and that was with everyone more or less agreeing from the outset on what the treaty would accomplish. What, therefore, are the actual prospects for renewed arms control? It may be too early to know for sure, but there exists an example of the administration’s approach to diplomacy that is not encouraging.
On March 18, Presidents Trump and Putin reportedly spoke for 90 minutes, after which they announced agreement that Russia and Ukraine would refrain from attacking each other’s energy facilities for 30 days, terming this a “partial ceasefire.” The limited scope of the “deal” backtracked the administration’s hopes to end the war quickly and has seemingly been superseded by an attempt at a Black Sea ceasefire. A similar fate met the United States’ earlier attempt at a 30-day pause in fighting. The general aim seems to be to stop some of the fighting somewhere and be able to declare success. In effect, the Trump administration is putting the packaging ahead of the product.
In practice, however, “negotiations” for such deals have been treated by the Russian side as opportunities to demand more concessions as a price for Moscow’s engagement. The Kremlin has sensed seeming U.S. desperation to achieve some positive result and upped its demands, most recently by calling for a cessation of intelligence information being provided to Ukraine. The White House has shown no hesitation in bullying Kyiv, so there is no downside for Russia to such a strategy. By talking with each party separately, and apparently offering concessions on Ukraine’s behalf, the Trump administration has made a difficult task more so. Ukraine will hesitate to sign on to a deal it had little hand in, and Russia, rewarded for demanding preconditions, will repeat the behavior.
In a potential arms control negotiation, this would be the wrong approach. Leaving aside the inadvisability of selling out one’s allies, the dual strategy of agreeing to preconditions while setting the goal to be striking a deal at any cost provides a recipe for failure. Good arms control makes all parties more secure, as the INF Treaty did in the 1980s by eliminating a whole category of supposedly “usable” nuclear weapons. On the other hand, setting one’s goal as reaching an agreement rather than making the world safer has proven misguided. In arms control, there are examples. The 1997 Ottawa Convention “banned” anti-personnel landmines, except it did not include landmine producing countries such as China, India and the United States. Despite a Nobel Prize for the treaty’s champions, large numbers of landmines persist. Russia has used millions of these devices, taking hundreds of square miles of Ukrainian farmland out of use. Following reports that Russia may be rewarded for its aggression with territory and security guarantees, Poland and the Baltic States announced plans to withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty, another signal of its ineffectiveness.
In 2017, the United Nations opened negotiations for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The goal of the process was to produce a treaty rather than to eliminate any weapons, and that was the result. The agreement currently has been signed by 94 countries, all of them already obligated by international law not to have nuclear weapons. However well intentioned, the TPNW has not produced any reduction in nuclear weapons. Instead, in 2022, for the first time since the Cold War, the total number of nuclear weapons in the world actually grew, due largely to China’s ongoing buildup. Once again, an arms control measure focused on producing an agreement instead of actually reducing the threat posed by excessive armaments has not had the desired effect as world leaders contemplate nuclear proliferation and a renewed nuclear arms race.
Real, effective arms control is difficult and painstaking, even for experienced diplomats and Nobel Prize winners. To address the incipient arms race and the threat posed by nuclear weapons will require more than grabbing headlines with empty “deals.” Conceding Ukrainian territory in return for an unenforceable pause on attacks on energy facilities is not diplomacy; it’s amateur hour. When it comes to the world’s most dangerous weapons, addressing the threat is not a job for amateurs.
