If Trump blows up US-Russia nuclear treaty, China will pick up the pieces

In December 1987, for the first time in history, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals and to eliminate an entire category of weapons.

The Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces in Europe (the INF treaty), signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, required both superpowers not to possess, produce or flight-test nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with a range from 500km to 5,500km, and not to possess or produce their launchers. By June 1991 the two countries had destroyed all their short- and medium-range missiles: 2,692 in total.

After the split of the USSR at the end of the same year, Russia took responsibility for the treaty’s obligations, while Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan joined Moscow and Washington in its implementation.

Since 2014, the US has been accusing Russia of treaty violations, referring, first of all, to the development and deployment of the SSC-8 cruise missile Washington considers non-compliant. Citing these alleged violations as the reason, US President Donald Trump announced plans to unilaterally withdraw from the treaty after a rally in Nevada on October 20.

The compliance issue, however, looks like a pretext. The major reason, as Washington has effectively admitted, is the rapid development of INF-banned missiles by China and other countries – Iran, North Korea and so on – not bound by the treaty requirements. It is assumed that to address these challenges the US must have a free hand in developing missiles of its own. In this regard, Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, the major initiator of the withdrawal, calls the INF treaty obsolete.