As recently as this summer, Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, was still describing the INF to reporters as “probably the most successful treaty in [the] history of arms control.”
What’s changed is that National-Security Adviser John Bolton now appears to have “the president’s ear on this issue,” Kingston Reif, the director of disarmament and threat-reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to raise awareness about arms-control efforts, told me.
Bolton, a proto–America Firster who joined the Trump administration in the spring, has long opposed international arms-control and nuclear-nonproliferation agreements that he claims are utterly ineffectual or intolerable infringements on the United States’ freedom of action. During the George W. Bush administration, he helped engineer the U.S. withdrawal from a treaty with Russia limiting antiballistic-missile systems and an agreement with North Korea rolling back its nuclear program, and he championed Washington’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal under Trump.
In 2011, well before the United States was calling out Russia for violating the INF, Bolton argued for either bringing new countries into the treaty or scrapping the accord entirely, since it constrained America’s ability to counter rival nuclear powers like China and nuclear aspirants like Iran and North Korea. (Even without its own intermediate-range missiles near China, Iran, and North Korea, the United States can still deter these countries with other elements of its nuclear-weapons arsenal, such as nuclear-capable aircraft and submarines.)
Trump has made a strikingly similar case—condemning the treaty for rendering the United States shackled and outgunned by a resurgent Russia and rising China, even as he floats the idea of one day reviving and expanding the agreement to include other nuclear-armed states.
Richard Burt, who helped negotiate the INF Treaty during the Reagan administration, said that while he’d “love to believe that this is a very clever strategy to get leverage over the Russians” and compel them to adhere to the terms of the treaty, he seriously doubts it.
Instead, he thinks Trump’s decision is an effort to shake off restraints and assert unfettered American sovereignty—just as the administration has done by withdrawing from the Paris climate pact and trade agreements.
