Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty fits a pattern. As the US president said in his speech to the UN General Assembly, he is unwilling to accept constraints on his America First foreign policy. Washington has quit the Paris climate accord and repudiated the international community’s nuclear deal with Iran. Such is the antipathy to multilateralism it has even announced that the US will be leaving the 144-year-old Universal Postal Union. Apparently, Mr Trump thinks China receives too good a deal.
By quitting the nuclear treaty, Mr Trump puts a question mark over what remains of the painstakingly negotiated arms control arrangements that helped the US and the Soviet Union to manage the risk of thermonuclear confrontation. It renders vanishingly small the prospect for any serious new effort to set limits to nuclear arsenals around the world. Now that the US has cut loose, why should China, India — or, for that matter, Iran — accept voluntary restraint?
The immediate impact of the INF announcement is to inject an element of nuclear instability into European security barely four years after the Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine. The nuclear treaty, signed in 1987 by US president Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, called a halt to the arms race in short- and medium-range (500km to 5,500km) land-based weapons. Handing back to Moscow free rein to deploy such weapons against European members of Nato demolishes a pillar of the continent’s strategic stability.