While you were looking over there, Donald Trump, our racist five-year-old drunken Twitter-troll of a President, pulled out of yet another arms control treaty with the Russians. Signed in 1992 by then president George H.W. Bush, the Open Skies Treaty allowed for short-notice, unarmed reconnaissance flights as a way of verifying compliance with other arms control treaties. As he always does when announcing the end of an international agreement, Trump breezily claimed that the Russians were not adhering to the treaty, and that by pulling out we will eventually end up with a new agreement that’s better than the current one.
This announcement comes in the context of:
- Withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which removed extremely destabilizing and dangerous medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe;
- Trump’s reluctance to renew the New START treaty next February when it expires. The accord provides for inspection of nuclear forces in by both parties, and is the final remaining pillar of the U.S.-Russian arms control regime.
This madness is another case of Trump’s key role as a rubber stamp for the most extreme elements in the right-wing political grouping that is currently running the country through him. I am certain Trump did not wake up in the middle of the night and say. “We must toss out all of our arms control agreements with Russia!” My guess is that the president’s strongest negative feeling might be reserved for New START, as that was signed by Obama in 2010, but otherwise this planet-saving series of treaties is probably of very little interest to him. Sure, there is some posing involved here, Trump trying to appear “tough”, trying to please daddy, etc., but why even bother getting into that? The man’s only ideology is himself. He is a uniquely valueless human being – the perfect vessel for a resurgent militarist right.
The administration’s rhetoric points to prompting a new arms race that will spend both China and Russia into a hole. Set aside for a moment the blatant insanity of such a policy (recall the dark days of the early 1980s) – it appears to be based on a popular misconception of what happened in the last arms race. We didn’t spend the Soviet Union into oblivion; empires decay, that’s what they do. We nearly spent ourselves into oblivion, investing trillions of dollars in the production of waste (useless military hardware) instead of putting those dollars into building a better society. Soviet military spending was pretty much flat through the 1980s. A renewed nuclear arms race puts humanity at risk, pure and simple – there’s no upside.
What is presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s position on this issue? Good question. I can’t find anything about it on his web site. For some more discussion about the lack of evidence of a Biden foreign policy, see the current episode of Strange Sound, our new podcast.
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