The last nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia has expired, and that’s a good thing. Former President Barack Obama and others have decried the end of the New START Treaty, warning that it could “pointlessly wipe out decades of diplomacy” and “spark another arms race.” But that arms race is already hurtling along, and America is being left behind. Obama’s bleating advice should be rejected.
The New START Treaty between the U.S. and the Russian Federation to reduce strategic offensive weapons entered into force on Feb. 5, 2011. It lasted 10 years.
On Feb. 4, 2021, New START was extended for another five years. A year later, Russia invaded Ukraine, sparking the biggest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II.
New START was ambitious, providing the U.S. and Russia with on-site inspections and data exchanges to reduce their nuclear arsenals. It also imposed limits on intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads on ICBMs, and the various means to deploy them, from submarines to heavy bombers.
The Biden administration campaigned to extend New START. Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, hailed its extension as making “the United States and the world safer.” But this is not so. One doesn’t need a degree in nuclear physics to understand why.
Arms control agreements are only as good as their signatories are honest. And Moscow’s promises count for little.
Both the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union before it have violated every arms control treaty they’ve ever signed. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan, a skeptic of such agreements, famously called to “trust but verify” Soviet compliance. These days, there is precious little reason for trust.
The Biden administration knew this, threatening to end the treaty in response to escalating Russian aggression, which included threatening NATO allies, cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, and the Ukraine war.
It is a dangerous game to take a totalitarian regime at its word. And it can have a sullying effect.
In a democracy such as America, treaties require political buy-in, meaning American politicians who campaign for them must have a vested interest in defending their creation, irrespective of whether the other side is violating the agreement. During the 1970s, for example, American diplomats, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were often forced to play the role of Moscow’s lawyer, overlooking Soviet violations for political reasons. Too often, the process became more important than the result.
There are other reasons that America should be glad to see New START expire. Russia, after all, is hardly the only threat that America faces.
For the first time, the U.S. is confronting a challenge from two nuclear-equipped great powers: Russia and China. More troubling still, Moscow and Beijing are working together in an axis of aggression. Their allies include Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, and North Korea, which already has nuclear weapons and ambitions to conquer the Korean Peninsula.
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China is undertaking the biggest nuclear buildup in history. By contrast, America’s arsenal is in dire need of modernization, as experts such as Bob Peters of the Heritage Foundation have noted.
Now is not the time to curtail American capabilities in the forlorn and naive hope of trusting the words of tyrants. Rather, now is the time to build America’s arsenal to achieve what Reagan and President Donald Trump both called for: peace through strength.