[D66] Trump says US will withdraw from Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/22/inft-o22.html

Trump says US will withdraw from Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty
By Alex Lantier
22 October 2018

Speaking at a campaign rally in Nevada on Saturday, President Donald
Trump said Washington will repudiate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) treaty and develop intermediate range nuclear missiles.
“We’ll have to develop those weapons,” he said. “We’re going to
terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out.”

With this decision, Washington is scrapping the entire nuclear arms
control framework that emerged from the Cold War. In 2001, Washington
repudiated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, so it could
begin working on a “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system to shoot
down enemy ballistic missiles. Now it is scrapping the 1987 treaty that
bans US or Russian manufacture and deployment of nuclear missiles with
ranges of 500-5,500 kilometers (310-3,420 miles). For the first time
since 1972, there is to be no treaty limiting the major powers’
deployment of nuclear arms.

Washington is aggressively stoking a nuclear arms race, with Russia and
China first in its gun-sights, which would provoke stepped-up missile
deployments across Europe and East Asia. It points to the immediate and
growing risk of nuclear war between the major powers.

Trump blamed his decision to scrap the INF treaty on Moscow and Beijing:
“Russia has violated the agreement. They’ve been violating it for many
years and I don’t know why President Obama didn’t negotiate or pull out.
… Unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to
us and they say, ‘Let’s all of us get smart and let’s none of us develop
those weapons,’ but if Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it and
we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable. So we have a
tremendous amount of money to play with with our military.”

Moscow condemned Trump’s statement as “blackmail” against Russia. Deputy
Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told TASS: “At first glance, I can say
that apparently the INF Treaty creates problems for pursuing the line
towards the US total domination in military sphere…This would be a very
dangerous step, which, I’m sure, won’t be just understood by the
international community, but arouse serious condemnation of all members
of the world community.”

Ryabkov said he would discuss it with US National Security Advisor John
Bolton, who supports killing the INF treaty. Bolton arrived yesterday in
Moscow for two days of talks starting today.

Trump’s attempt to blame Moscow and Beijing for his decision is a
transparent political fraud. The US repudiation of nuclear arms control
treaties is part of a longstanding, aggressive foreign policy aiming to
exploit US military supremacy in the aftermath of the Stalinist
dissolution of the Soviet Union to counterbalance the effects of its
accelerating economic decline in world affairs. The 2001 repudiation of
the ABM treaty was part of the Bush administration’s turn to war,
including the illegal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan in 2001
and Iraq in 2003, to dominate the Eurasian landmass.

The Democratic Party escalated this policy, launching wars in Libya and
Syria while initiating a “pivot to Asia” to confront China in Barack
Obama’s first term. In his second term, together with its European
allies, Obama backed a far-right coup in Ukraine that toppled a
pro-Russian government and provoked an all-out military confrontation
with Russia in Eastern Europe. Washington and its European allies have
deployed tens of thousands of troops on the very borders of Russia.

The coup in Ukraine and the resulting escalation by Washington and the
European imperialist powers in Eastern Europe set the world on course
towards nuclear war. Amid the NATO military build-up against Russia,
Washington first alleged in July 2014 that Moscow was developing a
ground-launched cruise missile system violating the INF treaty.
Recently, on October 2, US Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchinson took the
extraordinary step of threatening to bomb Russia to “take out” these
missiles, after again denouncing Russia for violating the INF treaty.

It is not Russian but US aggression that is driving Washington’s
decision to scrap the INF treaty. In fact, powerful factions of the US
military and foreign policy establishment have been campaigning for
years to scrap the INF treaty—not because of Russia, but to threaten China.

After Obama launched the “pivot to Asia” in 2011, Beijing sought to
develop intermediate-range missiles capable of hitting US aircraft
carriers and military bases in the Western Pacific, to deter Washington
from using them to attack China. As the balance of power in that region
shifted ever more in China’s favor, voices in US ruling elite began to
call for scrapping the INF treaty, using tensions with Russia as a cover
for a policy designed to target China.

In 2014, the  National Interest published an article, “China’s Missile
Forces Are Growing: Is It Time to Modify the INF Treaty?” It wrote that
“forward-based missile forces could be a partial solution to emerging
operational problems in the Western Pacific.” However, the INF treaty
bans Washington and Moscow from having the type of missiles the Pentagon
would deploy to the Western Pacific to target China. So, it added, “How
might Washington leverage current tensions with Moscow to improve its
long-term military posture vis-à-vis Beijing? One option is to abrogate
INF.”

Admiral Harry Harris, who recently stepped down as commander of the US
Pacific Fleet, became an aggressive proponent of renegotiating or
scrapping the INF treaty. Last year, Harris said that he considered arms
control “problematic,” as the INF treaty limits “our ability to counter
Chinese and other countries’ cruise missiles, land-based missiles.”

Testifying to the US Senate this March, Harris made clear that scrapping
the INF treaty as critical to trying to re-establish full US military
dominance of the Pacific Ocean. “We are at a disadvantage with regard to
China today in the sense that China has ground-based ballistic missiles
that threaten our basing in the western Pacific and our ships,” he said.
“We have no ground-based capability that can threaten China because of,
among other things, our rigid adherence…to the INF treaty.”

Washington’s repudiation of nuclear arms control as it seeks to maintain
global military dominance is a warning to the working class in America
and worldwide.

With the major powers pledge to spend massive sums on their arsenals of
missiles and nuclear warheads, led by Washington, who pledged in 2014 to
spend $1 trillion to modernize its nuclear arms, untold social resources
are being squandered on creating conditions for a nuclear war.
Governments internationally are determined that the costs of this insane
policy are to be borne by workers, through austerity and attacks on
living standards.

The construction of an anti-war movement based in the working class is a
critical necessity, objectively posed by the rapid development of the
danger of wars that could end in a nuclear conflagration.