Thank you for having me on this program. 

It’s hard to follow such a terrific roster of speakers who have flagged such important issues, but – and with apologies for any lapses of coherence due to jet lag, since I’m joining you guys from Singapore right now and it’s just past two in the morning here – let me at least add a little of my own gloss on these issues.  These will just be my own personal opinions, of course, and they won’t necessarily correspond to those of anyone else, but I think they’ll dovetail well with what the others have said.

Let me note at the outset, however, that I don’t consider myself a die-hard arms control skeptic.  When it’s done right, arms control can, I think, play a valuable role in helping us meet security threats and preserve strategic stability.  The problem, however, is that it’s far more difficult, and rather less common, for arms control to be “done right” than we in the West like to think it is. 

The Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch once wrote to one of his patrons about how to tell a friend from a flatterer. He called, in effect, for true friends to show each other the kind of tough love that does not evade or sugar-coat what the other really needs to hear.  The flatterer, wrote Plutarch, 

“always takes a position over against the maxim ‘Know thyself,’ by creating in every man deception towards himself and ignorance both of himself and of the good and evil that concerns himself; the good he renders defective and incomplete, and the evil impossible to amend.” 

By contrast, the true friend is both able and willing to offer “admonishment and frankness of speech.”  Precisely because he is truly a friend, in other words the true friend “blames … when he must.”

This is a distinction tow which I’ve been fond of pointing for years, because I think Western diplomatic culture has had a tendency to let hope outrun the lessons of experience when it comes to addressing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) issues. So bearing that in mind, let me try here to offer a little such “blame,” puncturing some of the flattery of arms control that I sometimes see in the policy community.  I want instead to be a true friend to arms control by being honest about some of its potential pitfalls and seductions. 

To put it simply, we sometimes want arms control so much that we get in our own way. 

To illustrate this, let me describe a few types of characteristic challenge that can be created by the mindset we bring to dealing with issues of arms control.  These are, in a sense, political or perhaps cultural problems – challenges related to how morally and intellectually serious we really are about arms control, if you will – and there are at least four of them.  These four relate to: 

• whether and when to enter into arms control in the first place; 
• whether and when to withdraw from an arms control agreement; 
• challenges of compliance assessment; and 
• challenges of compliance enforcement.

 Problems of Entering

My good friend the late Jeff Eberhardt was fond of reminding State Department negotiators that “if you want it bad, you get it bad.”  That is, if you’re too eager for a deal, you give the other guy a powerful tool with which to take advantage of you.  Less eagerness to get a deal can thus sometimes produce better results.

Malevolent actors like the Iranians and Russians often excel at arms control gamesmanship.  We’ve taught them over the years that the mere prospect of talks is often enough to get the United States to back off from doing things that might annoy or disadvantage them.  And they frequently try to take advantage of this, in effect weaponizing our earnest desire for diplomatic solutions against us.

The Soviets were particularly eager practitioners of such gamesmanship.  (I discussed this in more detail in a paper published by NIPP earlier this year.)  After they had deployed a new generation of strategic delivery systems as well as their intermediate-range SS- 20 missiles in the late 1970s, they began offering “nuclear freeze” resolutions at the United Nations, hoping to lock in place an advantageous balance before Washington could respond with countervailing deployments. 

When their forces outnumbered us in central Europe, Moscow promoted a “no-first use” treaty that would have taken off the table our nuclear deterrence against those forces.  When President Reagan began pursuing potentially space-based missile defenses and was building up U.S. conventional might, the Kremlin duly offered a plan to ban weapons in space and proposed “Talks on the Non-Increase and Reduction of Military Expenditures.”

One might wonder, in fact, whether that tradition continues today.  I saw recently, for instance, that Vladimir Putin – the man who has been violating the New START agreement and who announced Russia’s “suspension” of that treaty in 2023 – is now suggesting to President Trump that we extend observance of the central limits on strategic systems in New START.  One wonders whether Putin’s newfound liking for New START has anything to do with the fact that the U.S. national security strategic policy community has recently coalesced on a bipartisan basis, perhaps for the first time in my lifetime, around the idea that we need to have new nuclear delivery systems and more nuclear weapons than before in response to the new challenge of deterring two nuclear peers at the same time. 

If indeed deterrence requires that we now deploy more weapons – and I agree that it does – it’s obviously a terrible idea to agree to extend limits that would preclude us doing so.  So of course Putin now wants to lock us in at present force levels!  His game (and its dangers) should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but arms control can be seductive, and we’ve been fooled before.

Anyway, arms control negotiating is clearly not a business for the incautious or naïve.  Sometimes “nyet” is exactly the right answer to an arms control proposal.  Ronald Reagan knew that, but the prospect of reaching a “deal” – any deal! – is apparently eternally tempting, and not everybody has the Gipper’s moral courage, as his wife Nancy put it in a different context, to “just say no.”

 Problems of Remaining

A second set of political problem with arms control revolves around how long to stay in an agreement when circumstances are changing. 

The most obvious way that relevant facts can change, of course, is that the other side may cheat.  This was, for instance, the reason for the United States’ withdrawal in 2019 from the INF Treaty: Russia was flagrantly cheating, and it had been doing so for years. 

It’s also possible for withdrawal to become appropriate even when the other side is complying, if other facts change in ways that make it disadvantageous to remain.  This was the case for us with the ABM Treaty, from which we withdrew after the growth of third-party missile threats from North Korea and Iran. 

But here’s the rub.  Historically, we have struggled politically with withdrawal even when it’s needed.  Our earnest desire   for arms control has sometimes made it difficult for us to gather the courage to get out of it when circumstances demand.

Russia, for example, began testing a new cruise missile in violation of the terms of the INF treaty in 2008.  The United States knew about this not long afterward, but it actually took the Obama Administration until 2014 to be willing actually to publicly declare Russia a violator, and even then Washington did essentially nothing except simply talk about the problem until Obama left office.  By the time we in the First Trump Administration arrived on the scene in early 2017, Russia had begun actually deploying its new missile against us and our allies in Europe.

The United States did finally react concretely under the First Trump Administration, authorizing the Defense Department to start R&D on American INF-class systems.  And when Russia didn’t change course, we announced in 2019 that we were pulling out.  By then, however, it was already more than ten years after the first flight-tests of the illegal missile had occurred.  That is disgracefully long.

         Problems of Compliance Assessment

My third category of political problem is the challenge of honestly assessing compliance with arms control agreements.  Admitting that problems exist can have major consequences, and that can sometimes make leaders reluctant to be honest in compliance assessment.

With INF, it proved extraordinarily hard for us to get even our friends in Britain, France, and Germany to admit that there was a Russian INF violation at all.  They did eventually relent, but they prevaricated for a painfully long time, clearly fearing that their concurrence with U.S. assessments of a Russian violation would mean the end of the treaty.  Especially for France and Germany – for, in fairness, the Brits came around sooner – it seemed better to ignore the Russian violation than to see a treaty officially collapse. 

And it’s not just them.  We ourselves have a mixed track record of being willing to admit the existence of problems where such honesty would suggest a need to do something in response to them.  It was not until more than a decade after the U.S. Government first assessed Iran was in the early stages of a nuclear weapons development program, for example, that we were finally willing officially to state what obviously followed from that – namely, that Iran was in violation of its obligations under Article II of the NPT. 

         Problems of Enforcement

Turning to my fourth and final category of problem, there can also be huge political challenges associated with compliance enforcement.  This is the old challenge Fred Iklé’s captured in the title of his 1961 Foreign Affairs article “After Detection – What?”  If you find a violation, what are you willing to do about it? 

As it turns out, leaders sometimes find it hard to take resolute and effective action to try to restore compliance even once a violation becomes undeniable.

The Obama Administration’s approach to INF is a good example, but we should also remember that after Iran’s nuclear program first came publicly to light, it took the international community a long time to do anything in response.  By the time the first U.N. sanctions were imposed, for instance, the centrifuge plant at Natanz had gone from being merely a provocative hole in the ground to actually producing enriched uranium.  Once again, shame on us.

Conclusion

So if there’s a myth to dispel here, it is the false idea that asking tough questions about arms control and approaching arms control proposals with some realistic skepticism is necessarily to be hostile to it.  Pursuing good arms control requires a kind of “tough love” that our policy community has sometimes found difficult to apply.

Thanks.

—Christopher Ford