Experts: Multilateralize the INF Treaty to Promote Compliance

Multilateralizing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to include countries in Europe and Asia will offset power imbalances and encourage Russia’s compliance, two experts said yesterday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Right now the INF Treaty issue is a diplomatic issue between the United States and Russia, but if the Russians are going to proceed to develop a new intermediate-range missile, that’s not going to be a direct threat to the United States,” said Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution. The threat is greater for much of Europe, China and Japan, he said, so “the objective here should be to take this bilateralism between Washington and Moscow, and make it a multilateral problem for the Russians.”

 

The 1987 INF Treaty required the United States and then-Soviet Union to eliminate any ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. In a June 5 report, the Obama administration said Russia since last year has been in violation of its treaty obligation “not to possess, produce, or flight-test” these missiles. Paul Schwartz, senior associate of the Russia and Eurasia Program at CSIS, said yesterday Russia is more likely to comply “with agreements where they have more parity with the U.S.” Moscow is now “concerned about an imbalance,” primarily with NATO and the U.S., which could be addressed by arms control efforts that include other countries such as China, he said. “Arms control here would mean potentially expanding and multilateralizing the INF Treaty to bring in some of these new powers, and that’s an approach that the U.S. and Russia are both on board with, at least in principle,” Schwartz said.