Present at Creation – and Destruction

I was present at the Creation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) in Europe Treaty in Washington in 1987, and I was in the same town again covering US-Soviet/Russian relations when President Donald Trump pulled the plug on it in 2019. We observed the fifth anniversary of the treaty’s death on Friday, August 2 this year: it was not an auspicious occasion.

I was the recently appointed young Soviet and Eastern European affairs correspondent of The Washington Times in 1987, and I worked for a demanding genius, Arnaud de Borchgrave, by birth an eminent Belgian aristocrat and for more than 30 years chief foreign correspondent of Newsweek magazine when that really meant something. Arnaud recognized the importance of what was happening when the INF Treaty was signed, when Washington was filled with ignorant Know Nothings who did not.

Credit for the treaty belonged to two very underestimated men who should have been arch enemies: US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet somehow, they came together from very different perspectives and vastly reduced the dangers of nuclear war in Europe and across the world for nearly two generations.

As a super-hawkish – and very stupid – member of Reagan’s National Security Council said to me (the old president eased him off his staff and far away from power for life and did it so subtly that the Fall Guy never realized he had been dumped), “Unless you realize that Nancy Reagan was determined her Beloved Ronnie should go down in history as a peacemaker, you will never understand the national security policies of the Reagan administration.”

There have been far worse motives for implementing historic national policies than that.

From Gorbachev’s side, he was determined to eliminate the direct threat to the Soviet Union that Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – both of them backed by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand – had created by deploying the Pershing II intermediate missiles in Europe.

The Pershing II had a far shorter range and lower trajectory than the huge intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with which both the Americans and the Soviets had been obsessed through the Cold War.

Martin Sieff, a young correspondent at the State Department of the Washington Times newspaper, participated in a TV program in May 1990 and spoke about his recent article “Cheers May Turn to Jeers When Gorbachev Gets Home.”

It represented, as one of the greatest Western nuclear strategists of his generation, the late Jean-Marie Benoist of France, national security adviser to Premier Jacques Chirac, said to me, a simple weapon that was so direct and unanticipated it could not be defended against. Pershing’s could launch an annihilating strike against the Soviet Union in 10 to 20 minutes, depending on where they would be deployed.

Today, America’s ludicrous neocons and neoliberals have completely destroyed all mainstream strategic debate – and therefore the capacity for issuing warnings – in the United States and Britain. For them, those Pershings would just have been another giant step on the road to Armageddon – the thermonuclear destruction of the world.

However, Ronald Reagan did not see it that way. He saw the Pershings as a giant step to peace, not war. And as a tool to end the thermonuclear arms race, not accelerate it.

Reagan was, as I can testify, having been introduced to him on many occasions, a sunny positive soul who was far wiser and more street smart and shrewd than he liked to let on.

When Ronald Reagan indulged in rhetoric about bringing about world peace, he actually meant it, and the Pershing deployments were central to his strategy. In contrast to the farcical strategic conceptions of all America’s five 21st century presidents so far, Reagan’s actually worked.

The Soviet Union collapsed and then first Bill Clinton and then every president after him, with the exception, of all people of Trump, broke the solemn, well documented assurances Reagan and his immediate successor George Herbert Walker Bush had given first Gorbachev and then to Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO would never expand east of the Oder River – the post-1945 border between Poland and Germany. Instead, NATO has never stopped.

Thirty-two years later it was a very different story.

Over those three and a half decades since the INF Treaty was signed, NATO has continued to relentlessly expand to the east, and it is now obsessed with swallowing what is left of Ukraine and standing aggressive and even more threatening than ever on Russia’s historic Dnieper River. If that were ever to happen, could the Volga or even the Yenisei be far behind?

But all that wickedness and suicidal stupidity appeared inconceivable back in 1987. Reagan, like Gorbachev, had serious, methodical, dignified and responsible advisers. Pathetic, bungling clowns like Pompeo and Bolton, or Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan today were inconceivable. Adults still ruled the roost in the West Wing of the White House.

Into this morass, in 2017, came Donald Trump: he emerged out of the business world of New York City, and his appointments and economic policies were far more successful and consistent than the baying hyenas who pass for the Mainstream Media in the United States ever acknowledged.

But on national security affairs, Trump was a mystery and a contradiction even to himself – as General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said of his lifelong colleague and friend, President Ulysses S. Grant.

Trump was determined not to start any new wars: he was the very first president in 40 years since Gerald Ford to have had that distinction. He got no thanks for it and was falsely accused of treason by endless waves of media hysterics instead.

But Trump had gotten all his ideas of strategy, national security, and how to develop policy from listening to generations of simplistic, obscenely well-paid mindless chimpanzees performing on the conservative/Republican Fox News channel. And his appointments as secretaries of state, defense, national security advisers, and CIA chiefs reflected this.

Thus, Trump himself appointed two ignorant, incompetent, blundering super hawks – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton – who were determined to destroy the very policies of wider peace and specific improved relations with Russia that he wanted to foster. And they succeeded.

The more was typical of Trump at his worst. He listened to the two most stupid, criminally incompetent, and ignorant senior officials he ever appointed – Bolton and Pompeo.

Most of all, Trump swallowed the poisoned Kool Aid that Pompeo and Bolton, along with many others, fed him about the INF Treaty. So, he pulled the plug on it and refused to renew it in 2019. Like so many presidents before him, and Joe Biden after him, on the most crucial issues of war and peace, life and death, annihilation or survival, Trump could not even see to the end of his own nose.

Thus, the INF Treaty was allowed to die in 2019, and not a sparrow in Washington cried at its passing. What was left of the arms control community recognized the appalling nature of what had happened. But they were systematically shut out of all influence and power as relentlessly by Joe Biden’s Democrats as by Donald Trump’s Republicans. Fools seldom differ.

Today, we see what the end of the INF Treaty has led to. The immensely powerful and obscenely wealthy US defense contractors who have virtually all the elected politicians and wealthy think tanks inside the Beltway on their limitless payrolls are boosting record profits as all the nations of Europe, corralled into the now farcical but also sinister NATO alliance, are rounded up to buy their endless super-expensive weapons, most of which do not even work.

The sums spent are astronomical. But who cares? After all, the US government is nothing more than the biggest ATM machine of all time and it can always print more money. Or so the master strategists in Washington imagine.

Friday, August 2 this year marked the fifth anniversary of the scrapping of the INF Treaty, and once again Donald Trump is running for the presidency. His new opponent, incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris, has never spoken a coherent word on foreign policy or nuclear strategy in her life that was not written for her to be mindlessly recited out of a teleprompter.

In those five years, Harris and her boss President Biden complacently presided over a policy that propelled Ukraine into a war it could not win against Russia that has so far cost 600,000 lives – and the death toll still grows. For eight years Russia sought a peaceful end to the ongoing terrorist attacks against the Russian-speaking secessionist provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk. And Biden was in the forefront of blocking all those efforts in all the eight years till Russia invaded Ukraine to end the violence in 2022.

Now NATO openly boasts of deploying new intermediate missiles in Germany and Poland that can threaten to annihilate the heart of Russia. I am convinced this will not be allowed to happen. Those evil plans will be reduced to radioactive dust in a vastly greater preemptive catastrophe first. But the arrogance, blindness, and sheer madness of the Washington policymakers knows no limits.

The evil fruits of scrapping the INF Treaty have now sprouted all around us. And they are going to consume the entire world: very soon.