Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
If you keep a memento long enough, the moment it was meant to commemorate is bound to come around again in a reverse movement of history.
On my desk still rests a small plaque made from a Soviet-era SS-20 missile melted down into scrap metal. It was given to me in Moscow in late 1989 as a token of “new thinking” in the world by Valentin Falin, a former Soviet ambassador to West Germany and head of the International Department of the Soviet Communist Party, two years after the Soviets and the United States agreed to dismantle their intermediate range nuclear missiles deployed against each other across the Iron Curtain. As a return keepsake, I gave Falin a beautifully graffitied chunk of the fallen Berlin Wall that I had picked up out of the rubble.
In one of the most consequential milestones of the end of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 at the White House. For the first time, an American and Soviet president agreed to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons, restricting the deployment of both intermediate and short-range, land-based missiles that could reach targets from 500 to 5500 kilometers away. The accord ended one of the most fraught standoffs between the two superpowers in a divided Europe during the long history of the arms race.
Now, nearly 40 years later, those once-banned weapons are coming back — along with regional deployment of new, longer-range weapons — in a far more complex security environment. Both the U.S. and Russia have abrogated the landmark treaty. And today, unlike in the 1980s, not only is there a hot war raging in Ukraine, but there is another major power on the scene — China — which has entered the parlous balance-of-force equation with its own interests, intentions and insecurities.
After The Unraveling
The Trump administration withdrew from the INF treaty in 2019, accusing Russia of breaching it by testing and deploying banned weapons, but also because China was not included in the 1987 pact. In a tit-for-tat move, President Vladimir Putin suspended Russia’s participation in the treaty in short order.
China’s presence introduces the “three-body problem.” The situation of three objects of similar mass in close enough proximity to exert force on each other is far more inherently unstable than two objects that can more easily achieve a steady equilibrium by reciprocally calibrating their relationship to each other’s gravitational weight and predictable behavior. The fluctuations of a third body disrupts that fine-tuned balance.
For now, China is closer to Russia than to the U.S., as it was in the early revolutionary era of the mid-20th century until each saw the other as a threat. China then sought a new balance by opening to the West — only to turn once again, after prospering decades, to strategic alignment with Moscow. What will be its next move?
China’s wobbly vacillations with respect to the other two force fields perfectly epitomizes the three-body instability that will now haunt the coming arms race. And that is not to speak of the shifting influence a newly aggressive Russia has had on the U.S. posture and how that posture itself may well move in another direction entirely depending on the outcome of November’s election.
In late June, Putin declared that Russia would resume production of intermediate and short range nuclear-capable missiles and position them against planned U.S. deployments in Europe and Asia. Last week, Russian deputy defense minister Sergei Ryabkov announced coming deployments specifically to counter a plan announced at the NATO summit in Washington to place mid-range Typhon and Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as longer-range hyper-sonic missiles, in Germany by 2026.
A spokesman for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said: “In view of the modernization of the Russian nuclear arsenal and Russia’s aggressive policy, which threatens Germany’s and Europe’s security, this is the right thing to do.”
On the other front of the three-body problem, the U.S. Army Pacific Command announced in April that it had deployed Typhon missiles in the northern Philippines facing Taiwan — the first actual positioning of that class of missile by the U.S. since the INF treaty ended. China immediately denounced the move as bringing “huge risks of war to the region” and pledged countermeasures.
Because China was never part of the INF treaty, defense analysts in the West note that it has already deployed a “theater-range arsenal” of nuclear-capable missiles that could reach Japan or U.S. bases in the western Pacific in any conflict over Taiwan. In the minds of U.S. strategists, that asymmetry is why a counterforce is necessary in the region.
Complexity And Opportunity
So, we are off and running again in the same race with more players than the last time around — which only ended when it was recognized by everyone concerned that, beyond a certain threshold, the quest for security through piling up more and more weapons only generates perpetual insecurity as each mimics the other’s fear of advantage, feeding the momentum of an endless buildup.
If that illusive dynamic could be grasped both by America’s most hawkish president and the Soviet Union’s last and most courageous statesman, one would think it might be a lasting lesson learned rather than repeating the foreseeable pattern all over again in the decades to come. Must we always wait for things to get worse before we to try to make them better?
Opportunity always hides in instability if you have the imagination to see it and the will to seize it. In the three-body constellation, just as two can leverage their combined force against the third for war, so too could their disengagement from conflict enhance peaceful stability not only with each other but elsewhere in their orbit? This was, in fact, the effect ending the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviets had on China by creating the global breathing space for “reform and opening up” in the decades after the end of the Cold War.
Is it beyond plausibility that the complexity of the three-body problem can similarly be exploited today as a chance for the two weightiest powers, China and the U.S., to negotiate a minimum deterrent force structure that serves to induce the third power to do so before an all-around buildup that will inexorably raise tensions?
Not even a glimmer of such deft diplomacy appears on the horizon. Yet one can still answer that the INF treaty, too, was unimaginable in the immediate years before it became possible.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, mass anti-war demonstrations roiled Europe, particularly West Germany, protesting that U.S. deployment of Pershing missiles to counter the Soviet SS-20s would risk war on the continent. Ronald Reagan came to power in the U.S. during those tensions, boosting the arms race further. He uncompromisingly excoriated the “Evil Empire” while a parade of doddering apparatchiks, as rigid and worn as their ideology, occupied the top posts in the Kremlin with their unsteady fingers poised on the nuclear trigger, dying off one after another at brief intervals before Gorbachev emerged as virtually the only one who could still stand unaided.
The circumstances were so bleak that widespread alarm gripped public opinion over the prospect of a “nuclear winter” that would result if the colossal arsenals of 60,000 nuclear warheads at the time were ever used. It was out of a common realization that the world was on the brink of looming calamity that the “unrealistic” and geopolitically unsophisticated notion of disarmament suddenly seemed not only necessary, but tenable.
Looking at the missile memento on my desk and reflecting back on those years, I’m reminded that what was initially criticized as naïve and idealistic in such despairing times later turned out to be precocious wisdom that saved the day. The hope ahead is that history can be reversed yet again by the naively precocious before we get back to the brink we once left behind.
