Trump to Withdraw U.S. From ‘Open Skies’ Treaty - The New York Times

The president held out the possibility of negotiations with the Russians that could save American participation in the accord. But even some of his own aides said success for that seemed unlikely.

• May 21, 2020Updated 5:51 p.m. ET

President Trump has decided to withdraw from another major arms control accord, he and other officials said Thursday, and will inform Russia that the United States is pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty, negotiated three decades ago to allow nations to fly over each other’s territory with elaborate sensor equipment to assure that they are not preparing for military action.

Mr. Trump’s decision may be viewed as more evidence that he is preparing to exit the one major arms treaty remaining with Russia: New START, which limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear missiles each. It expires in February, weeks after the next presidential inauguration, and Mr. Trump has insisted that China must join what is now a U.S.-Russia limit on nuclear arsenals.

Even as the administration disclosed Mr. Trump’s intention to withdraw from the Open Skies agreement, the president held out the possibility of negotiations with the Russians that could save American participation in the accord.

“There’s a chance we may make a new agreement or do something to put that agreement back together,” he said outside the White House. “I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to pull out and they’re going to come back and want to make a deal.”

That seems unlikely, even his own aides said. Yet at the same time, his newly appointed arms negotiator, Marshall Billingslea, said the administration planned to hold detailed conversations with the Russians over the future of New START. But the Chinese do not appear to be participating in that first meeting, even though Mr. Billingslea insisted that he was “confident” they would ultimately join.

So far, though, the Chinese have indicated no interest in limitations on their own nuclear arsenal, which is about a fifth of the size of the United States’ and Russia’s, and some critics of the administration’s approach say the insistence on Beijing’s participation is a poison pill to scuttle the treaty.

American officials have long complained that Moscow was violating the Open Skies accord by not permitting flights over a city where it was believed Russia was deploying nuclear weapons that could reach Europe, as well as forbidding flights over major Russian military exercises. (Satellites, the main source for gathering intelligence, are not affected by the treaty.)

“You reach a point at which you need to say enough is enough,” Mr. Billingslea said. “The United States cannot keep participating in this treaty if Russia is going to violate it with impunity.”

American officials also note that Mr. Trump was angered by a Russian flight directly over his Bedminster, N.J., golf estate in 2017. And in classified reports, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies have contended that the Russians are also using flights over the United States to map out critical American infrastructure that could be hit by conventional weapons or cyberattacks.

William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in a statement that the surveys of such civilian targets were “posing an unacceptable risk to our national security.”

But such collection was not prohibited under the treaty and much of the information is now publicly available on Google Earth and from commercial imagery.

Mr. Trump’s decision, rumored for some time, is bound to further aggravate European allies, including those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who are also signatories to the treaty.

They are likely to remain in the accord, which has nearly three dozen signatories, but have warned that with Washington’s exit, Russia will almost certainly respond by also cutting off their flights, which the allies use to monitor troop movements on their borders — especially important to the Baltic nations.

For Mr. Trump, the decision is the third time he has renounced a major arms control treaty.

Two years ago, he abandoned the Iran nuclear accord negotiated by President Barack Obama. Last year he left the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, again saying that he would not participate in a treaty that he said Russia was violating. When he announced his intention to withdraw, he said, as he did today, that he thought the Russians would seek a new deal; they did not.

The Open Skies Treaty was negotiated by President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At the time — a moment of relative warmth between the two countries that proved fleeting — the idea was to reduce the chances of accidental war by making troop movements and the placement of new missiles and armaments evident. It was hardly a new idea: It was first presented by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the summer of 1955 and rejected by Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, as an elaborate plan to spy on a weaker foe.

transcript

transcript

Eisenhower Describes Treaty on Open Skies

Archival footage of President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposing that the United States and the Soviet Union conduct surveillance of each other’s territory as a defense against a surprise attack.

Announcer: “At his White House press conference, the president’s comments on the Power’s spy case and on America’s foreign intelligence activities.” “No one wants another Pearl Harbor. This means that we must have knowledge of military forces and preparations around the world, especially those capable of massive surprise attack. Secrecy in the Soviet Union makes this essential. In most of the world, no large-scale attack could be prepared in secret. But in the Soviet Union, there is a fetish of secrecy and concealment. This is a major cause of international tension and uneasiness, today. Our deterrence must never be placed in jeopardy. The safety of the whole free world demands this. We prefer and work for a different kind of world, and a different way of obtaining the information essential to competence and effective deterrence. Open societies in the day of present weapons are the only answer. This was the reason for my Open Skies proposal in 1955 which I was ready, yes indeed, to put into effect to permit aerial observation over the United States and the Soviet Union, which would assure that no surprise attack was being prepared against anyone. I shall bring up the Open Skies proposal again at Paris. It is a means of ending concealment.”

It now has less relevance than it did then or even when it finally went into effect, in 2002, a decade after it was signed. Modern commercial satellite photography is widely and cheaply available, though it cannot replace all the information available through an airplane’s sensors.

“The concept of Open Skies, starting with President Eisenhower, was to give insight and build confidence related to military intentions, among other things,” Mr. Billingslea, a veteran of the George W. Bush Pentagon and considered a hard-liner on Russia, said in an interview. “But it no longer is serving that purpose because of so many Russian violations.”

He cited Russian moves to make it impossible for the United States to send flights over Kaliningrad, Georgia and Russia’s own large military exercises.

Nonetheless, European nations regard the regular flights — conducted by the United States, Britain and smaller powers — as an important continuing engagement with Russia, even if Moscow has increasingly blocked flight plans that seem permissible under the treaty.

Russia has said that the engagement in the treaty is valuable. Mr. Billingslea and his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, disagree.

Representative Eliot L. Engel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called Mr. Trump’s move illegal, noting that the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act requires that the president give Congress 120 days’ notice before beginning the withdrawal process. Mr. Trump signed that act.

“There is something particularly dangerous about a president, a secretary of state and a secretary of defense knowingly breaking the law in ways that jeopardize our safety and national security,” Mr. Engel said in a statement. “With this decision, that is exactly what they’ve chosen to do.”

Under the terms of the treaty, Mr. Trump’s formal notice to Russia and the other signatories starts a six-month clock toward final withdrawal. It requires a meeting of all the signatories within 60 days.

To the extent that foreign policy becomes an issue in the presidential campaign, the withdrawal from this treaty, along with the previous two, could become a debating point. On Monday, Antony J. Blinken, the top foreign policy adviser to Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said that “I would be very much in favor of staying engaged in Open Skies.”

Conservatives have been pressing Mr. Trump to withdraw for some time, despite his own periodic musings about his friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin, which he repeated on Thursday. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a longtime proponent of withdrawal, said in a statement, “It was long past time for the United States to withdraw from this treaty and stop allowing Russia to use our skies to spy on the American people.”

But that was the entire premise of the Eisenhower plan: that the “spying” would, in fact, build confidence that neither side was preparing for military action. The treaty was imagined as a way to verify the movement and exercises of conventional forces, though it also played some role in tracking the movement of tactical nuclear weapons as the Russians placed more aimed at targets in Western Europe.

“The transparency it provides has helped prevent miscalculation and misunderstandings that could have otherwise led to conflict,” said John F. Tierney, a former Democratic representative from Massachusetts who is the executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “This has become a reckless pattern” for the Trump administration.

Open Skies is a comparatively small treaty; the bigger issue will be the fate of New START.

For more than a year, Mr. Trump has said he would not renew the New START treaty, negotiated by Mr. Obama in 2010, unless China also joined. Beijing has rejected the idea. And it is unclear how that might work even if China agreed to enter the treaty. With 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons each, the United States and Russia would never be willing to reduce their arsenals to the 300 or so held by China. And allowing China to build up to American and Russian levels seems to defeat the purpose of arms control.

Mr. Pompeo has suggested that not all nuclear powers need to have the same number of nuclear weapons. But the idea that China would willingly agree to a small arsenal, especially at a moment of great tension with the United States, seems hard to imagine.

In a briefing for reporters Thursday afternoon, Mr. Billingslea said that he and his Russian counterparts had agreed to meet on the future of the New START treaty, and that the United States would insist that any negotiations include the Chinese. He said he was confident the Chinese would participate.

“The Chinese have an obligation to negotiate with us in good faith,” he said. “We also know they want to be treated as a great power, and what better way to do so” than entering into negotiations with Moscow and Washington.

“We will have to have very tough verification measures” for any new accord, he said.