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The Ideas of Hugo Grotius [1]

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Date: 2023-11-18

Early this month Russia renounced its membership in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, considered a pillar of European stability. The treaty, the Russian Foreign Ministry wrote in a report, “has become history for Russia once and for all.” North Atlantic Treaty Alliance countries quickly followed suit, suspending their treaty obligations, as stated by writer Mathias Hammer in his story “The Collapse of Global Arms Control.”

The CFE represents just one arms control agreement to have been thrown onto the garbage heap of history in recent years. New START, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Vienna document, and the Open Skies Treaty are all arms control treaties that have been hampered, suspended, or discarded as tensions have ratcheted between Russia and its adversaries, the United States and NATO.

These treaties are witness to the concept of international law, a success story for a certain period because the treaties helped ensure peace and reduced the chances of a full-scale war between NATO and Russia in its Soviet and post-Soviet forms. Arms control agreements usually lock countries into promises to limit their military activity and set up monitoring mechanisms so leaders can make sure their counterparts are abiding by their commitments. Past agreements set limits to Russian and the US’ nuclear arsenals or capped active military forces in Europe. This helped minimize misunderstandings, prevent arms races, and build hard-earned trust between military rivals. Renaissance thinker Hugo Grotius – who originated the concept of international law - would be proud of all accomplished in those years.

The agreements represented the result of decades of diplomatic efforts to stabilize the Euro-Atlantic world. As arms control treaties have become increasingly frayed, the norms they established have been torn down with Russia’s behavior being key to the suspension of norms, as it suspended its cooperation with the New START treaty, de-ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, a multilateral treaty to ban nuclear weapons testing. Russia said it’s seeking parity with the U.S., who has yet to ratify the treaty (CNTBT). But growing voices within Russia have called for Moscow to resume nuclear arms testing, something no country other than North Korea has done since the 1990s.

The Joe Biden administration sought to keep arms control talks on a separate track from the diplomatic breakdown in Russia-U.S. relations to keep the geopolitical tensions under control, and Russian officials have warned that arms control talks will be impossible while the US continues to support Ukraine. In the years after the Cold War, these landmark treaties remained out of the public eye. In 2002, President George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the landmark Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which sought to restrain arms races by limiting missile defenses. He claimed the treaty to be unnecessary, even as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin described the move as a “mistake.”

“From that point on, I think Russia no longer saw the United States as a partner,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a former National Security Council staffer, who now works at the Federation of American Scientists, in a report. “Putin's worst instincts were fanned and fed.”

In 2019, President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the INF Treaty after the US found Russia to be in violation of its treaty commitments. The treaty banned ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of 500 to 5,000 kilometers and led to the elimination of an entire category of nuclear weapons, said Hammer. Some arms control experts fear this generation of politicians don’t fear nuclear annihilation.

Across the board, the three largest nuclear powers are upgrading their arsenals with China in the process of rapidly building nukes, and it will likely double its nuclear arsenal to more than 1,000 warheads by the end of the decade. There have been some recent developments that have sparked a modicum of optimism among arms control experts. On Nov. 6 Chinese and American officials met to discuss arms control issues, the first meeting of its kind since the Obama administration. While it is unclear whether the talks led to any tangible results, even a rare sit-down was welcomed as a positive sign.

If the history of the first Cold War is any indicator, one side will have to establish defense dominance for significant arms control deals can be struck. Who knows how much time that will take. In the first Cold War, it wasn’t until the 1960’s and 1970’s until arms control deals between the two power blocks became a reality. However, there’s a relevant question that needs to be asked - is there a way we can cool geopolitical tensions without huge defense buildups on both sides of the world’s divide? Will we remember the principals of Hugo Grotius?

Jason Sibert is the Lead Writer of the Peace Economy Project

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