Opinion

Can Putin afford a new arms race?

October 24, 2018

The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty between Moscow and Washington heralded a sea-change in the superpower rivalry between the United States and the then Soviet Union. A welcome tide of peace and security was coming in. More than 30 years on, President Donald Trump’s repudiation of the INF reflects the unfortunate reality that that tide of peace and security is going out.

The treaty banned ground-launched medium-range missiles, with a range of between 500 and 5,500km. President Vladimir Putin’s Russia appeared to have violated the agreement in 2013. President Barack Obama protested but, as with so much else in his vacillating and lackluster administration, did not push the issue further.

And it must be wondered if either side to this deal ever actually stopped research and development on these weapons, for the very good reason that if the geo-political axis shifted back to confrontation, they would need to return to physical production as quickly as possible.

In any event, the INF treaty stood for far more than the de-ratcheting of the superpower confrontation. Ronald Reagan had faced down the crumbling Soviet Union and the pragmatic Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev saw that Communism, as adopted ruthlessly by Lenin and Stalin, had failed. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the subsequent opening of Russia to capitalism ended the Cold War and seemed to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.

However, from the get-go Russia became ever more humiliated. Under Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s successor, the country’s experience of free market capitalism saw the collapse of the rouble, the destruction of savings and the wholesale plunder of state assets by Yeltsin’s favorites.

Moreover, Western businessmen moved into the economy more like conquerors than partners. Russia felt that its nose was being rubbed into the dirt of its failed communist state. It was the reversal of that humiliation that fueled Putin’s rise to power and sustains him still as the country’s widely admired strongman. The fact that in capitalist terms Russia now has a gimcrack economy still dominated by oligarchs is less important than the reality that Putin has restored national pride and reasserted Russia’s place in the world.

And part of Putin’s narrative is that just as Yeltsin’s Russia was threatened by a US-led capitalist takeover, so it is now once again in armed confrontation with Washington, if not with the less aggressive and poorly-armed Europeans. Trump’s scrapping of the INF plays strongly to that narrative. Whatever the truth of Obama’s claim four years ago that the Kremlin had broken the terms of the treaty, Putin is now able to increase the rhetoric and also of course, his expenditure on the Russian military and its capabilities.

But the question has to be whether or not history is repeating itself. Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was bankrupt. It lost the Cold War because it simply could no longer afford to compete militarily, dollar for dollar, with the United States. Does Putin now have the economic base with which to reverse that econometric? International sanctions already constrain Russia’s economy. Trump says he is boosting military and weapons spending. This will generate more American growth. However, it is hard to see Putin getting the same payback from a new arms race.


October 24, 2018
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