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One usually thinks of a conservative as an individual who wants to conserve something.
Like many of the issues in our turbulent political system, President Donald Trump is anything but a conservative in the realm of nuclear arms control. Trump recently announced that our country would leave the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Reagan-era treaty that bans Russia and the United States from having conventional or nuclear ground-based weapons from 300 to 3,400 miles. Ending the treaty makes the world less safe from nuclear threat because it does away with a key nonproliferation instrument.
In addition, Trump has said that our country might leave the 2010 New Start treaty with Russia. Leaving these treaties would strengthen Vladimir Putin’s hand in Europe against our allies. However, our current president seems to be more skeptical of our allies than Putin’s Russia.
Since the 1960s, the United States and Russia (in its Soviet and post-Soviet forms) worked together to eliminate much of the world’s nuclear arsenal and make our world a safer place. Arms control accomplishments like the INF and New Start treaty have also helped our country fiscally. The effectiveness of the two agreements freed up funds to spend on domestic needs to make our economy more fair and strong. Arms control and diplomacy only cost a fraction of what new nuclear weapons cost.
The Trump administration, and the Obama administration before it, concluded Russia is not in compliance with the INF Treaty by deploying a small number of banned missiles. President Obama’s special assistant and senior director at the National Security Council for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, Jon Wolfstahl, said some in the government felt the answer to this problem was to work together with our allies to bring Russia back into compliance.
If our country follows through with its threat to withdraw from the INF Treaty, Russia will continue to build its arsenal and any attempts to work together with our allies to sanction Russia will not be worth the try. President Trump is making our country an obstacle to the cause of nuclear arms control. Leaving either INF or New Start would create a nuclear arms race and also risk a case of miscalculation, one of the greatest dangers of nuclear arms.
While Trump and his allies have often told the American people how they’re “making America great again,” our real history has a different story to tell. Alexander Hamilton, one of our forefathers and the first secretary of the treasury, believed in the establishment of international law to prevent international conflict.
Hamilton was an opponent of our first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, because he felt the federal government didn’t have enough power to govern effectively and that the individual states were too powerful. One of his points of opposition was the ability of individual states to ditch treaties made by the federal government under the Articles, as they featured stronger states and a weaker federal government. Hamilton used Hugo Grotius’ “The Rights of War and Peace” to develop the legal foundations of the then-new country. Grotius was the progenitor of international law, or the idea that nations can build legal structures to build a more lawful world.
What is the difference between a Hamilton, a Grotius, and a Trump? Grotius (1583-1945) was a Renaissance thinker who laid the foundation for the idea of international law. He thought international law was based on natural law, or laws that could be found in nature. The Renaissance was a period of time that marked the rebirth of humanism and learning after the Dark Ages.
Hamilton (1787-1804), like our forefathers, was a man of the Enlightenment. The ideas of the Enlightenment were built upon the ideas of the Renaissance. The thinkers of the Enlightenment thought humans could build a better world for themselves by using human reason. Trump can’t be put in a line of thinking with Hamilton and Grotius. His knee-jerk approach to foreign policy doesn’t take reason, order, or law into account. It’s just based around the concept that “the other” – other nations in Trump’s foreign policy – are taking advantage of us in bad treaties. How do we return to the ideals of our founders? The ideas that came out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Jason Sibert
Peace Economy Project