The Cornerstone Crumbles

At midnight on Wednesday, December 12, Russia suspended its participation in the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. Also known as “the cornerstone of European security,” the CFE is the most important of three arms treaties that effectively ended the Cold War. In symbol and practice, the it is a massive achievement that was greeted by global euphoria when signed in Paris in November 1990 by NATO and Warsaw Pact leaders.

Considerably less attention is being paid to its slow-motion passing. While Russia's moratorium is a solemn event for arms control wonks from the Atlantic to the Urals, few others will take serious note. With so many hot wars raging, I suppose it’s hard for people to get too worked up over the critical condition of a Bush I-era piece of paper.

I realized just how little attention the unraveling of landmark arms control regimes is getting when I started making background calls for this article. “Thank you for taking an interest in this subject!” more than one think-tanker told me with surprising think-tank enthusiasm. They obviously haven’t been overwhelmed by reporters curious about the hardening security deadlocks between Russia and the West, which on paper at least is starting to look like the end of the Cold War being played back in reverse. The CFE is just the latest end-of-the-Cold War treaty whose future is in doubt.

It is also the most lovable. The other two treaties that formalized the end of the Cold War arms race—START and INF—were nuke treaties that left massive hair-trigger nuclear arsenals on both sides. It’s hard to feel too fuzzy about those. The 1972 ABM Treaty was a lovable regime, simple in logic and clean in sweep, but it’s been dead for six years. The START process and the INF Treaty may not be far behind, a reality tied to the 2001 U.S. withdrawal from the ABM. The CFE's problems also cannot be completely separated from U.S. plans for missile defense stations in Europe. Like the CFE, they used to call the ABM a "cornerstone" of strategic stability. Its death is an object lesson in what happens when you start messing around with cornerstones.

The CFE essentially replaced the Berlin Wall with a Plexiglass Panopticon, making force deployments around Europe transparent to all. An ambitious and successful collective security regime, it made massive surprise attacks on the continent impossible. It did this very simply: by forcing the Cold War players to reduce their conventional arsenals and show their hands. The CFE cut and regulated the numbers of troops, tanks, planes, attack helicopters, and artillery along European fault lines. As an added bonus, the treaty does away with the temptation to place short-range nukes in Europe as a hedge against conventional surprise attack. As they say, it’s win-win.

So why is Russia suspending compliance? Is the country planning another massive conventional buildup along its western border? Is Moscow, as claimed by U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, “unilaterally walking out of one of the most important arms-control regimes of the last 20 years”?

No. If that were the case, Moscow would have simply withdrawn from the treaty, as Washington withdrew from ABM, and not announced a moratorium months in advance while expressing hope that the treaty would be saved.

Russia is suspending compliance because a lot has changed since the original treaty was signed in 1990. The CFE was updated in 1999 to reflect these changes, but most Western nations, led by Washington, have refused to ratify CFE 2.0, negotiated in Istanbul in 1999. “We will not wait forever,” Vladimir Putin said last month, explaining the decision.

The West is refusing to ratify the new CFE because of the presence of Russian peacekeepers in Georgia (Abkhasia and South Ossetia) and Moldova (Transdnestr), as well as a few hundred troops guarding a 20,000-ton ammunition depot in the latter. Washington says these deployments violate the letter and spirit of the CFE treaty and must be removed before ratification. Russia believes the same is true of U.S. missile defense stations in Europe and NATO expansion, but has not let that stop it from recognizing the larger importance of the CFE. Russia ratified the amended version in 2004.

“Russia is using strong medicine to push the U.S. and allies to
ratify the CFE, which Moscow does not want to lose,” said Dmitri
Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and veteran of
Soviet delegations to Gorbachev-era arms talks. “Russia is not
interested in unregulated force build-ups in Europe. Neither is
America, which has wider interests in keeping Russia within the
framework of the CFE. [Washington] should have ratified it. Europe will
fall in line if it does. [But] Washington wants to be seen as sticking
up for the pro-western governments of Georgia and Moldova.” 

The result is a game of geopolitical chicken, which could result in both sides shooting over a cliff. 

Meetings on the sidelines of last week’s NATO foreign minister’s
conference in Brussels failed to close the NATO-Russia gap. After the
final session of the NATO-Russia Council, both sides expressed
frustration. "The fact that an important document has been blocked due
to the absolutely ideological position of our American colleagues, who
are trying to force us to annul Russia's law on the Conventional Forces
in Europe [CFE] treaty, obviously is a cause for regret," said Sergei
Lavrov.

U.S. Secretary of State Rice also found the impasse “regrettable,”
but refused to decouple CFE ratification from the question of Russian
peacekeepers and troops in Georgia Moldova.

According to Russian arms control expert Alexei Arbatov, there is no basis for this linkage. 

“The [negotiated CFE amendments] do not imply the withdrawal of
troops by a certain date,” wrote Arbatov in a recent article
distributed by RIA/Novisti. “They only provide for a relevant
agreement, for instance with Georgia, where Russia only has
peacekeepers rather than bases, which is a fundamental difference.
Withdrawal of peacekeepers is linked with the settlement of the
relevant conflicts rather than the CFE Treaty.”

The view that the U.S. should decouple the Georgia and Moldova issue
from CFE ratification is widely shared by the international arms
control community. Earlier this month nearly 50 former officials and
arms experts across the Cold War divide published an appeal to break
the logjam and rescue the CFE. 

“We firmly believe that all the parties should abide by the core CFE
principles and that current disagreements must not be allowed to erode
or destroy a regime fundamental to the security of the whole of
Europe,” reads the statement. “All states and peoples of Europe would
lose if the CFE regime, an unprecedented instrument for the
preservation of peace and with greatest importance to Europe’s future,
would now be destroyed.”

After the Russian moratorium goes into effect, attention shifts to
Saturday, December 15, Russia’s first deadline to submit a CFE report
after its announced suspension. Failure to meet its CFE obligations
could begin the process of further unraveling western support for the
treaty and making ratification even more unlikely. 

“At the moment no one is serious about a military conflict in
Europe,” says Dmitri Trenin of Carnegie Moscow. “But while there would
be no immediate military result of CFE [collapsing], there would be
considerable political and psychological fallout.”

This metaphorical fallout may not seem like such a big deal at the
moment. But when it comes to NATO-Russian relations, it’s good to
remember that the specter of the other kind of fallout is never hiding
that deep in the shadows.