Angela Kane on Nuclear Brinksmanship and the INF Treaty

VCDNP Senior Fellow Angela Kane participated in a panel discussion at the 2019 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. The panel, entitled "Nuclear Brinksmanship", addressed grave concerns raised by the potential demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, concluded by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1987. American President Donald Trump has claimed that he will affect withdrawal from the INF Treaty at the beginning of February 2019 if Russia does not remedy allegations of non-compliance against it.

Ms. Kane spoke at the panel alongside the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace William Burns. The discussion was moderated by WEF's Philip Shetler-Jones.

"Do we want to live in a world where we are threatened by a cloud of increasing nuclear significance? Do we want to deal with the ecological or the environmental consequences of that? And what has happened is that you have a narrative that is building up that the US administration is abrogating a lot of the treaties that are either bilateral or that are multilateral. The INF is one of the [...] signature pieces of the arms control and arms limitation agreement. There have always been agreements between the United States and the Russian Federation, ever since John F. Kennedy, and so if this treaty is abrogated, that basically means that the only one that is still standing is the New START. And the New START, which is expiring in 2021, can be extended one time. But one wonders what is actually the possibility of extending it if now the INF Treaty is abrogated."

The panel discussion is available to view below or on the WEF's website.