I belong to the tribe that favors treaties that reduce the risk of war, add transparency and predictability to relations between well-armed competitors, and that depress impulses toward arms races. Not all treaties and treaty provisions succeed. Some have not only failed to accomplish these objectives, but have undercut them. What are the worst offenders?
In contemporary Republican circles, the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty tops this list, but I strongly disagree. For three decades, the ABM Treaty braked one source of nuclear weapon requirements. Unfortunately, other accelerators were unchecked. If you are looking to apportion blame for MIRVs and other strategic modernization programs, the fault lies with the SALT I Interim Agreement, not with the ABM Treaty.
If we were to compile a list of the top mistakes in terms of provisions missing from arms control agreements, failure to stop MIRVs in the SALT I would certainly qualify. My list would also include the absence of a ban on underground testing in the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. But this post focuses on what was agreed to, not what was out of reach.
What, then, are the three worst treaties or treaty provisions? Here’s my list:
1. The 1919 Pact of Paris that followed World War I. The mercurial William C. Bullitt, who staffed President Wilson and Colonel House during the Paris Peace Conference, quit the US delegation and subsequently testified against the Treaty, famously declaring that, “This isn’t a treaty of peace… I can see at least eleven wars in it.” It didn’t take long for Bullitt to be proven right.
2. The provision in the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty prohibiting new or enlarged fortifications in the area east of Singapore and west of Hawaii. This constraint was a corollary to establishing a 5-5-3 ratio of naval power projection among the United States, Great Britain and Japan. Tokyo accepted the short straw if western powers did not build up their infrastructure in the Pacific. This system of constraints did not turn our very well. I’ll return to the inter-war naval treaties in a subsequent post.
3. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact not to use war as an instrument of national policy. Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, won the Nobel Peace prize for this agreement in 1929. Perhaps we should compile another list of regrettable Nobel Peace Prize recipients.
What I find notable about this short list is that all of these picks were negotiated during the inter-war period when high diplomacy sought to paper over hard reality. These agreements sought to constrain conflicts and eminently usable weapons without addressing the underlying reasons for war. They failed for understandable reasons.
Critics of nuclear arms control point to these failures all the time when lambasting treaties like New START or the CTBT. They cannot acknowledge two crucial differences between nuclear treaties and the inter-war accords. First, nuclear arms reduction and testing treaties haven’t papered over political differences; instead, they contributed to positive shifts in relations between well-armed, major powers that sought to avoid war. Second, nuclear weapons, unlike naval surface combatants, are not useful instruments of war.