What did the INF suspension of 1 February 2019 signal?
A look back at the US announcement that it would suspend its role in a 1987 arms control treaty with Russia.
What did it mean when Washington said it was stepping back from one of its central arms control agreements? On 1 February 2019, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States was suspending its role in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, citing Russian non-compliance.
The treaty was made in 1987 with the USSR and, by extension, its successor state Russia. It banned both countries from possessing or testing nuclear and conventional intermediate-range missiles, as well as their launchers. The announcement therefore concerned a limit that had applied to both sides for more than three decades.
Reading the announcement
The stated reason was clear: the United States pointed to Russian non-compliance. The announcement placed the treaty within the wider context of Russia–United States relations, which some scholars and journalists have described, using terms such as Cold War II or the Second Cold War, as a period of heightened geopolitical tension between the United States and NATO on one side and Russia or China on the other. Others have discouraged the use of those labels.
For readers in Kyiv and elsewhere in Europe, the significance lay in the direction of travel: an agreement covering an entire category of missiles was no longer being upheld by one of its two parties in the way it had been. The announcement of 1 February 2019 was a statement of that position, and it marked a moment when the arms control framework between Washington and Moscow visibly weakened.
