The NRCC has publicized a poll from North Star Opinion Research that not only shows freshman Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath leading Republican Karen Handel in Georgia’s 6th District, it also finds Handel losing support since April. The new survey has McBath up 48-46, while it was Handel who was ahead 49-47 in North Star’s older poll. We haven’t seen any other numbers here.
The NRCC, in what seems to have already become a tradition for Republicans, also did not include presidential numbers in either of these two polls. If Team Red did ask respondents about that contest, though, we doubt they’d like the result.
This ancestrally red seat in Atlanta’s affluent northern suburbs went from 61-37 Romney to 48-47 Trump, and, despite the taint of Republican voter suppression that marred her election, Democrat Stacey Abrams carried it 51.0-47.5 during the 2018 contest for governor; McBath also unseated Handel 50.5-49.5 in a 2018 upset. Well-educated suburban areas like this have only become more hostile to Team Red since then, so this is unlikely to be friendly turf for Trump this fall.
And while McBath was the underdog during her last race, she now has a massive financial edge over the former congresswoman. McBath outraised Handel $1.45 million to $522,000 during the second quarter of 2020, and the incumbent ended June with a $3.8 million to $1.2 million cash-on-hand lead.
There's no non-racist reason at this point to support this buffoon
Axios’s Jonathan Swan interviewing President Donald Trump. | Axios/HBO
Jonathan Swan just put on a clinic on how to interview Trump.
President Donald Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios began with him telling a dizzying string of lies about his coronavirus response and the state of the pandemic in the country. It ended with Trump making the death of civil rights leader John Lewis about himself. It didn’t go any better in between.
For the second time in a month, Trump’s attempt to sit down for an interview with a journalist willing to challenge him ended in disaster. Over the course of 37 minutes, Swan repeatedly exposed Trump’s inability to respond to the most basic of follow-up questions.
Trump’s difficulty with push-back is often concealed when he answers questions beside a loud helicopter or in the friendly confines of Sean Hannity’s show. But the Swan interview, which came out just two weeks after Trump’s similarly disastrous performance on Chris Wallace’s show, highlighted the degree to which Trump is unable to defend his record in the face of even mildly challenging questions.
Trump’s coronavirus comments continue to be an embarrassment
Perhaps the most terrifying part of the interview came early on when Swan peppered Trump with a string of questions about why he isn’t doing more to fight the coronavirus and why the virus has hit the US so much harder than other comparable countries.
Asked how he can say the pandemic is under control when roughly 1,000 Americans are dying from Covid-19 each day, Trump said, remarkably, that “it is what it is.”
“They are dying. That’s true. It is what it is. ... It’s under control as much as you can control it.”
“They are dying. That’s true. And it is what it is.”
On the topic of America’s struggles with coronavirus testing, including long wait times for test results that render testing almost worthless, Trump resorted to making stuff up.
“There are those that say you can test too much. You know that?” Trump said at one point.
“Who says that?” Swan responded.
“Read the manuals. Read the books,” answered Trump.
“What books?” Swan challenged, but no answer was forthcoming. Instead, Trump said that “when I took over we didn’t even have a test” — as if the Obama administration was supposed to develop a test for a virus that didn’t exist until nearly three years after Trump’s inauguration.
A few minutes later, just as he did on Wallace’s show, Trump waved around pieces of paper with charts and graphs in an unconvincing effort to make it seem as though the US coronavirus death toll of more than 150,000 isn’t as bad as it seems.
“Right here, the United States is lowest in ... numerous categories ... ah, we’re lower than the world,” Trump stammered, which prompted Swan to respond, incredulously, “lower than the world? In what?”
“Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” Swan continued. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc. ... Look at South Korea: 50 million population, 300 deaths.”
Trump responded by suggesting South Korea is faking its numbers. But when Swan challenged him on that point, Trump quickly changed the topic back to his pieces of paper.
“Here’s one right here. You take the number of cases. No, look. We’re last. Meaning we’re first,” Trump said.
“I mean, 1,000 Americans die a day,” Swan responded. “If hospital rates were going down and deaths were going down, I’d say terrific, you deserve to be praised for testing. But they’re all going up!
Watch the exchange:
.@jonathanvswan: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”@realdonaldtrump: “You can’t do that.”
In the minutes that followed, Trump failed to explain the contradiction between his claims about being a voracious consumer of intelligence reports and that he was never informed about intelligence that Russia was offering bounties for US troops in Afghanistan that was reportedly in said briefs. “I read a lot. I comprehend extraordinarily well. Probably better than anybody you’ve interviewed in a long time,” the president claimed.
He also revealed total confusion about the difference between absentee and mail-in voting, struggled to explain why he recently extended his well-wishes to accused sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell (“Yeah, I wish her well. I’d wish you well, I’d wish a lot of people well. Good luck.”), and dismissed video footage of federal law enforcement officials using a baton to beat a Navy veteran who was protesting in Portland.
Trump tells #AxiosOnHBO that he stands by his comments wishing alleged child sex trafficker and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell well.
“I think that actually, antifa should be investigated, not the law enforcement,” Trump said.
Trump’s race relations remarks pour fuel on the fire
But perhaps Trump’s most tone-deaf remarks were reserved for the end when Swan asked him a string of questions about racial inequalities and his reaction to the death of John Lewis.
Presented with a statistic that succinctly illustrates systemic racism in the country — “Why do you think Black men are two and half times more likely to be killed by police than white men?” Swan asked — Trump dodged with an equivalency.
“I do know this: that police have killed many white people also,” he said.
After Trump claimed he’s done “more for the Black community than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, whether you like it or not,” Swan asked him: “You believe you did more than Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act?”
“How has it worked out?” Trump responded. “If you take a look at what Lyndon Johnson did. How has it worked out?”
The interview closed with what should’ve been a softball — “How do you think history will remember John Lewis?” Swan asked. But instead of paying lip service to Lewis’s record as a Civil Rights icon, Trump denigrated him for the pettiest of reasons.
“I really don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration,” Trump said.
“Taking your relationship with him out of it, do you find his story impressive, what he’s done for this country?” Swan followed up.
“He was a person that devoted a lot of energy and a lot of heart to civil rights. But there were many others also,” Trump demurred.
Swan: Do you find John Lewis impressive?
Trump: I can't say one way or the other... but, no, he didn't come to my inauguration. He didn't come to my SOTU speeches, and that's ok... And again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have. pic.twitter.com/TEESiVQQk0
The interview was recorded last Tuesday and aired Monday evening on Axios’s HBO show. In a sign of how it went, Trump — who regularly promotes softball interviews he does with the Hannitys of the world in the hope of getting as many people as possible to tune in — didn’t mention it on Twitter or elsewhere.
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Enlarge / View of an iceberg and the Hurtigruten hybrid expedition cruise ship MS Roald Amundsen on Half Moon island, Antarctica on November 09, 2019. (credit: Getty | JOHAN ORDONEZ)
Four of the infected crew members have been hospitalized and hundreds of passengers are in quarantine, awaiting test results.
MS Roald Amundsen is run by the Norwegian firm Hurtigruten, which in mid-June became the first cruise ship operator in the world to resume voyages amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hurtigruten assured travelers that it followed national public health guidelines and touted safety precautions for passengers on board, including social distancing, increased hygiene and sanitation protocols, and a vow to sail at no more than 50 percent capacity.
Yeah, I'm thinking it wasn't eyes that drew attention here.
Is learning to wink a gay man’s most powerful tool in our new masked world? Over these past few face-masked months, Michael Henry realized that “I tend to give off a lot of social cues orally” so came up with a new trademark: winking. But Henry found a counterargument from Andrew, a friend at the park, whose winking game brought out something very explosive.
Again, in a sane world, this would be singlehandedly disqualifying
In a wild new interview on Axios, Donald Trump revealed how far his dangerous and frankly, criminal delusion (whether he believes it himself or is knowingly pushing lies) has gone about the extent of the coronavirus crisis in the U.S.
Trump’s analysis, his comparison of how the U.S. is doing compared to the rest of the world, is drawn from deaths as a proportion of coronavirus cases and not as a proportion of population, as reporter Jonathan Swan pointed out.
“You can’t do that, ” Trump told him.
“Why can’t I do that?” Swan asked.
.@jonathanvswan: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”@realdonaldtrump: “You can’t do that.”
Trump went on to have a huge blow-up about mail-in voting and absentee ballots: “In the interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, Trump continued his campaign of raising doubts about voting by mail — which he has done repeatedly on Twitter and in public comments — but amplified it by tying it to the prospect of a lengthy election count.”
Said Trump: “You know, you could have a case where this election won’t be decided on the evening of Nov. 3. This election could be decided two months later. … lots of things will happen during that period of time. Especially when you have tight margins. Lots of things can happen. There’s never been anything like this.”
The truth, as Axios notes: “It is true that voting by mail is likely to expand significantly because of the pandemic. But voting by mail itself dates back to the Civil War, and 1 in 4 Americans have used it in the last three federal elections, per the Brennan Center. … States that allow mail-in voting generally have a wide variety of security measures, like making people request ballots with personal information (like a driver’s license number), unique bar codes on ballot envelopes, ballot tracking, and secure drop-off locations.”
Trump also had nothing nice to say about civil rights icon and longtime Congressman John Lewis except that he didn’t come to his inauguration or speeches: “Nobody has done more for black Americans than I have.”
Trump added that he would “have no objection” to renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama after John Lewis.
This week, the president of the United States is sort-of-kind-of-maybe trying to help a different giant US tech company become even bigger — by forcing the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell it to Microsoft.
There are all kinds of perspectives on a potential sale of TikTok from ByteDance to Microsoft. Some rational people think it’s a good idea: They don’t want the popular social video app with a huge presence in the US to be controlled by a Chinese company because Chinese companies are, in various ways, extensions of the Chinese government.
But it seems to me that one of the striking parts of the whole deal would be that the US government, which says it worries about the reach and power of its homegrown tech giants, is now actively encouraging a deal that would supersize one of those giants.
Which suggests that the US isn’t really worried about the reach and power of its tech giants.
Caveat time! There are many confounding, surprising, and improbable components to the ByteDance-TikTok-Microsoft-White House-China story, which is very much a moving target. This afternoon, for instance, Donald Trump insisted that in order for the deal to go through, the US government would have to get a “very substantial portion” of any sale price if Microsoft does buy TikTok from ByteDance.
Trump, of course, says all kinds of things, all the time. Many of those things are not true. But if he actually means it this time, it means the deal looks much less likely than it did a few hours earlier.
And while we’re at it, let’s be clear that it’s hard to make a real antitrust argument against a Microsoft-TikTok deal, at least as antitrust law works in the US right now: TikTok may worry the social media giant Facebook, but Facebook still dwarfs TikTok; same thing for Google’s YouTube. Facebook, for instance, says it has 256 million users in the US and Canada; TikTok says it is at 100 million.
It’s also not a coincidence that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was not in Washington last week, testifying along with the heads of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. With the exception of its Xbox gaming platform, Microsoft has a very modest consumer internet presence in the US psyche*. If any big tech company is going to acquire TikTok, it would be Microsoft.
But let’s also be very clear: While Microsoft has turned itself into a giant tech company that focuses on business customers, it is still very much a Giant Tech Company — one that the US government spent years trying to break up because of the way it abused its status as the dominant computer operating system in the 1990s.
In short: If you were worried about the concentration of tech power in the US, you wouldn’t add the most consequential new social media platform in years to a company that made $44 billion in profits — four Amazons — last year. (That said! In the near term, Facebook execs won’t complain while Microsoft figures out, structurally and technically, how to separate TikTok from its current owner/operators and rebuilt large portions of it. Big companies usually expect to take a year or more to swallow up a significant acquisition; this one could be way more difficult.)
If US lawmakers were truly concerned about the power of tech giants, they would be actively be debating laws to rein that in, instead of punting the work to enforcement agencies like the DOJ and the FTC. And an entire faction of US politicians wouldn’tspend their time in important antitrust hearings focusingon made-up claims that big internet companies are bad because they censor conservatives.
If anything, you could argue that a TikTok sale to Microsoft makes it even less likely that we’ll see real antitrust movement against Google or Facebook. If that deal goes through, both companies can credibly argue that TikTok is now an even fiercer rival to their business because it has Microsoft behind it.
Again: I’m happy to entertain arguments for or against TikTokSoft — it’s a genuinely fascinating and important inflection point for tech and world politics. But next time you tell me the US government is Very Worried About Big Tech, you’re going to have work much harder to convince me.
* Not for lack of trying: If Microsoft had succeeded in its attempt to buy Yahoo many years ago, or if it hadn’t burned billions trying to build a consumer ad business, maybe things would be different.
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National Covid-19 cases appear to be plateauing, but new hot spots are emerging.
For the first time in a while, there is a bit of good news to report about America’s coronavirus pandemic: Nationally, cases have plateaued — and in some places, they have begun to decline slightly.
But, as always is the case when looking at the national numbers, the situation is more complicated than it seems.
Over the last two weeks, the average number of new cases reported daily has dipped from more than 66,000 to roughly 60,000, according to the Covid Exit Strategy tracker. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 nationwide has also fallen in the last 10 days, which would suggest an ebb in the virus’s spread. The explanation for the drops is pretty simple: Arizona, Florida, California, and Texas — the four states that had driven much of the summer wave — have seen their daily new cases drop by between 11 percent and 28 percent over the last two weeks. Hospitalizations in those states have also tailed off.
Deaths are still at their highest levels since May, however, with the US currently averaging more than 1,000 Covid-19 deaths every day.
Earlier in the summer, there seemed to be a disconnect between case numbers and death counts, with the death count remaining low even as new case counts rose. But this time, the case count is declining and the death count is rising. Because of the lag between when a person’s case is reported and when their death would be reported if they fall victim to the coronavirus — which can sometimes be a month or more — we may not see the drop in cases reflected in the death data for a while.
It’s too soon to say any of those four states are out of the woods entirely. Certain areas, like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, are still struggling, and experts warn that any progress could be quickly reversed.
“It would not take much — schools reopening in person, or people relaxing precautions a little bit because we’re ‘past the peak’ — for us to have a growing epidemic again,” Tom Hladish, a research scientist at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, told me.
But if the summer’s hot spots are in fact starting to turn a corner, the worry is new ones will flare up. The US had enjoyed a steady decline in cases and deaths after the New York City region got through the worst of its outbreak in the spring — until Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas began reopening their economies and cases picked up again in June. This was an important reminder that the US does not have one outbreak but many, and any improvements in one place could be quickly offset if new areas experience a spike in cases, hospitalizations, and, eventually, deaths.
With that in mind, I asked public health experts which states show signs of an accelerating outbreak and looked at the data myself.
There are some states that have had worrying trends for a while but flew under the radar while much of the nation’s attention focused on the Big Four. Georgia and Nevada typify that group; their daily new cases, positive test rates, and hospitalizations are stubbornly high. Others are definitely trending in the wrong direction: Missouri and Oklahoma are two states where cases and positive test rates have gone up recently.
But two states stood out from the rest, the unfortunate candidates most likely to become the next US hot spots: Alabama and Mississippi.
Alabama
There are various ways to measure the scale and trajectory of a state’s outbreak — percent of tests coming back positive, number of new cases per million people, number of hospital beds occupied — but by any of these metrics, Alabama is in a bad place.
At the beginning of July, Alabama was averaging fewer than 1,000 new Covid-19 cases every day. Today, the daily average is above 1,600. The percentage of tests that are positive is more than 21 percent and rising, according to Covid Exit Strategy; experts say that the positivity rate should be 5 percent or less in order for a state to feel it is adequately managing its outbreak. According to the Covid Tracking Project, about 800 people were hospitalized with Covid-19 in Alabama on July 1; today, the number is 1,529.
Going by the number of new cases per million people — a good proxy for how saturated a state is with Covid-19 infections — Alabama has the fourth-worst outbreak in the US. It also ranks fifth in the number of people hospitalized per million people. Right now, 72 percent of the state’s hospital beds are occupied, which the public health researchers at Covid Exit Strategy characterize as an “elevated” level of hospitalizations.
Taken together, these are a troubling set of trends. Alabama did issue a statewide mask order in mid-July, which may help to ensure the situation does not spiral out of control, and Gov. Kay Ivey has extended the mandate through August. But the state has been reluctant to order businesses closed again after starting to reopen its economy in late April, and Ivey has been insistent about starting in-person instruction at Alabama schools.
“It is worth watching whether face mask orders in place ... help to curtail or prevent widespread outbreaks,” Jennifer Tolbert, director of state health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said. It will likely be several weeks before any effect would be seen, given the lags in reporting.
Mississippi
Mississippi is, if anything, even worse off than its neighbor to the east.
The number of daily new cases roughly doubled from 639 on July 1 to 1,178 on August 2. More than 20 percent of tests are positive, and that number has been steadily rising for the last two weeks. A month ago, about 800 people were hospitalized with Covid-19 in Mississippi; today, nearly 1,200 are. It now ranks second in new cases per million people, behind only Florida.
Most troubling is the growing death toll. The state reported 52 new deaths on July 31, a record, and dramatically higher than one month ago, when Mississippi was seeing 10 deaths per day on average. Its large Black population and high poverty levels could make the state particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus, considering being a person of color and of a lower socioeconomic status have been linked to more adverse outcomes.
“Both Alabama and Mississippi have an awful lot of counties that are predicted to be vulnerable on the basis of their population demographics,” William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me, “Whether age, race, or socioeconomic status, or some combination of all three.”
But the state has also pushed ahead with opening schools; one of the first school districts to restart classes has already reported that one student has tested positive for the coronavirus. The school district said it has notified people who came into close contact with the student, the public health practice known as contact tracing. But the level of spread in the state and the lack of contact tracing workers could make it difficult to do that work at scale; NPR reported last month that the state had not hired enough people to meet its estimated contact tracing needs.
Given the trend lines in Mississippi, Harvard Global Health Institute director Ashish Jha predicted the state would become first in the nation in the number of new cases as a share of its population.
Mississippi will become nation's #1 in new cases/pop
In other words, Mississippi may soon be the worst Covid-19 hot spot in the country.
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After initial success, Japan is facing a reality check on the coronavirus. From a report: The country garnered global attention after containing the first wave of Covid-19 with what it referred to as the "Japan Model" -- limited testing and no lockdown, nor any legal means to force businesses to close. The country's finance minister even suggested a higher "cultural standard" helped contain the disease. But now the island nation is facing a formidable resurgence, with Covid-19 cases hitting records nationwide day after day. Infections first concentrated in the capital have spread to other urban areas, while regions without cases for months have become new hotspots. And the patient demographic -- originally younger people less likely to fall seriously ill -- is expanding to the elderly, a concern given that Japan is home to the world's oldest population.
Experts say that Japan's focus on the economy may have been its undoing. As other countries in Asia, which experienced the coronavirus earlier than those in the West, wrestle with new flare ups of Covid-19, Japan now risks becoming a warning for what happens when a country moves too fast to normalize -- and doesn't adjust its strategy when the outbreak changes. While Japan declared a state of emergency to contain the first wave of the virus, it didn't compel people to stay home or businesses to shut. That was ended in late May and officials quickly pivoted to a full reopening in an attempt to get the country's recessionary economy back on track. By June, restaurants and bars were fully open while events like baseball and sumo-wrestling were back on -- a stark contrast to other places in the region like Singapore which were re-opening only in cautious phases.
The Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) latest Forbearance and Call Volume Survey revealed that the total number of loans now in forbearance decreased by 7 basis points from 7.74% of servicers’ portfolio volume in the prior week to 7.67% as of July 26, 2020. According to MBA’s estimate, 3.8 million homeowners are in forbearance plans. ... “The share of loans in forbearance declined, but we are now seeing a notable pattern developing over the past two weeks. The forbearance share is decreasing for GSE loans but has slightly increased for Ginnie Mae loans,” said Mike Fratantoni, MBA’s Senior Vice President and Chief Economist. “The job market has cooled somewhat over the past few weeks, with layoffs increasing and other indications that the economic rebound may be losing some steam because of the rising COVID-19 cases throughout the country. It is therefore not surprising to see this situation first impact the Ginnie Mae segment of the market.”
Added Fratantoni, “The higher level of Ginnie Mae loans in forbearance will increase the amount of payments that servicers must advance. We continue to monitor servicer liquidity during these challenging times.” emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.
This graph shows the percent of portfolio in forbearance by investor type over time. Most of the increase was in late March and early April, and has been trending down for the last seven weeks.
The MBA notes: "Total weekly forbearance requests as a percent of servicing portfolio volume (#) decreased relative to the prior week from 0.13% to 0.10% – the lowest level reported since early March."
More racist fuckwits in and around the military. That'll end well.
The U.S. Navy is investigating the circumstances around year-old video footage showing a dog handler mocking free-agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick. In the video, the handler could be seen wearing a Kaepernick jersey as dogs attacked him for demonstration purposes at an event held by the nonprofit National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum. "Oh man, I will stand,” the handler could be heard saying after the dog attack. The comment, a reference to Kaepernick’s earlier decision to kneel for social justice during the playing of the national anthem at NFL games, earned him a few laughs from the crowd, but the Navy was not amused.
“The inherent message of this video is completely inconsistent with the values and ethos of Naval Special Warfare and the U.S. Navy,” a Navy spokesperson said in a statement about the incident. "We are investigating the matter fully, and initial indications are that there were no active duty Navy personnel or equipment involved with this independent organization's event."
When Kaepernick, who was then a San Francisco 49ers quarterback, took a knee during the national anthem four years ago, he was all but banned from the NFL and targeted with threats and profanities. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recently did an about-face in light of protests throughout the nation following the death of George Floyd. A Black man, Floyd died in police custody May 25 after a Minneapolis cop kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes. “We were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest," Goodell has since said.
Far be it for President Donald Trump to follow suit, though. He implied Kaepernick was a “son of a b---h” at an Alabama rally for Republican Sen. Luther Strange in September 2017, and he stood by his stance this year following Floyd’s death.
Tony Fauci has nothing to do with NFL Football. They are planning a very safe and controlled opening. However, if they don�t stand for our National Anthem and our Great American Flag, I won�t be watching!!!
Trump said June 19 that if the NFL doesn’t “stand for our National Anthem and our Great American Flag, I won’t be watching!!!” It’s no mystery why people, even those representing powerful agencies, feel so emboldened to live out their cherished racist sentiments. The SEAL museum has failed to address the anti-Kaepernick videos in a public statement.
Although it isn't officially affiliated with the Navy SEALs, the museum has several retired SEALs on its board of directors and has apparently been mocking Kaepernick for years, ABC News reported. Another video taken in November 2018 at the museum's 33rd Annual Muster event shows an SUV with the words “TAKE A KNEE” and “NIKE” on it being used as a shooting target following the corporation’s decision to use Kaepernick in an ad.
President Trump said Monday that TikTok will be shut down in the U.S. if it hasn't been bought by Microsoft or another company by Sept. 15, and claimed that the U.S. Treasury should get "a very substantial portion" of the sale fee. From a report: Trump appears to have backed off his threat to immediately ban TikTok after speaking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who said Sunday that the company will pursue discussions with TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to purchase the app in the U.S. TikTok has come under intense scrutiny in the U.S. due to concerns that the vast amounts of data it collects could be accessed by the Chinese government, potentially posing a national security threat.
Good. Maybe we'll eventually see some fucking accountability
A new federal court filing from the Manhattan district attorney's office suggests Donald Trump and his family business are the subjects of a wide-ranging banking and insurance fraud investigation, according to TheNew York Times.
Prosecutors working for Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance argued in the filing that the subpoena they issued should compel Trump to provide eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns. Trump's lawyers have urged a federal judge to invalidate the subpoena, but the DA's office wants the challenge dismissed.
While the filing didn't elaborate on the investigation, the prosecutors cited "undisputed" reporting from last year pertaining to Trump and his business practices. Some of that reporting focused on the congressional testimony of Trump's former lawyer/fixer, Michael Cohen, who said that Trump often used illegal accounting schemes to either inflate or deflate his real estate assets for banking and insurance purposes. Vance's office originally subpoenaed the tax returns from Trump's accounting firm Mazars USA in 2019, but the probe was believed to be more narrowly focused on the hush money payments Trump made in the run-up to the 2016 election to silence two women with whom he had affairs.
Vance's new filing comes on the heels of a decisive 7-2 Supreme Court ruling last month rejecting Trump's assertion that he shouldn't have to comply with the subpoena seeking his financial records. That ruling sent the case back to the lower courts, where Trump would be allowed to challenge specific parts of Vance's probe.
“In our judicial system, ‘the public has a right to every man’s evidence,’ ” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the first sentence of the high court's majority opinion in Trump v. Vance. “Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States.”
Vance's office has argued in court that Trump's lawyers are simply trying to delay the subpoena until the statute of limitations invalidates the case.
Just finished encoding, and I'm looking forward to watching this
The Hargreeves siblings find themselves trapped in 1963 in S2 of The Umbrella Academy. [credit:
Netflix ]
Ars staffers were divided on the merits of The Umbrella Academy's first season. The pacing dragged a bit in the earlier episodes, and the deviations from the source material—the Dark Horse Comics series created by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bá—were not to everyone's taste. But I appreciated the time taken to flesh out the main characters, and I thought S1 ended strong, with a promising setup for a second season. I'm happy to report that S2 is even better: faster paced and well-acted, with some intriguing plot twists and developmental arcs for the Hargreeves siblings as they find themselves scattered in Dallas, Texas, in the early 1960s.
(Spoilers for S1; some spoilers for S2, but no major reveals with regard to the final episodes.)
For those unfamiliar with the series, billionaire industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore, House of Cards) adopts seven children out of 43 mysteriously born in 1989 to random women who had not been pregnant the day before. The children are raised at Hargreeves' Umbrella Academy, with the help of a robot "mother" named Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins, iZombie) and become a family of superheroes with special powers. But it's a dysfunctional arrangement, and the family members ultimately disband, only reuniting as adults when Hargreeves dies.
What he means is "I cannot abide the status quo, with 5 conservatives not delivering up the taliban wishlist on every single case"
[Here are five steps Chief Justice Roberts can take to bring the Court back in order. If by next July, Roberts cannot step up to this challenge—either through his own ineptitude or his own malfeasance—then he should step down from the Court.]
The Supreme Court has turned into a sieve. Last week, CNN reporter Joan Biskupic published afour–partseries that revealed the high court's private deliberations. Even worse, the leaks were designed to advance specific narratives about which justices are strong and which are weak. Chief Justice John G. Roberts is all-powerful. Justice Neil Gorsuch appears decisive. Justice Brett Kavanaugh looks weak and ineffective. And Justice Elena Kagan lurks in the background, eager to lend a helping hand to form a moderate coalition. We do not know who leaked the information to the press. It could have been the justices, their law clerks or even allies outside the Court. Frankly, it doesn't matter. These leaks have no doubt destroyed trust and camaraderie on the Court. Relationships will become distant, and the workplace will become even more toxic. There is only one person who can restore order to the Court: Chief Justice Roberts.
Alas, I doubt the George W. Bush appointee is up to the task. Roberts fancies himself the second coming of the great Chief Justice John Marshall. Not even close. Instead, now he more closely resembles one of his lesser-known predecessors, Chief Justice Warren Burger. In 1979, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong published the groundbreaking book, The Brethren. The reporters interviewed several of the justices and hundreds of Court staff to peel back the curtain. They revealed internal Court squabbles, painted some of the justices as partisans and highlighted Burger's inept leadership. This book tore the justices apart and created distrust for decades. Burger, an ill-suited chief justice, could do nothing to heal those wounds. Roberts now faces an even greater crisis of confidence. Unless he can rise to the occasion, and plug these leaks, the Roberts Court will tear itself apart. A Supreme Court divided cannot stand. If Roberts cannot unite the Court, he must leave it.
I offer five specific steps Chief Justice Roberts can take to bring the Court back in order. Here are the highlights:
"First, the chief justice must immediately issue a public statement, on his own behalf, about the leaks. "
"Second, after the chief justice publicly denounces the leaks, he must bring his colleagues on board.
"Third, after all of the justices agree to condemn the leaks, Roberts must meet with his colleagues, one at a time. He should personally ask them whether they spoke to Biskupic or authorized someone to speak on their behalf—expressly or impliedly."
"Fourth, Roberts should talk to every law clerk, staff member and employee of the Court, one at a time. Unlike the justices, they can be fired."
"Fifth, and finally, all of the justices should then pledge that for the next term, in the midst of a presidential election, there will be no disclosures."
And here is the conclusion:
If by next July, Roberts cannot step up to this challenge—either through his own ineptitude or his own malfeasance—then he should step down from the Court. I don't reach this conclusion lightly. But leadership matters even more than jurisprudence. Roberts continually frustrates me with his calculating approach to deciding cases. Indeed, this never-ending balancing act may have contributed to the toxic climate among the justices. Yet, I can live with Roberts' frustrating legal reasoning—it will have a short shelf-life. Most justices are forgotten as soon as they retire, and their precedents fade just as quickly. Roberts will suffer that fate, sooner or later.
However, I cannot abide by a crumbling Supreme Court. I would much rather have a competent chief justice who I constantly disagree with, but who can manage the Court, than a failed chief justice who sometimes writes decisions I partially approve of while the Court tears itself apart. An occasional five to four victory, which throws crumbs to the Right, is not enough to sit by idly as a whirlwind demolishes the marble palace from the inside. And I lay down this marker knowing full well that President Joe Biden will likely nominate Roberts' replacement. Chief Justice Merrick Garland, anyone?
This op-ed will be controversial. But I hope it begins a process for the Court to bring itself back into order. I cannot abide by the status quo, which will rip the Court apart.
The PlayStation 5's new gamepad is called DualSense and sports a bold two-toned design. Did Aperture Science make this? [credit:
Sony / Aurich Lawson
]
You won't be able to use Sony's DualShock 4 or other third-party PS4 gamepads to play PlayStation 5 games, Sony confirmed in a blog post today.
Those older gamepads will still work with "supported PS4 games" running on the PS5, Sony said, and PS5 software will work with "specialty peripherals" designed for the PS4—including "officially licensed racing wheels, arcade sticks, and flight sticks." Those caveats highlight the fact that there's no technical limitation or communication protocol mismatch stopping the upcoming hardware from communicating with legacy controllers.
But Sony says it "believe[s] that PS5 games should take advantage of the new capabilities and features we’re bringing to the platform, including the features of DualSense wireless controller." Those features include what Sony is calling "haptic feedback and dynamic trigger effects" and a built-in microphone (last month, Geoff Keighley hosted what is, thus far, the only public hands-on impressions of these new controller features).
Gwinnett County, Georgia, didn’t even make it to the beginning of the school year before it had serious coronavirus problems amid Gov. Brian Kemp’s push to reopen schools in person. Teachers started in-person planning for the school year on Wednesday. By Thursday, 260 school district employees were out because of positive coronavirus tests or contact with a case.
The school district’s position is that hey, it’s all community spread, not exposure in the schools themselves. But that’s not a great sign, either, and “In-person training and meetings are taking place without areas being wiped down or disinfected in between and masks aren’t being worn at all times, said several teachers who didn’t disclose their names when contacting the AJC. Others added that their school still hadn’t received any hand sanitizer,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. In other words, the conditions are there for in-school spread. It just hasn’t had time to fully develop. Yet.
Gwinnett County isn’t the only place to encounter problems immediately upon reopening or moving toward reopening. “We knew it was a when, not if,” one Indiana superintendent said after a student tested positive on the first day of school. That positive test began the process of tracing which other students that student had come into contact with and quarantining them.
The same story played out in Mississippi, where 12 to 14 students were in quarantine after coming into contact with an infected classmate.
And a Georgia summer camp had 260 infections. Not just people in quarantine after possible exposure, but 260 infections. Out of 600 campers and counselors.
Teachers and parents have warned against turning the schools into a giant COVID-19 experiment by forcing in-person reopening. The thing is, the experiment has already happened and we can see the results here. In-person school requires a massive reduction in community spread of the virus—which means closing bars and gyms and more—and a massive investment in schools, not just in longtime priorities like class size but in things we now know are important to slow the spread of the coronavirus like improvements in ventilation and air quality. And at this point, those things are not even on the horizon, so we have our answer on schools: It’s not safe to reopen in person.
Microsoft has confirmed that it is in talks to purchase TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and may make moves before summer is out. From a report: The decision, according to Microsoft, follows a conversation between its CEO and President Trump, who just days ago threatened to use an executive order to ban the app from the United States. In a blog post published Sunday night, Microsoft also said it may "invite other American investors to participate" in the deal, though "on a minority basis." These discussions will be wrapped up by Sept. 15. TikTok has increasingly come under scrutiny over largely baseless claims that it hands American users' data over to the Chinese government. Detractors say even the potential for that makes the app, best known for viral challenges and teen dance trends, a national security threat. Trump has been among the loudest, though it's been speculated that his most recent outburst was nothing more than a negotiation ploy. Further reading:
Chinese internet users brand ByteDance CEO a 'traitor' as TikTok seeks US buyer.
Anti-gay bigotry driven by religious conservatives. Gee, where have we seen that before?
DOUAI, France — At the entrance to the Lycée La Salle Deforest de Lewarde in Douai in Northern France, students are welcomed with a “bonjour” written on the wall in many languages: “guten tag,” “hello,” “buenos días.”
There used to be the Polish “dzień dobry” as well — but it got painted over during a recent renovation. “It was just a mistake, we will bring ‘dzień dobry’ back!” said Diego Mercier, the school’s headmaster.
But while it shouldn’t be too difficult to repaint the greeting, re-establishing a good relationship between schools in Douai and the Polish town of Puławy could prove more problematic — especially after the Polish municipality signed an anti-LGBTQ pledge.
Since 2019, dozens of Polish towns, counties and regions have signed similar declarations and charters. In response, several European towns have ended twinning partnerships with their Polish counterparts.
Last week, the European Commission rejected grants for six Polish towns under a citizens' program for twin municipalities, linking the decision to the anti-gay declarations.
"Human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities, are fundamental EU values," Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli told POLITICO in a statement. "These principles must be applied transversally to all EU funding."
Decisions like that are putting a real price on the largely symbolic anti-LGBTQ declarations, with many international cultural programs and youth exchanges suspended or canceled.
Take Douai — located in French Flanders, where many Polish people emigrated between the wars to work in the mines. It's had a twin partnership with Puławy in Eastern Poland since 1996.
In February, Frédéric Chéreau, the mayor of Douai, said he’d found out about Puławy’s declaration and decided to freeze the partnership.
“Many citizens wrote letters to me saying how stunned they were about Puławy’s decision. I really couldn’t sit and do nothing,” he told POLITICO.
His immediate decision was to withhold invitations for Puławy’s officials to Douai. But he didn’t exclude that future exchanges between two high schools would also be suspended.
Mercier, Douai's high school headmaster, said he understood the mayor’s position. “It’s unbelievable to declare a town an LGBT-free zone,” he said. “It’s crazy, it’s sad.”
But he also stressed that schools had enjoyed a “perfect” partnership for four years. “I hope we’ll get there to separate the youth exchange and the exchange between two cities,” he said.
The headmaster of the high school in Puławy, Marta Gładysz, has similar hopes. “We have put a lot of work in this exchange,” she said. “We should divide the exchange of young people from the [municipality’s] declaration,” she said.
In July, the Dutch town of Nieuwegein also cut its ties with Puławy.
Similar things are happening to other Polish "anti-LGBTQ" towns. France's Nogent-sur-Oise ended its cooperation with Kraśnik (suspending the exchange of young footballers) and Germany's Schwerte withheld partnership with Nowy Sącz (threatening the tradition of school exchanges).
‘LGBTQ-free’ Polish towns
Poland is the EU’s most homophobic country, according to a Rainbow Europe ranking out this year. The issue of the LGBTQ community regularly appears in political and public debates. Recently it was used by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party to mobilize its most conservative support during the country’s presidential election.
The trend of towns making anti-gay declarations was sparked by a decision last year by Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski to sign a city charter pledging support for LGBTQ people.
PiS and conservative organizations said that such initiatives would allow activists to “smuggle LGBT ideology into school” and will “sexualize children.”
In response to Warsaw's liberal mayor, many smaller Polish towns — usually governed by right-wing mayors — staked out anti-LGBTQ positions. Some endorsed the “Regional Charter of Family Rights,” drafted by the right-wing, catholic NGO Ordo Iuris grouping, and others, like Puławy, came up with their own statements.
The charter doesn’t mention LGBTQ explicitly but calls for the “protection of marriage, being a union of a man and a woman,” which is already safeguarded by the Polish constitution, and says that public funds shouldn’t be spent on “projects that undermine the constitutional identity of marriage.”
The statement endorsed by Puławy states that the town will aim to “stop the ideology promoted by the LGBT subculture.” The city council won't allow special provisions to help LGBTQ students and will protect public officials, like teachers, from the pressure of “homopropaganda.”
According to the Atlas of Hate project, which collects all the declarations, the towns and regions that have signed some sort of anti-LGBTQ document cover one-third of Poland's territory.
Puławy says its declaration “doesn’t trigger any specific actions” against the gay community. “There has been no violence in the town,” said a spokesperson.
The mayor also wrote a letter to Douai, in which he argued Puławy “was the object of the media and political attack” and that there’s “no law discriminating against people because of their origin, political opinions or sexual orientation.”
EU steps in
That stance is creating painful financial consequences.
Six Polish towns — the Commission didn't name them — won't get extra funds from a town twinning program. Grants range from €5,000 to €25,000.
Commissioner Dalli said the rules of the program are "very clear." They state that it should be accessible "to all European citizens without any form of discrimination on grounds of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual orientation."
"It is my responsibility to ensure that EU values are respected in all our work and in all EU funds," she added. "It is our duty to protect European citizens from discrimination. Inaction was not an option and would have made the European Commission complicit."
Poland's Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro called Dalli's decision "groundless and illegal" and said the Commission had a duty to respect the traditions and views of member countries. He's asked Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to intervene in Brussels.
In Tuchów, reportedly one of the six towns that didn't get the grant, the town's mayor asked the local council to reconsider its anti-gay decision.
"One can't calculate this image loss. It's not just €18,000 that we're losing," Mayor Magdalena Marszałek told Polish TVN24 television, adding she fears the town's international partners "won't treat Tuchów seriously."
"We won't have an annual meeting of twin towns ... we won't have the meeting, the talks, the concerts," she said.
But Andrzej Głaz, head of Tuchów's local council, isn't backing down. "I pity those EU actions. I'm waiting until somebody there wises up," he told the NaTemat website. "One can live poorly but with dignity," he added.
President Donald Trump has installed a nominee for a top Pentagon job in a senior Department of Defense post on a temporary basis after lawmakers abruptly canceled his confirmation hearing last week amid lingering questions about his fitness for the role.
Retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, a novelist, former state government official and Fox News regular, withdrew Sunday from consideration to be undersecretary of defense for policy, a position that requires Senate confirmation, the Pentagon said in a statement emailed to POLITICO Sunday.
Instead, he has been designated as the official "performing the duties of" the deputy undersecretary of defense policy. The position Tata will assume is one that James H. Anderson was confirmed for in June; Anderson has also been serving as acting undersecretary of defense policy and will remain in that post.
Since Trump announced his intent to nominate Tata earlier this year, the former Army general has been widely criticized for tweets calling former President Barack Obama a "terrorist leader" and referring to Islam as the "most oppressive violent religion I know of," among other controversial statements.
Tata later said he regretted the now-deleted tweets.
His nomination to be undersecretary of defense for policy, the department's number three official, was upended Thursday when the Senate Armed Services Committee canceled his confirmation hearing minutes before it was scheduled to begin.
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the panel’s chair, said lawmakers didn't have enough information about Tata to consider him for the position, while Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee's top Democrat, said, "Members on both sides of the aisle have raised serious questions about this nominee."
On Sunday, Reed condemned the president’s move. “If President Trump’s goal is to hollow out, politicize, and undermine the Pentagon the way he has the State Department and Intelligence Community, then mission accomplished. This is an offensive, destabilizing move,” he said. Reed also called move “an insult an insult to our troops, professionals at the Pentagon, the Senate, and the American people.“
A majority of Democrats on the panel have come out publicly against Tata. One Republican, Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, has also warned he would vote no on his confirmation, though for different reasons.
Still, the White House press secretary said Friday that Trump was standing by the nominee.
The intent to install Tata in a temporary position short of Senate confirmation drew a rebuke earlier Sunday from Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who accused the administration of making an end run around Congress.
“If an appointee cannot gain the support of the Senate, as is clearly the case with Tata, then the President should not put that person into an identical temporary role,” Smith said in a statement. “This evasion of scrutiny makes our government less accountable and prioritizes loyalty over competence.”
“The vacancies at the Department of Defense, which have now hit record highs under the Trump administration, should be filled through the existing nomination and confirmation process," Smith added. "If confirmations cannot be completed, the President must find new, qualified people who can win the support of the Senate."
Tata has been serving as a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the New START treaty in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
The last agreement limiting America’s and Russia’s nuclear arsenals is months away from expiring.
In December 2019, a secretive group of elite Americans and Russians gathered around a large square table. It was chilly outside, as Dayton, Ohio, can get in the winter, but the mood inside was just as frosty.
The 147th meeting of the Dartmouth Conference, a biannual gathering of citizens from both nations to improve ties between Washington and Moscow, had convened. Former ambassadors and military generals, journalists, business leaders, and other experts came together to discuss the core challenges to the two countries’ delicate relationship, as members had since 1960.
In recent years, that has included everything from election interference to the war in Ukraine. But now the prospect of an old danger worried them most, just as it had the group’s quiet supporters President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev decades before: nuclear catastrophe.
Proceedings typically start with a lengthy summary of the relationship, touching on security, medical, societal, political, and religious issues up for discussion. This time, the synopsis was unnervingly short.
“We went right into the nuclear issue,” said a conference member, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak openly about the event. “There was a belief we were in serious danger because it’s the end of arms control as we know it.”
“It was dramatic and sobering,” the member added.
The US and Russia were then barely over a year away from losing the last major arms control agreement between them: New START, short for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. That agreement limits the size of the two countries’ nuclear arsenals, which together account for 93 percent of all nuclear warheads on earth. The deal expires on February 5, 2021, and those sitting around the table feared its demise.
The trepidation inspired the group’s four co-chairs to do something the Dartmouth Conference hadn’t done in its 60-year existence: release a statement.
“Given the deep concerns we share about the security of our peoples, for the first time in our history we are compelled by the urgency of the situation to issue this public appeal to our governments,” they wrote, calling for the US and Russia to invoke the treaty’s five-year extension.
Photo12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev in Washington, DC, in September 1959.
Today, roughly half a year before New START stops, the group’s members continue to stress the consequences. “We’re at a decisive point,” said retired US Army Brig. Gen. Peter Zwack, who was at the December meetings. “The entire arms control regime of the past 50 years is about to pass.”
Seventy-five years ago this week, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, unleashing a weapon of mass destruction on the world. Decades of painstaking diplomacy between the world’s two greatest nuclear powers, the US and Russia, helped keep both nations from unleashing that destructive power on each other ever since. But now the US and Russia are mere months from throwing it all away.
One reason for all of this: President Donald Trump wants to put his own stamp on arms control history, one way or another.
“They would like to do something, and so would I,” Trump told Axios about a July call he had with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “If we can do something with Russia in terms of nuclear proliferation, which is a very big problem — bigger problem than global warming, a much bigger problem than global warming in terms of the real world — that would be a great thing.”
But Trump’s administration acknowledges its view of nuclear issues is much wider than the weapons America and Russia have: It also involves China’s arsenal.
“The president has directed us to think more broadly than the current arms control construct and pursue an agreement that reflects current geopolitical dynamics and includes both Russia and China,” a senior administration official told me on the condition of anonymity. “We’re continuing to evaluate whether New START can be used to achieve that objective.”
That may explain why Trump waffled on getting China involved. “We’re going to work this first and we’ll see,” he said outside the White House when asked about folding China into negotiations with Russia. “China right now is a much lesser nuclear power — you understand that — than Russia ... we would want to talk to China eventually.”
Some say Trump has good reasons to rethink things. The Russians have cheated on previous deals. Washington could use Moscow’s clear desire to extend New START to its advantage, like getting them to promise no meddling in the 2020 election. And China, some believe, should be included in a modern set of agreements soon, if not now.
But even former Trump officials say those rationales shouldn’t mean the end of New START. “New START is working,” Andrea Thompson, the State Department’s top arms control official from April 2018 to October 2019, told me a few months after leaving the government. Former Vice President Joe Biden agrees, and has already vowed to seek an extension in the few weeks between the start of his presidency and the deal’s expiration.
Yet there’s still a chance Trump doesn’t continue the accord and Biden can’t strike a way forward. If New START ends, then, the general animosity between the US and Russia could lead to a nuclear arms race and prompt China to keep building up its forces — a situation unlike anything we’ve seen since the Cold War.
“We’re creating the greater threat of a conflict that could literally destroy each country and perhaps even our planet,” Leon Panetta, the former CIA director and defense secretary, told me.
The following account of the looming death of US-Russia arms control is based on conversations with over 20 current and former US officials, lawmakers, and experts on three continents. It traces the story of arms control from its origins to its possible end in the coming years, and what that end could mean for all of us.
The long and dangerous road to arms control
Washington and Moscow didn’t just sit down one day and decide, “Hey, we really should lower tensions and put restrictions on our nuclear arsenals.” They basically had to be scared and pressured into doing so.
It took decades of demonstrations, terrifying close calls, and nuclear surprises before both sides decided it was time to talk. Below are five of the most important moments on the path to arms control, briefly explained.
1) The rise of the anti-nuclear movement: After American forces dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, vividly demonstrating the horrifying power of those weapons, many Americans, and people around the world, rallied against them. The movement ebbed and flowed, but the overall result was that sustained pressure restrained US policymakers, Christopher Miller, an expert on US-Russian nuclear history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, told me.
2) The US-Soviet standoff over Berlin: In 1958, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, wanted US, French, and British troops to leave West Berlin so the city could fall under Soviet-controlled East German authority. President Dwight Eisenhower left office without a resolution to the standoff. President John F. Kennedy escalated things, saying in a 1961 address: “We will at times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us. Either alone would fail. Together, they can serve the cause of freedom and peace.”
In the end, a Kennedy-Khrushchev backchannel de-escalated the situation, but the Berlin crisis showed that any major disagreement between the two powers could eventually heighten and conceivably go nuclear. The implications were staggering.
3) The Cuban missile crisis: On October 14, 1962, the United States discovered the Soviets had put nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the southern tip of Florida. What followed was a 13-day crisis that brought America to the brink of war with the Soviet Union. It finally ended in a deal where each superpower would remove missiles from a single region: the Soviets from Cuba and the US from Turkey.
“I got introduced to the nuclear equation and dangers early on,” said Sam Nunn, who would go on to serve as a US senator from Georgia from 1972 to 1996, and to become a major figure in US nuclear policy, about his time as a congressional staffer on a trip to Germany during that period. “It was a very close call.”
4) China’s nuclear test:China tested its first nuclear device on October 16, 1964, becoming the fifth nuclear state (in addition to the US and USSR, Britain and France also had nuclear weapons by this point). China used technology given to it by the Soviets years before and caught the Americans mostly by surprise.
Both nations felt immense responsibility for letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle, experts say, in part because they had paved the way to getting the technology necessary to make the bomb. The US and Soviet Union thus worked to make arms control a reality.
A mushroom cloud seen in China’s first atomic weapon test on October 16, 1964.
5) Breakdown in Soviet-Chinese relations: The decline in Moscow’s relations with Beijing compelled the Soviets to build trust with America, despite much reluctance. After forming an alliance in the 1950s, ideological differences — namely the centrality of communism to domestic and foreign policy — led both capitals to drift apart from one another. Disagreement over a mutually claimed uninhabited island erupted in 1969, confirming the break.
But the split caused some heartburn in the Soviet Union, as leaders didn’t want spiraling relations with powers to its east and west at the same time. Moscow decided it could improve its ties with the US by curbing its nuclear arsenal.
In other words, it took an increasingly dangerous period before the US and the Soviet Union finally realized they had to build trust to avoid disaster. “There was a real strong feeling that this was an opportunity to try and contain what could happen,” Panetta, the former Pentagon and CIA chief, told me.
That feeling turned into action, and produced the first major arms control deals between the world’s most heavily armed nations.
“This is a turning point in the history of the world”
The first, most promising arms control talks between the Americans and Soviets formally began in November 1969, and after a little over two years of negotiations, the two countries signed a landmark nuclear arms treaty in Moscow.
The accord consisted of two agreements. The first was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) of 1972, which restricted each country to just two anti-missile systems: one for the nation’s capital and another to protect an intercontinental ballistic missile field.
This was a big deal. Those systems were developed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles: If the Soviets fired a ballistic missile at America, for example, the US could launch a missile of its own to destroy the Soviet one. Both countries considered putting these defenses throughout their lands to protect key places like major cities, military sites, and critical infrastructure.
But by only having two sites, the US and the Soviets basically agreed to leave most of their respective countries vulnerable to attack. Should the US fire a missile at most places in the Soviet Union, it would be almost certain to hit its target, but any retaliation by Moscow would likely strike its target in America, too. Keeping both sides relatively weak, then, was meant to prompt the countries to think twice before launching any missiles, and perhaps persuade them to stop developing more offensive capabilities.
The other part of the pact, known as the Interim Agreement, capped US and Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) forces. The US couldn’t have more than 1,054 ICBM silos and 656 SLBM launch tubes. The Soviet Union was also unable to have more than 1,607 ICBM silos and 740 SLBM launch tubes.
Those two agreements, collectively known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks — or SALT — kicked off the era of arms control between the two major nuclear powers.
This was a weighty moment in history: After decades of dangerously close calls and nuclear buildups, the world’s two strongest nations walked back from the edge and talked out their problems. The deal wasn’t perfect by any means, but it demonstrated the first sign of hope that maybe they wouldn’t blow up one another — and the world. Instead of racing toward destruction, they purposely curtailed their power for their own national interest and for the common good of the world.
“It is an enormously important agreement,” President Richard Nixon said in May 1972, speaking at a dinner before the signing ceremony, “but, again, it is only an indication of what can happen in the future as we work toward peace in the world. I have great hopes on that score.”
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin concurred: The agreement would “go down in history as a major achievement on the road towards curbing the arms race,” he said. “This is a great victory for the Soviet and American peoples.”
Or, as one Soviet journalist covering the event put it: “This is a turning point in the history of the world.”
Arms control gained momentum ...
The two countries were primed to keep working on restricting the strength and size of their arsenals. “The Americans and Soviets realized their stature would improve if they took arms control seriously,” Sarah Bidgood, an expert on Russia’s nuclear program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told me. “They would look better in the eyes of the international community if they led on that issue.”
That momentum got a boost from several major events.
In 1974, India detonated its first nuclear bomb, which it developed using technology it received from American companies under an Eisenhower-era policy called “Atoms for Peace.”
“This visionary program was based on a bargain between the United States and developing states. The United States provided research reactors, fuel and scientific training to developing countries wanting civilian nuclear programs,” Ariana Rowberry, an expert in arms control and nuclear policy, wrote in 2013. “In exchange, recipient states committed to only use the technology and education for peaceful, civilian purposes.”
The program’s goal was to promote peaceful nuclear energy and scientific knowledge. But its lasting legacy is that it spurred the global spread of nuclear weapons. In fact, the policy helped build up the nuclear programs of Iran, Israel, and Pakistan, ultimately contributing to more nuclear proliferation, not less.
“[I]t is legitimate to ask whether Atoms for Peace accelerated proliferation by helping some nations achieve more advanced arsenals than would have otherwise been the case,” Leonard Weiss, a nuclear expert at Stanford University, wrote in 2003. “The jury has been in for some time on this question, and the answer is yes.”
Though both the US and the Soviet Union had been instrumental in driving it, this global proliferation of the deadliest weapons ever developed by humans ultimately deeply concerned Washington and Moscow. And it gave them that much more impetus to stop a widening nuclear spread.
The growth of anti-nuclear protests in the US also added to the push for further arms control. A major manifestation of this movement came in 1982, when 1 million people gathered in Manhattan on June 12 to protest nuclear weapons. “The groups participating ranged from radicals seeking immediate unilateral disarmament by the United States to moderates asking a resumption of negotiations on arms cutbacks,” the New York Times wrote the next day.
Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., spoke to that crowd during the rally. ‘’We have come here in numbers so large that the message must get through to the White House and Capitol Hill,’’ she said.
That movement inspired a similar one in Europe in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration wanted to put short- and medium-range missiles on the continent to deter the Soviet Union. The main fear was that Moscow might consider those actions so provocative that it would attack those positions and start World War III.
The protests proved so successful, the University of Hamburg’s arms control expert Ulrich Kühn told me, that in Germany, for example, they contributed to the resignation of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
During this tumultuous time, American and Soviet leaders met to strike more and more deals, or at least build on previous ones. Not every attempt succeeded, but the two nations would eventually sign more agreements over the next four decades, including an update to SALT — called SALT II, signed in 1979 — and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
These agreements played a critical role in lowering tensions between the two nations and curbing the risk of nuclear escalation. Those tensions, though, were about to rise once again.
... and arms control teetered
President Reagan was worried the Americans and the Soviets would blow each other to smithereens. The reliance on “mutually assured destruction” — the notion that neither country would attack the other with nuclear weapons, because the retaliation would escalate into the annihilation of both countries — was folly to him. In fact, he called the concept a “suicide pact.”
“What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Reagan said in a national address in March 1983.
But the administration realized that creating such a system would contravene the ABM Treaty. After all, the whole point of the treaty was to ensure that each country could successfully attack the other with lots of nuclear missiles, thereby deterring either side from ever launching a strike.
If the US could now successfully use space lasers to intercept incoming Soviet missiles, that would put the US at a major advantage over the Soviet Union, thus upending the fragile balance of mutually assured destruction.
The “Star Wars” plan, formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), was ultimately scrapped, in part because of the ABM Treaty. Yet that the plan was seriously considered showed that the US commitment to arms control wasn’t so ironclad.
The real breaking point in the era of cooperation began in the early 2000s.
Months before becoming president, George W. Bush told a Washington crowd that he would reduce America’s nuclear arsenal to “the lowest possible number consistent with our national security.” But after the 9/11 attacks, Bush and his national security team concluded that the world had changed drastically. Old ways of thinking about national security needed an update, and that included arms control.
The Bush administration believed that arms control arrangements with the Soviet Union not only were anachronistic (after all, the Soviet Union didn’t even exist anymore by that point) but also limited America’s ability to defend itself.
Bush’s team cited two main reasons. First, the US needed all tools at its disposal to combat terror groups trying to harm America, and it didn’t want to be restricted if terrorists got a hold of a nuclear weapon. Second, concerns were mounting about Iran and North Korea improving their missile programs. Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, thought the ABM Treaty limited America’s ability to respond if those countries were to launch an ICBM at the mainland.
As a result, Bush withdrew the US from the ABM Treaty, claiming it inappropriately restricted America’s might. “Defending the American people is my highest priority as commander in chief,” the president said in December 2001, “and I cannot and will not allow the United States to remain in a treaty that prevents us from developing effective defenses.”
Moscow saw this as the dawn of a more confrontational United States. “Russia perceived the US was now going full steam ahead in making its own international rules,” said Kühn, the arms control expert at the University of Hamburg. This perception only deepened as the US pushed for an expansion of NATO to include members nearer and nearer to Russia’s borders.
However, the Bush administration did sign the Strategic Offense Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow Treaty because of where it was signed) in May 2002. It committed the US and Russia to keep their deployed strategic nuclear forces between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads each for 10 years, and was ratified unanimously the following year.
The Bush administration decided to make the deal, some experts say, because it was basically costless. The accord was almost unverifiable, so the US could still be flexible if it needed to be, while Washington-Moscow ties improved at the same time.
President Barack Obama wanted to go further in the direction of arms control. During his first trip to Europe as president in 2009, he gave a speech in Prague vowing to reduce America’s number of nuclear weapons and announcing his intention to sign a new arms control deal with Russia.
As a way to garner support from Senate Republicans for a deal with Russia, Obama kick-started a nuclear modernization program that would cost billions and led to much criticism from arms control advocates. Some in line with Obama’s stated vision felt betrayed long after.
But the gambit worked: In 2010, he announced New START, which he called “the most comprehensive arms control agreement in nearly two decades.” The agreement, signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that April, reduced “by about a third — the nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia will deploy,” the White House explained at the time.
“It significantly reduces missiles and launchers. It puts in place a strong and effective verification regime. And it maintains the flexibility that we need to protect and advance our national security, and to guarantee our unwavering commitment to the security of our allies,” the White House statement continued.
The agreement went into effect on February 5, 2011, and replaced SORT. Under the terms of the treaty, the United States and Russia were to meet the limits imposed on their arsenals by February 5, 2018.
But then, in 2016, a new president was elected.
Trump takes control, and trashes arms control
Nuclear war is a threat Donald Trump has often talked about over the years, and he has sometimes seemed genuinely concerned about it.
“I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it,” Trump said in a 1990 interview with Playboy.
Trump has said many times that he learned about the destructive power of nuclear weapons at an early age from his uncle John, a professor at MIT who was a renowned scientific mind. “He was a brilliant scientist,” Trump said in another Playboy interview, this time in 2004, “and he would tell me weapons are getting so powerful today that humanity is in tremendous trouble. This was 25 years ago, but he was right.”
When Trump took office on January 20, 2017, three major arms control-related agreements were in force: the INF Treaty, a confidence-building measure known as Open Skies, and New START, the agreement Obama had negotiated just a few years earlier.
Yet, rather than continue the progress his predecessors made toward making the world safer from the threat of nuclear war, Trump decided to tear it all down, while pursuing an exit from the Iran nuclear deal and ineffective nuclear diplomacy with North Korea.
Of those three US-Russia agreements, one is gone, another is almost gone, and the last, it seems, is on the way out. That’s not all bad, some experts say, as Russia did cheat on some of the agreements and the US showed those actions would have consequences.
But most experts I spoke to are concerned that Trump is tearing down an artifice with no new blueprints to make it better, or even rebuild what exists. “The whole arms control regime is under considerable stress,” former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who now leads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told me. “It’s badly frayed.”
Let’s take each deal in turn.
The INF Treaty
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987. It prohibited Washington and Moscow from fielding ground-launched cruise missiles that could fly between 310 and 3,400 miles.
Both countries signed the deal as a way to improve relations toward the end of the Cold War. However, the two nations still could — and since have — built up cruise missiles that can be fired from the air or sea.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signing the INF Treaty in the East Room at the White House in 1987.
Then a problem arose: Russia violated that agreement. In 2014, the Obama administration blamed the Kremlin for testing a cruise missile in direct violation of the accord. (Russia says the US had violated the agreement, too, by fielding ground-based missile defense systems that can fly within the prohibited ranges. The US, however, denies fielding the banned weapons.)
So in October 2018, Trump proclaimed the US would withdraw from the treaty, adding that he would give Russia 60 days — until February 2 — to comply.
That led to months of hurried negotiations between Washington and Moscow to bring Russia into compliance again, but neither side caved. NATO, the US-led military alliance formed to thwart the Soviet threat, tried to increase pressure by stating in December that Russia violated the treaty’s terms.
The Kremlin didn’t budge during those talks. “We would confront them on it, and they would skirt responsibility,” said Thompson, who was responsible for leading INF negotiations in the Trump administration. “We knew we weren’t going to get anywhere. They weren’t going to be forthcoming about it, but we still kept chipping away.”
Ultimately, she said, “the president made the decision to leave” the deal. That officially happened in August 2019.
“Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the time. “The United States will not remain party to a treaty that is deliberately violated by Russia.”
The wisdom of Trump’s choice depends on whom you ask. “Make no mistake, Russia caused this mess when they decided to develop, test, and deploy” the treaty-violating missile, said the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s Alexandra Bell, “but the Trump administration may have had more luck” than Obama did. “Now there is no clear plan about what to do next.”
Jeffrey Edmonds, who served as the National Security Council director for Russia in the Obama administration, told me he thinks Trump made the right call. “Nothing was going to bring the Russians back into compliance,” he said. “It kind of poisons the well when it came to arms control in general. If you are pro-arms control, you shouldn’t want to hold on to arms control agreements that don’t work, because it limits your ability to pursue other arms control agreements.”
With the INF treaty gone, some argue the US could now place ground-based intermediate-range missiles in Asia, mainly in Japan, to thwart China.
Most experts I spoke with said there’s little chance of that happening soon. “This is a theoretically interesting point,” said Mike Green, a Japan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, “but at this point, the Japanese ability to host US deep-strike weapons on Japanese soil is pretty low.”
However, three American experts who traveled to Tokyo to meet privately with local officials earlier this year said the issue often came up. Each time, though, there was this added twist: Japan might consider building and basing ground-based missiles of its own. That’s not something Japan is seriously pushing for right now, they noted, but it would fit with the island nation’s trend of beefing up its defenses.
At a minimum, those in favor of putting US missiles in Japan say it’s worth a shot. “I believe it is realistic, and I am hopeful that we will have an opportunity for basing these weapons in Japan,” Rebeccah Heinrichs, a nuclear expert at the Hudson Institute in Washington, told me. “But it’s going to take some work.”
Open Skies
Originally an idea by Eisenhower and made a reality in 2002, the Open Skies Treaty allows nations to conduct unarmed flights over another country’s military installations and other areas of concern. Entering into effect 10 years later, it has since helped the 34 North American and European signatories, including the US and Russia, gain confidence that others weren’t developing advanced weapons in secret or planning big attacks.
In other words, the treaty was put into place to prevent arms races — and wars.
In May 2020, Trump decided America would withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty, kicking off a six-month clock before the US could officially leave the deal.
“It has become abundantly clear that it is no longer in America’s interest to remain a party to the Treaty on Open Skies,” Pompeo said in a statement announcing the decision.
“At its core, the Treaty was designed to provide all signatories an increased level of transparency and mutual understanding and cooperation, regardless of their size,” he continued. “Russia’s implementation and violation of Open Skies, however, has undermined this central confidence-building function of the Treaty — and has, in fact, fueled distrust and threats to our national security — making continued US participation untenable.”
But that same day, Trump left the door open just a crack to nixing the withdrawal. “There’s a very good chance we’ll make a new agreement or do something to put that agreement back together,” he said outside the White House. “I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to pull out and they’re going to come back and want to make a deal.”
Still, the decision to leave was stunning, and arguably dangerous. The treaty allowed both Washington and Moscow to track each other’s movements. The imagery they collected was then shared among all the signatories, giving some less technologically advanced nations their only source of overhead intelligence.
That’s vitally important for, say, Ukraine, a treaty member that wants to know about Russian military movements on its border.
The worry was if the US left Open Skies, others would too. So far, that’s not the case. The Kremlin criticized America’s decision but hasn’t said if it will stay or leave. NATO allies signaled soon after Trump’s announcement that they would remain in Open Skies and other arms control pacts, and the foreign ministries of at least 10 European nations vowed to remain signatories.
That makes sense, since those countries would still benefit from the intelligence collection from overflights, even though they’re likely to lose a large number of images after America’s departure.
The US, then, has separated itself from multiple allies with the unilateral decision to withdraw from the treaty. But that won’t bother the president’s supporters who long cited three reasons he needed to take the US out of Open Skies.
First, as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) articulated in 2019, the US could spend its money elsewhere. After all, the US has many spy satellites in space, so the utility of spending money to fly creaking planes for days over Russian and other territory doesn’t make much sense, the treaty’s critics say.
The president should withdraw from the Open Skies treaty and redeploy the hundreds of millions of dollars the Pentagon wastes on the flights and equipment to increase U.S. combat power. pic.twitter.com/YYewKwessO
Second, many said Russia was a cheating treaty member.
As Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters in February, the Russians aren’t playing by the rules. “The Russians have been noncompliant in the treaty for years, specifically when it comes to their allowance of overflights and near flights [of] Kaliningrad and Georgia,” he said.
It was a fair point. Russia did restrict US overflights of Kaliningrad — the Russian exclave in Europe’s northeast — to 310 miles in the territory and within a six-mile corridor of its border with Georgian conflict zones Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Meanwhile, the US rarely, if ever, impeded Russia from at least attempting to see what it wanted to.
“Yes, the Russians are violating that treaty, too, by restricting flights,” Thompson, Trump’s former top arms control diplomat, told me. “The treaty does provide transparency but my sense is it’s largely a symbolic treaty — it helps the alliance — as it provides intelligence for our allies that don’t have the capabilities we do.”
The impediment of flights, though, wasn’t much of a concern for former Secretary of Defense James Mattis. He told Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) in a May 2018 letter that “it is in our Nation’s best interest to remain a party to the Open Skies Treaty” after she complained about Russia’s cheating.
Many experts side with the then-Pentagon chief’s stance. “These issues do not rise to the level of a material breach, nor do they justify withdrawal,” Kingston Reif, an expert at the Arms Control Association, told me in October 2019.
Third, some experts claimed the deal helped Russia much more than it served America.
In 2016, then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Gen. Vincent Stewart told the House Armed Services Committee he was worried about what Russia could learn due to the treaty.
“The things that you can see, the amount of data you can collect, the things you can do with post-processing, allows Russia, in my opinion, to get incredible foundational intelligence on critical infrastructure, bases, ports, all of our facilities,” he said. “So from my perspective, it gives them a significant advantage.” He later added that he’d “love to deny” Russia overflights.
That’s all fair, especially if Russia was getting better quality information than the US. But advocates of the treaty note that what Moscow learned was outweighed by what the US obtained and shared with its allies in the accord, particularly Ukraine. “The treaty has been of particular value recently in countering Russian disinformation and aggression against Ukraine,” Reif said.
Yet the US dropped Open Skies, just as it soon might with New START.
New START
As a reminder, the New START arms control deal became effective in 2011 during the Obama administration. The treaty’s goal, essentially, is to limit the size of the American and Russian nuclear arsenals, the two largest in the world.
To ensure those limits are met and kept, the treaty also allows Washington and Moscow to keep tabs on the other’s nuclear programs through stringent inspections and data sharing, thereby curbing mistrust about each other’s nuclear and military plans.
At the time, it was heralded as a major achievement and is still considered such by top lawmakers.
“I stood behind President Obama in the Oval Office when he signed the New START agreement nine years ago. This landmark treaty has reduced the threat posed by nuclear weapons around the world,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, told me. “I’ll continue to urge the Trump administration to extend the New START treaty so we can keep safeguards in place that oversee Russia’s nuclear arsenal and ensure every measure is taken to shore up our national security.”
As of mid-July 2020, the two nations had exchanged more than 20,400 total notifications about the state of their arsenals.
Rose Gottemoeller, who led the New START negotiations for the US at the State Department, told me all that goes away if Trump decides not to stay in the agreement. “The Russians won’t allow for verifications and inspections without a legal basis,” she said. And without the ability to get deep insight into Russia’s nuclear forces, trust would surely erode.
“The exact thing which gives us an excellent understanding of Russian strategic forces is all going to break down,” said Gottemoeller, who in 2019 stepped down as NATO’s deputy secretary. “Unless you have access to verify what’s going on with the warheads on missiles or submarines, you don’t really understand what’s going on.”
Putin, Russia’s president, says he sees value in the deal. “Russia is not interested in starting an arms race and deploying missiles where they are not present now,” he told Russian officials in December. “Russia is ready to immediately, as soon as possible, by the end of this year, without any preconditions, extend the START Treaty so that there would be no further double or triple interpretation of our position.”
Trump hasn’t taken up Putin on his offer yet, even though those two could extend the agreement for up to five years without anyone else’s input.
If Washington is fretting the end of arms control, it sure isn’t acting like it — and neither is Moscow
So why get out of a deal that almost everyone says is vital to keeping US-Russia relations stable? The answer is China.
“We need to make sure that we’ve got all of the parties that are relevant as a component of this as well,” Pompeo told reporters in 2019, clearly alluding to China. ”It may be that we can’t get there. It may be that we just end up working with the Russians on this. But if we’re talking about a nuclear [capability] that presents risks to the United States, it’s very different today in the world.”
It’s a legitimate concern. Beijing has spent the past few years building up its missile arsenal. It has short-, intermediate-, and long-range missiles capable of making any military, including America’s, think twice about attacking it. And while it only has about 300 warheads, far fewer than the US and Russia, it has enough bombs and missiles to carry them to retaliate. If the US wants to drop a nuke on China, China can drop a nuke on the US right back.
That’s a big change from when the US and Russia signed New START almost a decade ago. Many in the Trump administration and outside experts argue it’s worth using the treaty’s imminent demise to pressure Moscow to either stop harming the US, such as with election interference, or get Beijing to join a broader arms control agreement.
In July, top US arms control negotiator Marshall Billingslea extended an “open invitation” to Chinese officials to join the US and Russia in Austria for New START talks, even though Beijing has long said it won’t sign on to New START since its arsenal is so much smaller than Washington’s and Moscow’s.
The Chinese government didn’t accept the offer, leading Billingslea to take a swipe at the country on Twitter.
Vienna talks about to start. China is a no-show. Beijing still hiding behind #GreatWallofSecrecy on its crash nuclear build-up, and so many other things. We will proceed with #Russia, notwithstanding. pic.twitter.com/EjDxXNmblv
— Ambassador Marshall S. Billingslea (@USArmsControl) June 22, 2020
What an odd scene! Displaying Chinese National Flags on a negotiating table without China's consent! Good luck on the extension of the New START! Wonder how LOW you can go?
It was a microcosm of the jam the US put itself in: New START — the last major arms control deal between the US and Russia — may expire if China doesn’t join in. It’s a deeply misguided stance, experts say.
“They [the Chinese government] don’t trust arms control,” Tong Zhao, a Beijing-based expert on China’s nuclear program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “They don’t see it as a way to defend Chinese security interests. They view arms control as a way to control others’ military power, so they want to delay Chinese arms control as much as possible.”
“That mainstream view in China is entrenched and cynical,” Zhao continued. “It’ll take decades to change.”
That’s why nuclear experts like Nunn, the former US senator from Georgia, argues the US should at most try to get Beijing to make an anti-nuclear statement along with Washington and Moscow, but not try to get them to sign a new pact before February. “But in the long run,” Nunn made sure to say, “China needs to be involved” in an arms control agreement with the Americans and Russians.
Others are skeptical of the Trump administration’s intentions. While there is merit in discussing arms control with the Chinese — especially on issues of nuclear weapons, hypersonics, and cybersecurity — they say pushing for those talks on such a tight timeline is nothing short of a ruse to kill New START.
“It’s a phantom endeavor, an obvious ploy,” Taylor Fravel, an expert on China’s military strategy at MIT, told me. “Why would China join an agreement with much bigger arsenals than theirs?”
“It’s just not going to be easy for China to go along with strategic stability discussions,” he added.
Everyone I spoke to, though, noted Trump’s hard line on arms control with Russia and China is consistent with this administration’s nuclear approach. If Washington is fretting the end of arms control, it sure isn’t acting like it, and neither is Moscow.
The new arms race
“Arms control creates an additional layer of insurance between states not getting along well and a possible hot war,” Samuel Charap, who served as a senior adviser to Gottemoeller during New START negotiations, told me. “If you remove the failsafe, you create more risk.”
Without the longstanding architecture in place, Washington and Moscow would enter a dangerous arms control hiatus and could see already poor relations spiral out of control. The US and Russia have many nuclear-tipped missiles already pointed at each other, but it would be even worse if both sides try to one-up their adversary by creating more deadly and usable weapons.
That, unfortunately, is exactly what’s happening. Welcome to the new arms race.
Take the American side of this first: The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, released in February 2018, lowered the threshold for dropping a bomb on an enemy.
Basically, the US said it would launch low-yield nuclear weapons — smaller, less deadly bombs — in response to non-nuclear strikes, such as a major cyberattack. That was in contrast with previous US administrations, which said they would respond with a nuke only in the event of the most egregious threats against the US, like the possible use of a biological weapon.
The document also calls for more, smaller weapons on submarines and other platforms to attack enemies. Many experts worry that having smaller nukes makes them more usable, thereby increasing the chance of a skirmish turning into a full-blown nuclear war. (Think, for example, of the US-China trade war escalating to the point that Trump thinks his only option is to launch a smaller nuke, or how Trump could respond to Beijing after a devastating cyberattack on US infrastructure.)
The US has already put its new nuclear strategy into overdrive. America’s armed forces placed their first low-yield nuclear weapon on a submarine in February, which means Washington now has a stealthy and hard-to-defend-against way to deliver a nuke to almost any point on earth.
If you’re in Moscow or Beijing, this may all be alarming news. In the US, the wisdom of these decisions depends on whom you ask.
Thomas Countryman, the assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation from 2011 to 2017, thinks the move ratchets up the chance for nuclear war.
“It would be practically impossible to prevent a limited use of nuclear weapons from escalating into an all-out strategic exchange of weapons,” he said, implying bigger nukes would soon follow the smaller ones. “The willingness to contemplate such use makes it more likely that [a strike with a low-yield nuclear weapon] will occur at some point.”
Matthew Kroenig, a nuclear expert at the Atlantic Council think tank, has a different take. He told me in 2018 that having smaller tactical weapons is a good idea. Our current arsenal, which prioritizes older and bigger nukes, leads adversaries to think we would never use it. Having smaller bombs that America might deploy, then, makes the chance of a nuclear conflict less likely. “It gives us more options to threaten that limited response,” Kroenig told me. “We raise the bar with these lower-yield weapons.”
But the US isn’t just experimenting with low-yield bombs. The Trump administration’s plans include spending more taxpayer dollars on nuclear development, including another new submarine-launched bomb. There are also new funds to develop conventional intermediate-range missiles, the same ones the INF Treaty prohibited.
The US, then, is off to the races. What’s more troublesome is that the Russians are, too.
In March 2018, Putin gave a dramatic speech to his nation in which he boasted about creating new, unstoppable weapons.
He said Russia was working on a cruise missile, powered by nuclear technology, that could reach the United States; nuclear weapons that could evade any missile defense system; and unfindable drone submarines that could be used to blow up foreign ports.
Experts at the time told me the most impressive new weapon Putin revealed was the nuclear-powered cruise missile he claimed could hit any point on the planet. (That’s big: Conventional cruise missiles rarely travel more than 600 miles.) This kind of weapon moves so quickly and flies so low to the ground that it could evade US and European missile defense systems and hit intended targets with a nuclear weapon.
Putin said the new technology would render American missile defense “useless,” but US officials say it needs further testing and is not yet operational. In fact, a radioactive explosion in 2019 in Russia may have been caused by a failed test of this very weapon.
But Moscow has succeeded in another area: hypersonic weapons. In December, the Russian military said it deployed one for the first time, a claim American officials don’t particularly doubt. It’s a provocative move, as this kind of missile could carry a warhead at about 3,800 miles per hour, fast enough to make it near-impossible for any defense system to stop it.
It looks like the Russians beat the Americans to the hypersonic punch. The US doesn’t plan to have a similar projectile in its arsenal until 2022 at the earliest, though that timeline is optimistic for many.
Despite all this, experts I spoke to said Moscow doesn’t really want an arms race. The Soviets already lost one to the US during the Cold War. Now that Russia has big economic problems, it could ill afford to engage in a long-term spending spree on weaponry.
“If there’s any country least ready for an arms race right now, it’s Russia,” Miller, the expert on Russian history at the Fletcher School, told me. “Even if they started the race a couple years ahead by violating the INF Treaty, that doesn’t give me or many people the confidence they’ll end the race ahead in 20 or 30 years.”
This would explain why Putin wants to extend New START so badly, and why the US believes it could use that desire as leverage. What’s certain is that the administration argues it’s no longer the time for old-school arms control ideas, as a top State Department arms control official, Christopher Ford, made clear in a February speech.
“I want to replace them with a discourse much more likely to be relevant to current conditions, more likely to improve real-world outcomes, and much less desperately maladaptive in the contemporary geopolitical environment of great power competition,” he told a London audience. “It should be increasingly clear that this arms control pathology is a completely inappropriate and even dangerous answer to the problems of international peace and security in today’s complex and challenging world, and we’re not shy about pointing this out.”
But at this rate, what he and Trump may get instead is no arms control at all.
“You’re pouring gasoline onto a fire”
If you’re starting to fear that a nuclear war is coming, the good news is the chance of one remains very low. The US and Russia have every incentive to avoid such a disaster, and they have done so thus far, in even the tensest moments.
But it’s fair to say many are worried about the long-term implications of current tensions. “You’re pouring gasoline onto a fire, and accelerating all of these trends to arms racing and proliferation globally,” says Nicholas Miller, a nuclear expert at Dartmouth College. “It could be quite dangerous.”
Three main consequences of the imminent death of arms control as we know it are broadly expected.
First, the US may lose global legitimacy as a leader in stopping nuclear proliferation. This year is the 50th anniversary of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), an international agreement to stem the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. None of the largest nuclear weapons states have signed on to it, but that’s because of an implicit understanding.
“The NPT is supposed to be a bargain between those that don’t have nuclear weapons and those that do,” said Middlebury’s Bidgood. “Non-nuclear weapons states expect those that have them to disarm, and if they don’t, then non-nuclear nations might leave the treaty because why would they limit their own capability?”
A review conference for the treaty was supposed to take place in April but was postponed due to the coronavirus. Whenever it meets, the lack of US-Russia arms control commitment could make it the testiest gathering in decades. Some may seriously push for the NPT to be dissolved. And if that’s the case, what’s to stop nations like Iran, Saudi Arabia, or others from sprinting toward the bomb?
Second, the end of an important era in global security fades away with nothing to replace or build on it. “The good old days when arms control was going hand-in-hand with a cooperative security relationship — which basically ties my security to your security — those days are gone, and I don’t see them coming back,” said the University of Hamburg’s Kühn. The only chance of a return to that time, he added, would likely be after Trump, Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping leave their offices.
But by then, it’s possible the arms control muscle may have atrophied.
Third, yes, the risk of a nuclear exchange between the world’s foremost powers will go up. Few I spoke to, though, argued that possibility would grow immediately.
Gottemoeller told me she thinks Washington and Moscow would show some goodwill toward each other in the short term. But over time, tensions would surely rise as they lose insight into what the other is planning.
“Each side will accuse the other of breaking out” of New START’s restrictions and may revert to banned practices, like putting nets over silos to keep them from satellite observation. “I can see a period of mutual recrimination and possibly a build-up of strategic forces,” but perhaps not missile forces because of their immense cost, Gottemoeller continued.
That’s why experts like Nunn want the US and Russia to take new negotiations seriously. “If you have over 90 percent of the weapons that can destroy God’s universe, you have a responsibility to talk,” he told me.
There are reasons for optimism.
Washington and Moscow are having conversations now, including a working-level meeting in July in Vienna. Even though the administration is skeptical of arms control, and Billingslea is not a fan of the concept, Trump’s team at least hasn’t outright rejected negotiations.
However unlikely now, the two powers could come to an agreement before New START’s expiration on February 5. If they don’t, a newly elected Joe Biden could quickly reach a deal with Putin before the deadline, though he’d have limited time since his term would start in late January. “The election in November will be a major inflection point for New START specifically,” Moniz, the former energy secretary who helped strike the Iran nuclear deal, told me. “If Biden wins, I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t extend New START.”
And perhaps the future of arms control will feature more executive agreements, like the Iran deal, and fewer treaties, in large part due to the rancorous politics in Washington. That would mean the power to make nuclear pacts would shift in an even greater direction to a president.
This moment could be just a blip in an otherwise positive, decades-long story of how two enemies found a way to pull back from the brink.
But when I asked experts if they felt arms control may soon be a thing of the past, the nearly unanimous sentiment was resigned acceptance. “My heart says no, but my head says yes,” RAND’s Charap told me after a long sigh. “The arms control era doesn’t have to come to an end, but it seems like it is.”
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Axios’s Jonathan Swan interviewing President Donald Trump. | Axios/HBO
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President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the New START treaty in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
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