Fiona Hill On Trump And Nuclear Weapons

Fiona Hill was the Russia specialist on Donald Trump’s National Security Council in his first term. She’s actually a top expert on Russia. She is now chancellor of Durham University in England. She’s given a couple of interviews lately. One from a week ago in The Telegraph mentioned that she felt that Trump was afraid of nuclear weapons. Engelsberg Ideas delves into that idea in greater detail. The whole thing is worth reading.

Hill notes that Trump grew up during the Cold War, so that his attitudes toward nuclear weapons can mostly be attributed to the effect of those historical events on his thinking: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the nuclear fears of the 1980s. The Day After and Threads may have made a particular impression on a man who is heavily influenced by drama and the visual. He visits Russia for the first time in 1987.

According to Hill, Trump believes that he has a special insight into and talent for negotiations on nuclear weapons because of his uncle at MIT and his experience in Russia. He would like to eliminate nuclear weapons, but he also sees that project in the terms of the accolades it would bring him. He seems to envision a special deal between himself and Vladimir Putin, much as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev might have outlawed nuclear weapons in their meeting at Reykjavik.

He always brings it back to himself. It’s not abstract for him. It’s very personal, clearly. Most things that he really gets his teeth into are very personal for him. A classic example of this is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987.

The background to that was the Euromissile Crisis, which goes on from 1977 to 1987, a full ten years. The INF treaty was signed in 1987 and that’s the year that Trump is out there visiting the Soviet Union. I went there as a student in that year, and you already felt that things were starting to shift. The INF treaty takes the edge off this standoff over the SS-20s and Pershing missiles. And then, of course, you fast forward to the Moscow Summit of May-June 1988, and Gorbachev and Reagan have put everything on a completely different trajectory.

But in the 2010s we were starting to get back to a period of tensions between the US and Russia again. By the time of the first Trump administration in 2017, the Russians had been violating the terms of the INF Treaty. So, you’ve basically had this treaty for many decades being the cornerstone of nuclear policy and strategic stability in Europe. And now the Russians were violating it because they were trying to test a new category of intermediate range nuclear missiles. There were all these concerns that they might violate the Test Ban Treaty as well. They had been developing this whole range of hypersonics and new categories of missiles that we’re all of aware of now – it just wasn’t out in public yet, because, of course, later, Russia did announce all of this. We’d been going back and forth with the Russians the whole time, trading accusations about violating treaties, and it wasn’t at all productive.

….

So all of this is going on, and there is obviously an effort to get ahead of things with consultations and negotiations about pulling out of the INF. Then, in 2018, Ambassador Bolton led a team, which included myself, Tim Morrison and some others, to Moscow, to sit down with the Russians and talk about all of this. We got onto the plane and started talking through our strategy: there was an agreed plan that we were also going to be coordinating with European partners because the INF Treaty was so important for European security. And we’re on the plane, and then it became obvious that Trump just couldn’t abide the fact that it wasn’t him going out to go and negotiate this. He didn’t want Bolton or anybody else to take the credit, or to have that moment of successfully negotiating something with Putin.

So, he told a press gaggle that we were going to pull out of the INF. The decision had been made. But this contradicted our plan: we were going to negotiate. We were going to talk to the Russians about what we were going to do next. We were also going to consult with the Europeans. We weren’t going to leave the world abruptly without a nuclear treaty, or some kind of anchor on strategic stability. Some people in the administration did want to just pull out, but that’s not what Trump wanted. He wanted to negotiate this whole array of new treaties. Yet here we were, on the plane to Moscow, and we found out that, yet again, he’s put himself in the middle of it all and said, ‘we’re going to pull out’. So, by the time we get to meet with the Russians, they’ve already learned that we’re going to pull out. And so the question then becomes, what are the terms of that pull out? [my emphasis]

Just like that. Trump’s ego had to come to the fore, and it took the US out of the INF Treaty, rather than negotiate.

She says little about the 2018 Helsinki meeting, from which our frequently used header photo comes. It’s possible that even she doesn’t know what happened behind the closed doors.

She sees Trump as a tragic figure whose objective of controlling or eliminating nuclear weapons is undercut by his ego needs.

There’s a bit of TACO Trump in all this too. Make a lot of noise, and then fail to deliver. His fear of nuclear war may be part of his willingness to kowtow to Vladimir Putin. Was that a threat at Helsinki?

Today Tulsi Gabbard released a video about nuclear weapons. The implication is that we should work to eliminate them or to prohibit their use. It’s hard to know what is up with this and why now. Is it her initiative, or the President’s? Is it some badly thought out response to Putin? I thought that members of the President’s cabinet were a political elite, but she blames “the political elite and warmongers” for fomenting nuclear weapons fears. Is it a response to the big Federation of American Scientists op-ed in the Washington Post? Or is it just another random thing from an administration that values chaos?

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner