Mikhail Gorbachev - What Is at Stake Now

This is an illusion. In today’s world, it is not possible for a single country to achieve a hegemony. This has recently become clear. Even Washington’s most loyal allies are no longer prepared to stand to attention before their big brother.

The current destructive trend can only lead to destabilization and a new arms race. The global situation is becoming ever more chaotic and unpredictable. This, in turn, endangers the security of all states, including that of the USA.

The US president said his country was hoping to conclude a ‘new treaty that would be much better’. Let us not be deceived by this, or by the assertion of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the USA has ‘no plans to immediately start deploying new missiles’. This just means the USA does not yet possess such missiles.

Europeans have not been convinced by these assurances either. They are alarmed, and understandably so. Everyone remembers the early 1980s, when hundreds of missiles were stationed on our continent, Soviet SS-20s on one side, American Pershing and cruise missiles on the other. And everyone knows that a new arms race could be even more dangerous.

I welcomed the European attempts to save the INF Treaty. The European Union called upon the United States to think carefully about what withdrawing from the treaty would mean for its own security, the security of its allies and that of the entire world. German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who warned that terminating the INF Treaty would have ‘numerous negative consequences’, travelled to Moscow and Washington to mediate. Unfortunately, this was to no avail. It is therefore all the more crucial to continue these efforts, even now that the USA has withdrawn from the treaty and thus practically ensured its demise.

Too much is now at stake.

Opponents of the treaty claim that the world has changed substantially, so the agreement is simply outdated. The former is certainly true, the latter is completely false.

Despite all the changes in the world, we cannot do away with the agreements that laid the foundation for global security after the end of the Cold War. Instead, we must put our entire energy into achieving the most important goal: the total elimination of all nuclear weapons.

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