The Trump administration is preparing to tell Russian leaders next week that it is planning to exit the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, in part to enable the United States to counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, according to American officials and foreign diplomats.
President Trump has been moving toward scrapping the three-decade-old treaty, which grew out of President Ronald Reagan’s historic meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. While the treaty was seen as effective for years, Russia has been violating it at least since 2014 in an effort to menace other nations.
But the pact has also constrained the United States from deploying new weapons to respond to China’s efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and to keep American naval forces at bay. Because China was not a signatory to the treaty, it has faced no limits on developing intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which can travel thousands of miles.
The White House said that no official decision had been made to leave the treaty, known as I.N.F., which at the time of its signing was considered a critical step in defusing Cold War tensions. But in the coming weeks, Mr. Trump is expected to sign off on the decision, which would mark the first time he has scrapped an arms control treaty, the American officials said.
Now that the treaty is largely in tatters, the question is whether the decision to leave it will accelerate the increasingly Cold War-like behavior among the three superpowers: the United States, Russia and China.
As Russia has flown bombers over Europe and has conducted troop exercises on its borders with former Soviet states, the United States and its NATO allies have been rotating forces through countries under threat. Ukraine has become a low-level battleground, with ground skirmishes and a daily cyber conflict. China and the United States are jostling for position around reefs in the South China Sea that Beijing has turned into military bases, and they are both preparing for any possibility of war in space.
For the past four years, the United States has argued that Russia is in violation of the treaty because it has deployed prohibited tactical nuclear weapons to intimidate European nations and former Soviet states that have aligned with the West. But President Barack Obama chose not to leave the agreement because of objections from the Europeans particularly Germany and out of concern that it would rekindle an arms race.
President Trump appears not to share such hesitation. His national security adviser, John R. Bolton, will warn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, on a trip to Moscow early next week that the United States plans to leave the treaty, the American officials said.
Mr. Bolton declined to comment on his forthcoming trip. But a senior administration official issued a statement saying that “Russia continues to produce and field prohibited cruise missiles and has ignored calls for transparency.”
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has publicly brought the subject up several times in recent weeks, saying that Russia’s violations were “untenable” and signaling that the administration was reviewing its options. The preparations to leave the treaty were described by foreign diplomats who have been briefed on the matter and by American officials with knowledge of the plans.
In a lengthy nuclear strategy document published early this year, the administration detailed the Russian violations and concluded that the country’s “decision to violate the I.N.F. treaty and other commitments all clearly indicate that Russia has rebuffed repeated U.S. efforts to reduce the salience, role and number of nuclear weapons.”
The Pentagon has already been developing nuclear weapons to match, and counter, what the Chinese have deployed. But that effort would take years, so, in the interim, the United States is preparing to modify existing weapons, including its non-nuclear Tomahawk missiles, and is likely to deploy them first in Asia, according to officials who have been briefed on the issue. Those may be based in Japan, or perhaps in Guam, where the United States maintains a large base and would face little political opposition.
The last time the United States withdrew from a major nuclear arms control treaty was in 2002, when President George W. Bush fulfilled a campaign promise and scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. While President Trump withdrew from the Obama-era deal with Iran this year, that agreement was not a treaty, and it governed only Iran’s production of nuclear materials. Tehran has no nuclear weapons.
Mr. Bush’s pullout from the ballistic missile treaty led to a buildup of antimissile defenses still an irritant in relations with Russia. But it also led to a modest arms control agreement with Russia, reducing the overall number of weapons possessed by each country.
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