Future arms control agreements will be non-treaty accords that begin with “stealthy” conversations between diplomats willing to buck the status quo, a retired State Department official said in Washington at a government-sponsored forum named for him.
Even before China began expanding its nuclear arsenal and Russia invaded Ukraine for the second time this century, it was clear that “there were not going to be any more bilateral nuclear arms treaties,” James Timbie, a former senior advisor at the State Department, said Monday during the James P. Timbie Forum on Arms Control. “Those were the product of a simpler era.”
Timbie worked at the State Department from 1983 to 2016, prior to which the PhD physicist was a scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. At State, he was the lead negotiator on the Iran Nuclear Deal and a negotiator on the now-defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, and the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (START) I and II agreements that were the precursors to New START, the last remaining bilateral nuclear-arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia.
At Monday’s gathering, Timbie said he envisioned “21st century agreements that don’t look much like INF or START.”
The U.S. withdrew from the INF treaty, which prohibited deployment of a certain class of land-based missiles in Europe and Russia, in 2019, during the Donald Trump (R) administration. The withdrawal followed years of allegations by the U.S., dating to the Barack Obama (D) administration, that Russia was violating the treaty.
INF, Timbie said, now “makes no sense,” considering China’s massive stockpile of such weapons and the value Beijing attaches to them.
Timbie also said that New START is not a template for a future agreement that binds the U.S., China and Russia, because a successor accord would have to include limits on exotic Russian nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons intended for use in theaters of war, precision-guided conventional weapons and space-based systems that interface with all types of weapons.
That collection of weapons is “too unconventional for a formal treaty,” Timbie said during Monday’s meeting. Likewise, the seeds for any agreements to govern their deployment and use will be planted in unconventional ways, the veteran diplomat said.
“Interagency government-to-government talks of the sort that were once a familiar feature of the landscape do not seem to be happening,” Timbie said. “So this is my suggestion here: a stealthier approach.”
Stealth, Timbie said, means that “our ambassador in Moscow [would] talk quietly with Russian government officials” and U.S. officials in Washington from the State Department and the White House would “meet somewhere and talk quietly with their Russian counterparts…problematic as this may be.”
Last, Timbie said that when it comes to China, U.S. diplomats should reject the idea that it is “okay…that we don’t talk to China and it’s China’s fault.” Savvy diplomats, Timbie said, will seek out Chinese officials who are willing to talk, even if those officials are not part of the Chinese Politburo or the Central Military Commission.
“From the outside, it appears that one obstacle to conversation with China is a feeling that if you can’t talk to someone who’s whispering in the ear of [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, it’s not worth it,” Timbie said. “To the extent that that’s an obstacle, I think that’s something that should be overcome.”
“We are very interested in talking with China and have been making overtures,” Bonnie Jenkins, under secretary of state for arms control and international security, told Timbie at the forum, where the two briefly shared the stages for a fireside-style chat.
