In The Midst Of Cold War 2

9/11: The End of the ABM Treaty

The decade of the 1990s saw a significant but short-lived improvement in international relations and nuclear disarmament initiatives.

The US and the USSR agreed to the reduction of their strategic nuclear arsenals, removed overseas tactical nuclear weapons and halted military nuclear development programs.

The USSR collapsed at the end of 1991 and Russia gradually opened to the West.

France and China entered the Non-Proliferation Treaty, while the "zero option" – i.e. the ban of all nuclear weapons – gained traction.

In 1997, NATO and Russia signed the Founding Act, with the goal of overcoming previous confrontation and establishing mutual trust and cooperation for a peaceful and undivided Europe.

However, the trend soon began to revert.

Despite Russian opposition, in March 1999, NATO admitted former Eastern Bloc countries for the first time: Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. Twelve days later, NATO bombed Serbia, which was backed by Russia.

The turning point in nuclear peace came a couple of years later.

Three months after the attack on the World Trade Center, the United States notified Russia of the termination of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

It was a foundational agreement in nuclear deterrence signed in 1972. It prohibited the two countries from employing defense systems that could intercept ballistic missiles, so that in the event of nuclear escalation neither side could defend itself against attacks by the other. It belonged within the framework of the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine, for which the devastating consequences of a nuclear conflict for both sides would act as a deterrent for a first strike.

The US justified their decision with the need to protect the West from Middle Eastern threats in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, although the subsequent Iraq campaign found no evidence of a nuclear program.

As a result, the United States started the installation of two anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe under the NATO flag: in Romania (opened in 2016) and Poland (2024). The location chosen for the new bases, reminiscent of the Cold War's containment strategy, unsettled the Russians, who reportedly responded by transferring missiles for nuclear warheads into the exclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea.

Moscow invested in modernizing its nuclear arsenal and in late 2005 declared that innovations to its strategic (i.e. long-range) weapons would allow penetration of any defense system.

Ukraine War

As much as Gorbachev pursued Glasnost (political openness and freedom of speech) and Perestroika (economic and political restructuring), he never planned to dismantle the USSR. So Yeltsin did it.

During his presidency of the newborn Russian Federation, eastern expansion of NATO and the European Union encountered vocal but ineffective resistance.

With the change of leadership, after initial laissez-faireism, the balance of forces started to shift towards past positions. Putin has assumed increasingly strong stances on Russian defense, supported also by the growth of a powerful ally like China, which even the Western economy has been depending upon.

When Ukraine was about to enter an Association Agreement with the EU, as a first step towards EU membership, Russia used political pressure to prevent it. When this failed, Russia occupied Crimea and supported separatist armed groups in eastern Ukraine.

With the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the consequent expulsion from the G8 and the Syrian crisis, where the U.S. and Russia supported opposing sides, relations were definitively torn apart.

In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine, escalating what has become the largest conflict in Europe since World War 2. In response, it was hit by sweeping sanctions and excluded from the global SWIFT payment system.

What Next?

The 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has not yet come into force because North Korea, India, and Pakistan have not signed it, while China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and the United States have not ratified it and Russia withdrew its ratification in 2023.

None of the nuclear-weapon states participated in the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which opened for signatures in 2017, let alone signed it.

China’s military spending has quintupled in the last twenty years and its nuclear stockpile has doubled since 2020.

After three decades of bilateral nuclear disarmament, the last nuclear arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia (i.e. New START) expired in February 2026 without renewal, opening the way to unlimited rearmament.

Allowing relations between the West and Russia to deteriorate has been a potentially fatal mistake. Especially after abandoning communism, Russia has been culturally much closer to Europe than it is to China, just as it had been before 1917.

With a nuclear arsenal virtually matching that of the U.S., Russia determines the global geopolitical balance as a potential ally for Western military supremacy or alongside the Chinese for a soon-to-be-equal confrontation between the two blocs.

After the USSR’s collapse, the Russian government and population opened up again to Western economy and culture. Western companies penetrated the country and its inclusion in the globalized world would have been easier than ever.

As it was considered in the early 2000s, it would not have been unreasonable to envision Russia as a NATO member. Even the Chinese rearmament may have been prevented, if relations with Russia had been successfully managed.

The current Iran war predictably could not be settled in a matter of days as advertised by the attackers. Its obvious global implications in energy and alliances may be the trigger for a severe exacerbation of the Second Cold War we are living, if not a global war.

Conflict between nations seems to be a constant in human history. It may be overcome when people realize that nations are made of individuals and that governments' only function is to realize their will, and this function is fulfilled.

The fact that the only country in the world governed by direct democracy is also the neutral one par excellence confirms it.

This is why Time Zero promotes education on direct democracy as a tool for peace, freedom and prosperity.

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