President Donald Trump announced that the United States would begin withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, setting in motion the collapse of one of the most important arms-control agreements of the Cold War.
The INF Treaty had been signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. It prohibited the United States and Soviet Union — and later Russia — from possessing, producing or testing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
The agreement resulted in the destruction of 2,692 American and Soviet missiles and became an important part of the arms-control framework that emerged during the closing years of the Cold War.
But by 2019, the treaty had been in trouble for years.
The United States first formally accused Russia of violating the agreement in 2014, during the Obama administration. American officials said Russia had developed and later deployed a ground-launched cruise missile known by Russia as the 9M729 and by NATO as the SSC-8.
Russia denied that the missile violated the treaty.
The Trump administration inherited the dispute and eventually decided that continued American participation was no longer acceptable while Russia was allegedly deploying weapons prohibited by the agreement.
On February 1, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would suspend its treaty obligations beginning the following day and provide formal notice of its intention to withdraw in six months unless Russia returned to compliance.
Trump argued that the United States should not remain bound by an agreement that Russia was violating.
NATO backed the American assessment, saying Russia had developed and fielded the 9M729 missile in violation of the treaty. The alliance also supported the U.S. decision to begin the withdrawal process.
But there was another question: whether destroying the treaty was the best response to Russia's violation.
Arms-control advocates and some members of Congress warned that leaving the agreement could remove restrictions that had limited an entire category of American and Russian missiles for more than three decades. Rather than forcing Russia back into compliance, they argued, withdrawal could simply free both countries to develop and deploy weapons that the treaty had previously prohibited.
That concern would quickly become reality.
Russia responded by suspending its own participation in the agreement. With neither country willing to resolve the dispute during the six-month withdrawal period, the United States formally left the INF Treaty in August 2019.
The treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev had signed more than three decades earlier was dead.
Russia's violations played a central role in bringing the agreement to the breaking point. But Trump's decision established how the United States would respond: rather than remaining inside the treaty while attempting to enforce it, his administration chose to leave it.
The result was the disappearance of an agreement that had eliminated thousands of missiles and helped define nuclear arms control between Washington and Moscow since the final years of the Cold War.