The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War

by Jim Sciutto

The US has been navigating this nuclear scare as the world enters a new period with fewer and fewer treaties or even the outline of treaties to govern the expanding conflict. There are no cyber arms control treaties. There is no comprehensive agreement governing the weaponization of space. And two of the most crucial nuclear arms control treaties between the US and Russia—the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty—no longer hold. The US withdrew from ABM under President George W. Bush in 2002 and from INF under President Trump in 2019, accusing Russia of repeated violations. “We need at some stage to reestablish arms control,” NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg told me, “because all the big arms control agreements that we were able to reach, actually during the Cold War and in the years after the Cold War, have just been dismantled.”