The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The list of other agreements to discard is long, including the Law of the Sea Convention and two others from which the US should be immediately unshackled. The 1992 Treaty on Open Skies (which only entered into force in 2002) in theory allows unarmed military surveillance flights over the territories of its thirty-plus signatories but has been contentious since its inception.7 It has proven a boon to Russia8 but is outdated and essentially valueless to the United States because we no longer need to overfly their territory. Withdrawing the US would clearly be in our national interest, denying Russia, for example, the ability to conduct low-altitude flights over Washington, DC, and other highly sensitive locations. When I resigned, consideration was under way regarding leaving Open Skies, and press reports indicated these efforts, which I still fully support, were continuing.