Trump Withdraws U.S. From Treaty Allowing Surveillance Flights Over Russia, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That NATO Allies Could See What The Russian Military Was Doing

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Citing the Russian government's repeated failure to honor an agreement built entirely on mutual cooperation, the Trump administration announced Thursday that the United States would withdraw from the Treaty on Open Skies, a 34-nation arrangement that for nearly two decades had allowed member states to conduct unarmed observation flights over one another's territory.

The treaty, in force since 2002, had permitted the United States, Russia, Canada, and most of Europe to fly low-altitude reconnaissance missions across each other's airspace and to share the resulting imagery, a system designed so that no member would have to guess what another member's military was doing. Administration officials explained that the United States could no longer participate in an arrangement under which a hostile power was permitted to observe American forces, on the grounds that the same arrangement also permitted American allies to observe the hostile power.

"Russia didn't adhere to the treaty," said President Trump, who noted that Russia had restricted observation flights over the Kaliningrad exclave and along its border with Georgia, and who indicated that the appropriate response to one nation limiting transparency was for every nation to have less of it. "So until they adhere, we will pull out."

Sources within the administration confirmed that the withdrawal would have little practical effect on the United States, which maintains its own fleet of reconnaissance satellites, and would instead fall principally on smaller NATO members that had relied on Open Skies flights precisely because they did not. The decision, officials noted, freed those allies from the burden of knowing where Russian troops, armor, and aircraft were positioned, a burden the treaty had imposed on them since well before Russia would mass forces near the Ukrainian border.

Eleven European governments issued a joint statement expressing regret, which the administration characterized as evidence that the treaty had been working. The exit marked the third arms-control agreement the United States had abandoned in three years, following the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, completing what officials described as the removal of the last remaining mechanism by which the United States and Russia were contractually obligated to be honest with each other about their militaries.

At press time, the administration confirmed that Russia, having watched the United States voluntarily surrender its seat at the only table where the two nations were required to show each other their hands, would itself announce within months that it was leaving the treaty as well.

Who Benefits

§Donald Trump, who added a third abandoned arms-control treaty to a foreign-policy record he presents as evidence of strength, and who eliminated a mechanism that routinely documented Russian military activity he preferred not to discuss.
§Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, who were relieved of allied observation flights over Russian territory and, once the United States departed, of their own obligation to host them, having surrendered nothing the United States had not surrendered first.
§The Russian military, whose troop, armor, and aircraft movements would no longer be photographed at low altitude by the NATO members with the most direct interest in watching them.
§Arms-control opponents within the administration, who had argued for years that the United States should not belong to a treaty granting Russia access to American airspace, and who secured that outcome by also denying every American ally access to Russian airspace.
§Owners of reconnaissance-satellite capability, a category that included the United States and excluded the smaller European allies now left to guess, widening a gap the treaty had been written to close.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment