A Rough START
Do you remember in college how lots of people tended to put off studying for an important exam, writing a term paper, or even something as small as printing out an assignment at the public computer labs until the last possible moment? I don’t know what it is about the college environment that enables that type of action. My best guess is that the combination of technology, alcohol and the accompanying sleep deprivation, and social media combine to form a semi-toxic cocktail that causes our nation’s college population to embrace procrastination as one of the key components that form a college experience.
One particular memory comes to mind from my own college years which illustrates this phenomenon. I had a massive exam in accounting on a Thursday morning. The format was such that the class was given a problem to work through to analyze the revenue recognition for several scenarios, all containing the same numbers but with different circumstances and industries which changes the way revenue which the companies observed were recognized and recorded to the ledger. The class was to write down our answers and calculations from these different story problems on the exam, essentially stretching the exam out over the course of the week, but inspiring debate within the class as to what the correct accounting treatment of the revenues were.
For instance, in the oil industry revenue can be recorded as unearned revenue as soon as a reserve is discovered. This is because the demand for oil is going to be in the market for a long time, and the raw crude will almost certainly be refined as soon as it is extracted. The general consensus in the industry is that the critical juncture in which an entity knows oil will produce sales is the discovery of oil. At this point, the estimate of the oil is recorded to inventory, and revenue is recognized as reserves are sold.
Does that sound convincing?
I stayed up until 4am Thursday morning perfecting my calculations for the various story problems, working through different methods of revenue recognition. My roommate, diagnosed with ADD, let me try one of his Adderall pills that night, something I previously had never tried but felt like I needed to prepare for this important exam and was willing to try anything necessary to put in the work to get up to par. I pounded an entire four pack of Monster Absolute Zero energy drinks, which I had been planning on saving for mixers with Sobieski vodka for a little later on that Thursday night. Time felt like it was flowing slower. I felt like I could learn the entire two-inch thick textbook that night, though I only needed to memorize one section.
After the long evening faded to night and melted into morning, I awoke at 10am for the exam at 10:45. I ran through the shower relying on 3-in-1 Old Spice body/hair/face wash, scuttled across the street to the library to print off my calculations, and speed-walked over to the business building to sit for the exam. As I waited for the professor to walk in, I felt relaxed, prepared, and like I maybe should start studying sooner, given how deathly tired I was and the exhaustion I was going to feel the moment I walked out of the room and made it back to my apartment.
I failed that exam.
To be fair, it wasn’t just me. A full third of the three sections of about 50 kids each failed that exam, with another third getting a D, and around 10 students acing the exam. The professor was a total dick, but the lesson I learned (other than revenue recognition, which I had a solid understanding of despite the exam score) was to make sure to prepare when you know a major trial is going to be occurring. Review notes, ask advice, collaborate, and do everything you can do to prepare for whatever, be it an interview, an exam, a date, or a major phone call, which brings us to Donald Trump for the second time in a week.
Last week at noon in Wisconsin, I was on lunch and decided against my better judgment to check the news. I usually check local news websites for goings-on in the state because major networks do not give a single shit about the Midwest except Chicago when gun violence numbers are released. My other go-to for national and international reports is Reuters. I think it’s a pretty solid source in terms of its legacy of objectivity, to the point where Reuters refrained from describing the horrors of 9/11/2001 as terrorism because of its policy of using what it coins as “emotive terms”. I’m not sure I totally agree with the policy, but it does lead to news which is stripped of spin for the most part. Reuters does use charged words when it is quoting individuals, thankfully, because otherwise it would be like reading news written by your friend who you know has political opinions but is wishy-washy in discussing them because they’re deathly afraid of offending or alienating someone in the same room.
I am not one of those people, so let’s talk about this story. Full disclosure, Reuters nor I (obviously) reviewed notes from the call because the notes are classified. All details known are from three sources who read “detailed notes taken during the call” because unlike the call with Australia PM Malcolm Turnbull, this one wasn’t recorded(1).
“In his first call as president with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump denounced a treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployment of nuclear warheads as a bad deal for the United States, according to two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official with knowledge of the call.
When Putin raised the possibility of extending the 2010 treaty, known as New START, Trump paused to ask his aides in an aside what the treaty was, these sources said.”
Literally the first two sentences in the story and we’re off to a hot start! The second paragraph is what reminded me of that anecdote from college. The president, a man who has a dude following him around 100% of the time who is carrying a briefcase which can end the world via ICBMs, does not know what nuclear treaties are in place with our nation’s primary rival in the arena of military and political influence. If you don’t recall the campaign and subsequent transition period, you’ll recall much hay has been made out of Trump’s attitudes towards Russia. I think the assumption was that he had a semblance of an idea of what he was talking about when it came to diplomatic, economic, and military positions the US has held towards Russia, at least in the past 10, if not the past 20 years. The ideal would be a historical understanding of the dynamic between the two powers since 1941 and especially since 1945, the critical year in which the Yalta Conference occurred, the second World War ended, and US Nuclear policy was birthed.
Instead, he had to put Vlad on hold and ask what the START Treaty is. In fairness, I didn’t know either. In even more fairness, I’m not the POTUS with the power to end the world tailing me with a messenger bag full of launch codes.
But hey, at least he paused to analyze the situation, told Putin he’d call him back after reviewing his notes and discussing with his Secretaries of State, Defense, and Energy (Rick Perry, who also had no idea he would control the US stockpile of nukes), took a deep breath, and stayed off Twitter the rest of the day.
Sorry, I blacked out and was writing about what a sane person, average decision maker, or reasonable diplomat might do. Instead, Trump told Putin he thought the treaty was a “bad deal” and talked about his own popularity. I can’t imagine that he used actual approval numbers, but then neither does Putin so at least the men understood each other. The White House, mercifully, had no comment. If I had to guess, I would suspect Sean Spicer is performing my college cram routine, frothing himself into a rage backstage in the West Wing with Monster Absolute Zero, Adderall, and alternative facts, prepping for the moment Trump incites him to walk into the James S Brady press briefing room and start shrieking at some of our nation’s elite journalists from both sides of the political spectrum.
There are two issues I have with today’s serving of Trump Brand politics(3), the first consisting of Trump’s continued insistence on relying on his own “skill” in negotiation, bravado, and salesmanship instead of relying on the staff he hired to perform their jobs, with the POTUS standing on the shoulders of his staff’s work to achieve well-thought out decisions reached through analysis and consensus. My second objection is Donald Trump’s assessment of current nuclear proliferation treaties and his misunderstanding of the atom’s influence in foreign policy since WWII.
Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State on the block, said during his confirmation hearing that he supported this treaty, despite his own conflicts of interest pertaining to Russia. We knew when he said that that it was not in line with Trump’s own positions posited via noted foreign policy blog Twitter. Tillerson stated that he believed in arms reduction, while simultaneously updating our nuclear arsenal “from time to time”. Not my favorite position, but I get it. It’s reasonable, even if I want to eradicate nukes from the world like humans have eradicated other plagues capable of decimating the world. I disagree with Tillerson on many (read: most) issues, but his position that the US should stay in contact with Russia to let steam out of the pressure cooker that is global politics, with both nations holding each other to the treaty is in line with what I would hope our international nuclear policy.
Not only did Trump not know what START is, he didn’t even refer to it correctly when asked about it during a debate, when he referred to the treaty as “START-Up”, similar to how your parents call your PS4 Slim a “Nintendo”.
Fine, that’s picking nits. He also said Russia had “outsmarted” the US when it came to nuclear disarmament. A nausea-inducing amount of bravado, referring to “deals” as if these things are negotiated with profit being the only factor, and general ignorance to the process of diplomacy; unless something drastic changes, we should expect this from the White House going forward given how the first three weeks of the Trump administration have played out.
An additional wrinkle which could not surprise me less was that, per the sources, Trump did not receive a briefing from the people on staff whose job it is to know what to say on the phone from a policy perspective.
“Typically, before a telephone call with a foreign leader, a president receives a written in-depth briefing paper drafted by National Security Council staff after consultations with the relevant agencies, including the State Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies, two former senior officials said.
Just before the call, the president also usually receives an oral “pre-briefing” from his national security adviser and top subject-matter aide, they said.
Trump did not receive a briefing from Russia experts with the NSC and intelligence agencies before the Putin call, two of the sources said. Reuters was unable to determine if Trump received a briefing from his national security adviser Michael Flynn.”
Trump went into his revenue recognition exam without having spent the night before studying. A 70 year old man somehow did not learn a lesson I learned at age 21. This marks the second time in a week that I’ve written about this theme (read my first piece here). It isn’t just irresponsible to go into these meetings with less than all of the information available about the current climate with whoever is on the other end of the phone: it’s downright dangerous. I don’t want to use hyperbole every time a story comes out of the West Wing, but it is impossible not to when the stakes are this high. If Trump’s reluctance to do his homework does not give you pause, let me give you some historical context as to why it should.
American-Soviet global nuclear policy was the driving force in global politics for over half a century, and effectively shaped the current shape of the US economy and military. It was the prism through which foreign policy of the US was focused, defined a need which lit the fuse of the Space Race, and doomed normalized relations between the US and Russia almost every time talks occurred during the Cold War. Nuclear weapons, their use, the disarmament, and defense against ICBMs have informed almost every interaction between the two states since 1945.
Towards the end of WWII, the US had developed uranium and plutonium bombs. Harry Truman, having just watched 5 years of the Soviet war machine having been within a hair’s width of defeat at Stalingrad and rising to sacrifice in excess of 22 million of its own citizens to defeat Hitler on its west front, deduced that the US being relatively unscathed in terms of casualties and almost wholly devoid of the destruction that scarred Europe had a singular historical opportunity. Truman saw that Great Britain’s waning influence and Germany’s fall from would-be global conqueror to debtor state left two nations capable of controlling post-war global politics: the United States and the Soviet Union. Sure, there had been pre-war tension and even mid-war tension, with Roosevelt and Churchill’s invasion of Europe coming much later than was negotiated with Stalin. Stalin had felt betrayed, and knew the nations were working on an enemy-of-my-enemy basis. The Allies were justified not trusting Stalin; he’d made a pre-blitzkrieg alliance with Hitler, and had snatched up the land of eastern Europe. As the war wore on, Hitler reneged on the pact and attacked the Soviets, forging a wary ally into a scorned enemy.
The US and Britain did not fully trust the USSR, and the feeling was reciprocated back to London and Washington from Moscow. The Allied leaders set their concerns aside and worked together for the common cause of defeating what is still considered to be the most objectively evil empire in history. Historians note that at the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt and Stalin bonded over poking fun at Churchill’s Britishness. There was a legitimate bond between the men, and US-Soviet relations were trending upward towards the end of the war.
That all changed when FDR died at Warm Springs later that year. Harry Truman was sworn into office, having been on Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection ticket as VP instead of Henry Wallace who was VP for the previous four years(4).
Truman had a different stance towards the Soviets than did Roosevelt, demonstrated to the tune of two atomic bombs, two Japanese cities, and somewhere between 120,000–220,000 lives, largely used as a warning to Stalin to respect the ability of the US to wage war should that have been an option following the fall of the Axis powers. Was swiftly ending the war a factor? Sure. The potential loss of American lives? Probably. However, Truman sacrificed America’s moral high ground (already eroded by firebombings Germany and Japan along with our very own internment camps) to send a message to Stalin: do not mess with the US, or this could happen to you. Whether this was the “right thing to do” is a matter of debate to this day.
We know what happened next. Nuclear buildup and brinkmanship, combined with clashing ideologies led to the Cold War. Eisenhower kicked off the military-industrial complex, skyrocketing US spending on defense, and more tension between the superpowers coming to a boil early in the 1960s in the form of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and a climax during 13 days in 1962 over missiles supplied to the Communist Cuba government from the Soviet Union. Kennedy did not want to withdraw offensive US ICBMs from Turkey, leading the USSR to seek similar capabilities against its rival with missiles near the US.
I won’t go so far as to defend USSR, however the US is still the only country to ever use WMDs on the scale of a nuclear weapon, and I think the fear of a nation using a weapon with the destructive power of Little Boy or Fat Man was justified. Seeking to obtain a position of equal footing with a rival is reasonable, especially if the goal is to obtain mutually-assured destruction with the aim of preventing any missiles from being fired. The world has never been as close to nuclear holocaust as we were for those two weeks, and the brinkmanship displayed by both sides was undermined by the very human desires of ambassadors wishing to see another sunrise, wishing to eat another breakfast with their children, and wishing to deescalate the Cold War. By 1963, Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev forged the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, limiting the testing of nuclear weapons to only underground tests. Most nations in the world signed the treaty, with a notable exception being Red China.
Despite some measure of tensions being eased, the 16,000 US military advisors sent to Vietnam by Kennedy in meant that when two US Navy ships were fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 meant that his successor, Lyndon B Johnson, had few options other than total withdrawal or escalation. Withdrawal was not an option for a man with an ego the size of Johnson and a nationalist pride the size of America’s, to the tune of 85% of citizens supporting the bombing of North Vietnam oil facilities and naval targets. Shortly thereafter, China detonated its first atomic bomb. China sent troops massed along its border with North Vietnam south in an attempt to take on America’s forces to promote communism over democracy. By the time the dust settled in 1975, Johnson had declined to seek a second term due to unpopularity surrounding the war of attrition in Vietnam, and somewhere between 1,291,425 and 4,211,451 lives were lost.
Nixon sought to ease tensions. The SALT I treaty was ratified in 1972, limiting the numbers of warheads and launchers which the nations were able to possess, effectively curbing the arms race. He was the first president to visit China, and visited Moscow later in the fall of 1972. There was an open dialogue, and both nations appeared to be determined to avoid any war involving the use of nuclear weapons.
SALT II was signed by both Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev in 1979, though the US Senate kept it from becoming law primarily due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (a strategic error on par with Vietnam). Despite the apparent halt to progress, both heads of state made statements insisting they would abide by the warhead and launch system limits established by SALT II, leading to a halt to new missile programs and an increase to the US use of cruise missiles, which Jimmy Carter sought to be the United States’ primary offensive weapon.
By this time, Ronald Reagan had been swept into office. In 1982, he delivered a commencement address at Eureka College, proposing a policy of nuclear arms reduction. 1983 was perhaps the second-most dangerous year in the Cold War behind 1962. At this point, the US had a significant military advantage. Reagan spent large amounts to modernize the US military including quasi-stealth and stealth bomber development, essentially weapons which if used as intended meant that the US could drop nukes on the USSR with a high rate of success in the event of war. A proposal was dropped onto the Resolute Desk in 1983 to research and implement a Strategic Defense Initiative, which was quickly referred to as Star Wars by critics much in the way the Affordable Care Act was referred to as Obamacare early on. The names stuck in both cases.
What this meant was that the USSR was at a massive disadvantage in ability to wage a war with its rival superpower. The US had such an edge in technology and aerospace development that new premier Yuri Andropov’s decision to halt Soviet development of space-based weaponry in 1983 was met with massive criticism from Kremlin insiders, especially in light of Ronald Reagan referring to the USSR as an “evil empire” earlier that year.
To add to escalating tensions, Andropov died of renal failure that year, succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who had been smoking cigarettes since age nine and died thirteen months after attaining the Chairmanship of the Soviet Union. There was a huge amount of uncertainty with each new, unknown Soviet head of state, and thankfully Andrei Gromyko, who helped negotiate the Partial Test Ban Treaty and both SALT treaties was elevated to Chairman.
Gromyko sent the head of the Communist Party in the USSR, a man named Mikhail Gorbechev, to Reykjavik in 1986, with orders to negotiate with Reagan to obtain a ban on all ICMB missiles. Reagan liked the idea, with the exception of one stipulation to the proposal: abandoning the Star Wars initiative. It was the one part that both sides could not come to a consensus on, and doomed the proposal. Most observers recognize that the Reykjavik Summit represented a breakthrough in US-Soviet relations which eventually lead to later limits on nuclear capabilities.
Personally, I think it represents the worst in American Exceptionalism, where our country is allowed to have systems to defend itself while at the same time possessing the ability to destroy the world, while no other nation is allowed the same level of defense. It’s blatant disregard for sovereignty, even if the US sees itself as the world’s police force. Reagan’s obstinance prevented the elimination of the threat of the world ending within any given 30 minute period, a threat which is less sharp today but which still lingers in the backs of the minds of millions of Americans who lived through the Cold War era.
Hyperbolic? Perhaps. I’m not wrong. Can you imagine where we’d be if all ICBMs were banned? The UN would have no choice but to oppose what is currently unfolding in North Korea and would have an actionable doctrine by which to impose sanctions, the second Iraq war would most likely have had broader international support, and quite plainly every person in the US and Russia would feel less paranoid of a surprise first-strike from the other side. Any country with ICBMs would be subject to sanction, and would be disincentivized from pursuing rocketry. Nations could pursue nuclear fuel knowing that so long as they didn’t work on ICBMs that they could have clean, cheap, plentiful electricity to boost their economic development.
During the succeeding years up until Mikhail Gorbachev took office, the US and USSR worked together to formulate the START I treaty(5), which was signed under the leadership of George HW Bush. The ramifications of START I, which was to expire in 2009, was that no signatory could deploy more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and limited ICBMs to 1,600 per signatory. By the time of final implementation in 2001, about 80% nuclear weapons had been eliminated. Former Soviet republics dismantled the nukes in those countries or transferred them to Russia, which means that those fell under one signatory and were counted towards Russia’s total.
That was seven years before Barack Obama took office. There was rhetoric deployed by Russian Federation Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in 2009, signaling a desire to increase its nuclear capabilities following the expiration of START I. This was analyzed as Russia testing Barack Obama, who was perceived as inexperienced in global politics. Later that year, the (deep breath) Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms was drafted, and ratified in 2010. Most analysts refer to this treaty as New START because the actual name of the treaty is inconvenient to mention by name, even in the form of an acronym. The terms of New START were that among other requirements, both the US and Russia would reduce their stockpiles from 6,000 warheads to 1,550, with deployed missiles and nuclear-capable bombers down from 1,600 to 700. Additionally, START II limits total deployed and non-deployed nuclear-capable launchers to 800. Compare those figures to peak levels of warheads for both states: the US with more than 31,000 warheads and the USSR with upwards of 40,000. Bottom line: diplomacy works.
Sorry, I blacked out again, did I go on a nerdy history rant?
Given all of that history, and how far we’ve come from dropping two bombs on Japan to scare the USSR to Reagan’s near-miss in eliminating ICBMs to the New START treaty being ratified, you’d think that everyone on the planet is safer than ever before. This was prior to Trump’s call to Russia.
New START is in no way a “bad deal”. Sure, there are flies in the soup that exacerbate trust issues between the two nations such as missiles containing multiple warheads (MIRVs, for short), but overall both countries agreed to reduce the ability to wage nuclear war. Trump signaled that he does not believe the US should have to abide by the treaty, which as we’ve seen is more than enough motivation for Russia to hesitate in holding up its end of the bargain.
At every juncture, Russia has sought to keep up with the United States. Russia has shown a tendency to test new leaders throughout its relationship with the United States. And Vladimir Putin in particular has shown he is willing to take unilateral action to take care of Russian interests. For Trump to go into a meeting with Putin unprepared is dastardly, irresponsible, and disrespectful to every actual diplomat who came before him. The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been, but our president couldn’t be bothered to read a briefing. He couldn’t find time to talk to appropriate individuals to gain an understanding of the history of nuclear talks and what treaties have been in place, let alone numbers of warheads and launch vehicles.
This is an untenable position for the United States. If none of his staff or congressional Republicans stand up to him, Trump stands to undo decades of progress towards peace. I’m not saying he’ll cause a war, because calmer heads tend to prevail when lives are on the line, but an escalation in nuclear arms is not progress and I cannot think of one reasonable individual who could possibly disagree with me. This is not the same as updating our capabilities, this is a man who is influenced solely by cable news with no knowledge of historical context acting upon impulses to always be the biggest, shiniest, and richest. This is a man without principle, and there have been few factors more dangerous to peace than unprincipled leaders.
We need vigilance, and we need reason. I am increasingly concerned that Trump’s unpredictability will cost lives, and whether they’re American lives does not particularly matter. We need reasonable politicians in the Republican Party to act, because they are the party in control right now as was demonstrated during cabinet confirmation hearings. Nationalism I can abide. Nuclear escalation I cannot. Holding meetings and calls with global security on the line without the proper level of preparation or knowledge as to what certain terms mean is every person who voted for someone other than Trump’s worst nightmare.
I ended up having to retake that accounting class, by the way. I prepared for the final, which accounted for 100% of the grade, and passed the class with an A. I attribute that success to diligent preparation and knowing the material. It’s a lesson I hope the president learns soon.
1 — Not at all suspicious(2)
2 — That was sarcasm.
3 — Same quality as every other Trump-branded product as it turns out.
4 — I have a lot of thoughts about how we almost had President Wallace but got stuck with Truman instead. This occurred due to a Democratic National Conference several orders of magnitude more corrupt than what many perceive happened in 2016. Perspective is important.
5 — See? I did have a point!
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