Biden mimicking Trump’s ‘shortsightedness on Open Skies Treaty

President Joe is accomplishing and plugging for many good things on domestic issues. But he continues to flounder on foreign policy.

His latest miss step is putting the final nail into the Open Skies

Treaty that Trump dumped just 2 months before leaving office.

Ratified in 2002, it allows the U.S. and Russia to spy on each other’s military movements with unarmed reconnaissance flights. Besides providing mutual, valuable military information of each other, it helped bind together the world’s 2 nuclear superpowers to reduce tensions that could lead to misunderstanding, even war.

Dumping valuable nuclear and military safeguards with Russia was a core policy for Trump. He withdrew from the 1987 INF Treaty that had secured removal of nearly 2,700 American and Russian intermediate range nuclear weapons.

He left office without renewing for five years the New Start Treaty first implemented in 2011 and renewed in 2016. Set to expire February 21, 2021, Biden’s first call to Russia’s Putin was to complete the renewal good till February, 2026.

Why Biden has whiffed on doing the same for Open Skies is a mystery. He campaigned against Trump’s foolishness, calling it ‘shortsighted.’ Open Skies was especially helpful to U.S. European allies who used it to keep tabs on Russian troop movements on their borders, such as the recent buildup near Ukraine.

Biden and Putin hold a summit in just 9 days. Completing the withdrawal from Open Skies casts a pall on it securing any new substantive arms control agreements.

Instead of ‘open skies’ we have ‘open season’ to escalate tensions in America’s new Cold War against Russia.