A farewell to arms control: the INF treaty dies

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Baltimore is a city beset by poverty, crime and a murder rate higher than New York's. This week, President Donald Trump went on the attack against a congressman representing the city. We take a look beyond the tweets at how Baltimore got so troubled and what's to be done. And the French once saw rose wine as the forgettable middle child between red and white, but it's just so Instagrammable. Celebrities and influencers love the stuff and the industry is raising its pink drink game. First up, though. Today America formally withdraws from a landmark nuclear pact with Russia. The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces, or inf, Treaty, was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 after years of negotiation. It was an era when teams of American diplomats chipped away at Russia and the two countries forged a series of big nuclear deals. Many leaders, especially in Europe, fought to preserve the treaty. Among them, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.

We must prepare for a world without the INF Treaty, which will be less stable for all of us.

As the INF Treaty officially dies today, arms control looks very different from that of the Cold War era.

Things are headed backwards and they are going pretty badly. People who follow arms control, who like arms control are, are feeling very glum at the moment.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defence editor.

The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty will die today. The Iran nuclear deal is on life support. Other big treaties are dying. And the big powers, the U.S. russia and others, are building new types of nukes, crazier types of nukes, more nuclear warheads in ways that I think make arms controllers very, very pessimistic about the situation.

Well, let's start with the intermediate Range nuclear forces. The INF treaty that's dying Today. Why is it dying today?

Well, essentially, Russia cheated. It tested and built an illegal cruise missile that it wasn't supposed to build.

Decades ago, the United States entered into.

A treaty with Russia in which we agreed to limit and reduce our missile capability.

While we followed the agreement and the.

Rules to the letter, Russia repeatedly violated its terms. It's been going on for many years.

You don't have to take Donald Trump's word for that. The Obama administration said the same thing. The Americans, NATO allies, all agreed that Russia was cheating and that was the proximate cause of the treaty's death. I will say that many in the the Department of Defence were also saying, look, this was a US Russia treaty. China never signed up to it. China went on a missile building spree. So isn't it fair that we should now also walk away, now that Asia is a much bigger deal for us and we should be free to build these intermediate range missiles and stick them in Asia?

And those are reasonable arguments, you reckon?

Well, that depends on where you sit. Some of them are. But what I would say is that the Europeans, who would be most affected by this, would very much rather that the United States stay in the treaty. They were horrified that Trump was pulling out, even though they agreed Russia was cheating. But they felt, why not try and push Russia to abide by the treaty from within the deal? And in addition to that, if you do want to put these missiles in Asia, where are you going to put them? The Japanese might not accept them. Other countries might not be close enough. So in theory, it's nice to have these missiles from a military point of view. In practice, diplomatically, it's very hard to find people who would actually accept them.

But the INF was just one of sort of a patchwork of arms control agreements. What's left of that.

The most important treaty that's left is called New Start, and that was signed by Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. That puts limits on the number of nuclear warheads and the things that deliver them. And what's most important about that treaty is that it allows each side to inspect the other side's arsenal and forces each side to swap information about it. Now, that treaty is going to lapse in 2021 unless both sides agree to extend it. And right now it doesn't look like that's going to happen. America is suggesting it may simply allow it to collapse.

But what about beyond the sort of America, Russia axis? I mean, on North Korea, the Trump administration has been negotiating about their nukes. Has the Nuclear risk, at least from that part of the world been reduced?

Well, I suppose we no longer have the same sense of crisis that we did a year and a half ago. There are no more crazy threats of fire and fury from the president. North Korea is not launching big intercontinent range ballistic missiles that can cross the Pacific and reach the United States. But there has been an uptick in the past week in the firing of medium range missiles ahead of planned talks in Berlin. And that's North Korea saying, hey, we're getting impatient, we'd better get down to some serious negotiations or we will start upping the rate of missiles. And North Korea is still churning out the stuff that goes into bombs. It hasn't stopped. So ultimately, the thing that caused the crisis, a nuclear North Korea, that hasn't changed in any way.

And what about the other sort of the would be nuclear power in the form of Iran. The administration has pulled out of the nuclear deal and Iran seems to be, well, ramping up its intentions again.

Iran has said if you're going to crush us with sanctions, we're going to start walking away from bits of this deal ourselves. They've done it in the past two months. They've been breaking limits on the amount of uranium, they've been breaking limits on the level of uranium getting closer to weapons grade. And it's inevitable from Iran's point of view, they will keep doing that as long as they face this economic onslaught. So at some point, maybe this year, probably over the next year or two, we're going to ultimately get back to where we were in 2013 or so. That is a big growing Iranian nuclear program that will make everyone in the region, everyone in Europe very nervous. And we will start getting all of those anxieties we had a few years ago about potential American air strikes, potential Israeli airstrikes. So we are headed back onto a crisis with Iran as well.

Well, it sounds as if we are heading towards all kinds of potential crises. I mean, how do you see this progressing?

Well, ultimately, Donald Trump is not uninterested in arms control, but he likes to strike big fancy deals, not just bilateral ones, not just nuclear specific ones. He seems to like to strike deals that cover everything and cover lots of countries. Now, in some ways that does make sense. China is a big deal now in nuclear terms and some of the treaties may need to talk about that. Weapons have also been changing. So you have new sorts of weapons and they aren't covered by things like newstart. And that makes America nervous. So it's going to be very difficult to build new treaties that can cover these new sorts of weapons, that can cover new countries like China. But the question is, is it sensible to try and do that whilst destroying all of the old agreements? And the other question is, does this administration really want deals at all?

Shashank, thank you very much for joining us.

You're very welcome.

In the 2000s, HBO's crime drama series the Wire put the spotlight on the city of Baltimore.

If the felony raid doesn't fall, you most certainly will. It's Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you.

The city itself, with its drug ridden streets, was in many ways the central protagonist of the show. How would anybody ever want to leave Baltimore?

That's what I'm asking, yo.

That be the exit.

Take that shit.

Now, more than 10 years since the Wire's final episode, Charm City has seen a dramatic rise in crime and dysfunction, and it's recently become a target of President Donald Trump. Those people are living in hell in Baltimore. They're largely African American.

You have a large African American population.

And they really appreciate what I'm doing. Mr. Trump's war of words on the city might be inflammatory, but it's also sparking debate about why Baltimore is in such bad shape.

Baltimore is a city with a lot of good and a lot of troubles as well.

Idris Kaloon is our US Policy correspondent.

There are the institutions that you could use to engineer a turnaround for the city. There is a major research university, major hospitals, an art museum, a harbor. Baltimore also has a significantly high rate of poverty, of addiction, and a significantly high rate of violent crime and murder. President Trump has gone after Baltimore in the past few weeks, I think, not out of a concern for the plight of a lot of its citizens, but a interpersonal spat with Elijah Cummings, who is the Democratic chair of the Oversight Committee, who has been investigating the president. Last week, he subpoenaed the phone records for Ivanka Trump, and that appeared to have irked the president, who has since gone on a tear about how awful it is to live in Baltimore. He's called it rat infested, a place that no human would want to live in. People have understandably bristled at this. A lot of people think it's racist.

So some of the presidential bluster aside, there is a germ of truth about Baltimore being a place with an unusual amount of crime and violent crime. How did it get to this point? Why is that the case?

Baltimore had always been a poor city, ever since deindustrialization hit the city. Very Hard. But it looked like things were getting better up until April 2015. That's when Freddie Gray died while in police custody. We want justice for Freddy. Freddie.

Freddie was a great kid. How did Freddy end up dead?

How is he dead?

We saw the.

Afterwards, there were riots that swept through the city. Get the fuck out of here. And there was a period of unrest from which the city hasn't appeared to recover. The murder rate have been trending down, and after Freddie Gray's death, it exploded. It has been above 300 homicides a year for the past five years. It's on track this year to hit about 360 homicides, which would be more than all of New York City, which is a place that is 14 times the size of Baltimore. So Baltimore really does have problems. And it all seemed to have taken off right after Freddie Gray died.

Well, what changed, though? What changed in the city after Freddie Gray's death?

That's the big question that people don't have a clear answer about. There is one line of thinking which could be called the Ferguson effect, which is the idea that police officers felt like they didn't have the support of the city, and they pulled back. And so they stopped policing corners, they stopped disrupting street conflicts that could escalate into violence proactively. And crime shot up as a result. There's another set of theory that the calamitous events of Freddie Gray's death basically tragically undermined community trust. And so people were much less likely to report crimes to the police. As a result, the clearance rate fell, and the people most likely to commit crimes felt emboldened as a result. Another theory is that there has been tremendous unrest at the very top of the police department. Baltimore has gone through five police commissioners in recent years. It's on its third mayor. So understanding what went wrong with Baltimore is tough. And it's complicated, but you need to do it in order to figure out how to get the city out of its current malaise.

And so, outside of policing, which sounds complicated enough, are there any other factors at play in terms of what's affecting the crime rates in Baltimore?

There's so much. The schools are not great. The jobs are not really there. The existing population has a high rate of incarceration, low rate of college education. There are a lot of vacant buildings which are criminogenic and tend to drive businesses away. But one thing that might explain the sudden rise in crime after Freddie Grace's death is the opioid crisis. Baltimore has always had a heroin problem. Often it's been concentrated among poor black people. But today, Baltimore has morphed into a drug destination. A lot of times for white middle class kids and housewives who come in from the suburbs. It has access to both the international port and the I95 interstate. That's become a key conduit for heroin and fentanyl. And when business is booming for drug dealers, that breeds competition, and that competition breeds violence. We don't really know how many drug users there are in Baltimore right now, but we get the most reliable statistics, unfortunately, from the Morgue. And by 2018, we know that opioid overdoses had tripled since 2007. It's no longer a heroin problem, it's a fentanyl problem. It's found in 90% of the people who die of overdoses in the city. And we now know that Baltimore has the highest opioid fatality rate of any city or state in the country. It's more than twice as much as West Virginia, which has been the hardest hit state.

It sounds like quite a lot of symptoms then that lead to these kind of overall statistics. I mean, does that make, to your mind, Baltimore, unique among American cities? Is this the city that's kind of suffering from the greatest combination of these factors?

I don't think it's unique to Baltimore. There are a clutch of cities that are still stuck in a rut that might be going in reverse on violent crime. It's also Chicago, St. Louis, and in both of those places, you see a similar pattern. You had a high rate of pre existing poverty and crime to begin with that was inflamed by highly publicized deaths of black men in police custody.

So what's to be done? How can Baltimore tackle this problem or this set of problems that it's got?

Urban violence is actually a problem that can be tackled. It's not the inevitable consequence of poverty or racism. And we don't need to wait for fixes to those issues to come before we can address the problem of urban violence. It's an epidemic that needs to be addressed right now. A senior research fellow at Harvard named Thomas Apt just wrote a book called Bleeding out that dives into all of this. Among the strategies that he goes into are programs modeled off of operation ceasefire, which was a program set up in Baltimore in which you call in the highest risk offenders, you promise them social services if they don't offend, and severe punishment if they do. And when rigorously implemented, the results have shown pretty stunning results in other cities as well. We have other research that shows that the creation of violence disruption. Organizations often using former offenders to try and de escalate conflicts before they rise to violent crime or murder is statistically causally related to a drop in the murder rate. Some have estimate that for every 10 such organizations that spring up, the murder rate drops by 9%. So there is a game plan that can address urban violence right here and right now. It's not easy work. It requires the buy in of the police, it requires some level of community trust, and it requires a bevy of social supports and social services outside of the police that are able to assist in this. But it is something that can be done about it today.

So to your mind, President Trump weighing in on this, drawing attention to Baltimore's problems, is that going to hurry things along? Is that going to cause different problems, do you think?

So far, the epidemic of urban violence has been largely ignored. I think President Trump is using his talking points about Baltimore as a rhetorical cudgel to try and hit at his political opponents. And I don't see very much coming out in the way of solutions from his administration. But there is a reason that this problem should be getting much more attention. Even after the big crime Decline since the 1990s, homicide still accounts for half the deaths of young black men, which is more than the next nine causes combined. And every single murder has enormous social costs. There are the lost years of the victims, the depressed vitality of their neighborhoods and the anguish of their families. That's a real urgent crisis. It's one that real leadership will try to fix. But unfortunately, I don't see this spat between the president and Representative Cummings becoming the impetus for real change.

Idris, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks a lot for having me.

In the 19th century, French chemist Louis Pasteur wrote, there is more philosophy in a bottle of wine than in all the books in the world. It's a view that's still shared in France, where wine is taken very seriously. Well, except for one type of wine, Rose.

In the past, the French have traditionally seen it as a sort of poor second cousin to the red wine and the white wine that they drink in huge quantities.

Sophie Petter is the Economist's Paris bureau chief.

It's been almost considered a kind of low end, rather bland, pretty, unserious wine. And I think that that is what has changed.

In what way?

Well, it's quite amazing. You know, the wine industry's had quite a difficult time in France. Overall, sales of wine have been down. If you look at the second half of last year, for example, sales of red wine fell by 9% and white fell by 2%. But sales of rose have fallen, just kept on going up, and they increased by 6% in the second half of 2018.

And why is that?

I think there are a number of reasons. I mean, part of it, I think, is a change in diets and a sort of, even in France, a move away from red meat. The French, obviously traditional steak eaters, but they especially the young, are eating a lot less red meat and with it a lot less of the red wine, which usually they accompany red meat with. So the sort of health food fashion lends itself in a way to sort of lighten and a more refreshing wine. And that, I think, is one reason that has become very popular.

Are there any other reasons?

There are other reasons. I mean, summer sales are obviously very high because of chilled and increasing numbers of young people drinking it as an aperitifa choice in the summer months.

But if you want something that is not red and is chilled, why move to and not just to white?

Well, I think that part of it is a sort of celebrity factor. I spoke to one winemaker in inland Provence who told me that this was a fashion that was coming up from on the Mediterranean, on the Riviera, in beach clubs, on yachts. It's become a sort of fashionable drink to have. And it also looks really good on Instagram. So there are a lot of people posting pictures of the sort of sun glistening through the glass or through the bottle. And then I think there's also the fact that people like, for example, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have bought the Chateau de Miraval in Provence. So they actually produce their own wines. So there's a kind of, you know, celebrity glamour, lifestyle element, I think, to which has turned a sort of boring drink into something of a sort of glamorous liquor.

And how is the industry responding to that?

Well, it's interesting because hand in hand with that, some of the winemakers who traditionally consider something that they do, you know, as almost as an aside, have actually decided to try and take up market, which for the purists in France, you know, real wine connoisseurs would say you can't do that. But there are winemakers. I went to visit one at the Demesne de la Verriere, which makes a wine called the Chen Bleu. Very interesting that they take a lot of care with all the grapes. It's Grenache and syrup blend. They are hand picked and they really make it this sort of a premium, a product that they want to have structure serious drink. And that, I think, has also changed the industry perception of and what potential is.

And how about yourself? Are you convinced? Are you a fan?

Well, it's been very, very hot in France this summer. It's been extremely hot, even in Paris. And I think that that lends itself to a drink like. Yes. I have to say, part of my research, Jason.

Purely research, clearly. Sophie, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here on.