https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...ty-with-russia
Trump Is Right to Close U.S. Skies to Russian Spies
.....The deal in question is the Open Skies treaty, signed in 1992, which allows U.S. and Russian spy planes to fly over military installations and weapons facilities. The aim is to give the 35 nations that are now members confidence that their adversaries are keeping their arms-control commitments.
In theory, it’s a good idea. Overhead surveillance is one way to verify more substantive arms control agreements with Russia. It also gives a baseline for military planners, providing a data set that shows what peacetime deployment looks like. The big flaw in the arrangement is that the one party that all the others must worry about — Russia — is a serial violator of international agreements......
A similar story can be told about the Open Skies treaty. When it took effect, in 2002, Russia largely abided by it. But during former President Barack Obama’s administration, the U.S. found its flights were restricted over suspected facilities in Russia — even as the U.S. gathered evidence that Russian surveillance planes were mapping critical infrastructure in the U.S. As Republican Senator Tom Cotton
said Thursday: “The Open Skies Treaty started life as a good-faith agreement between major powers and died an asset of Russian intelligence.”
U.S. diplomats have raised these issues with their Russian counterparts to bring them back into compliance with the treaty. But Moscow has not budged. Because the U.S. has spy satellites and other technological means of gathering the same data its surveillance planes collect, it loses very little by withdrawing from the Open Skies treaty......