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Notes -
Manufacturers of prosthesis, rejoice!
Anti-personnel mines are making a big comeback in Europe, with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty. Poland has now decided to deploy millions of mines on its eastern border. Ukraine is of course in breach of that treaty, but as a non-signatory I do not see that Russia would get to whine about it.
On the one hand, I will concede that the Ottawa Treaty was always lacking support from the superpowers, unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention. Of course, the US has its own excuse (WP):
I do not think that the US argument is without merit, and if they had pushed for a treaty exemption for mines whose design had been approved by international experts so that they explode within 48 hours, that would perhaps not critically weaken Ottawa. The problem is that the military incentives do not lie that way. Obviously there are situations where it will be advantageous for a mine to remain dangerous years after they are placed. And anyone producing short-lived mines can easily switch to producing cheaper long-lived ones by just getting rid of the timer. I wish I could say that I believed that Trump would say "unfortunately, the US unilaterally committed to never use persistent landmines under Clinton, so we will not do that", but realistically he will just say that this was Bad Radical Leftist Democrat policy and ignore it. So "no anti-personnel land mines" seems like the obvious Schelling point for an international agreement. (Anti-vehicle mines are a lesser concern, either they are planted on roads, where they are easily discovered (one way or another), or they are planted offroad, where the chances of civilians triggering them are much slimmer. Lots of kids play in the woods, few kids drive jeeps through the prairie.)
Personally, I would prefer for Poland to start a nuclear weapons program to them relying on landmines.
Some countries need landmines, and so will have them, one way or the other. Same thing with nuclear weapons (within technological capability).
International treaties are toilet paper. They can be ignored, unsigned or simply violated at will, because the only thing that enforces an international treaty is military force. Every bit of paper ever dedicated to a treaty draft in all of world history carries less force than I do going to Aldi for butter.
The idea that all arms-limitation treaties are meaningless "toilet paper" is absurd.
For example, the previously-mentioned CWC has UN inspectors visiting the chemical production facilities of signatory parties (and these inspections regularly happen even in US facilities). These inspections allow states to be reasonably confident that other states are not mass-producing chemical weapons and meaningfully reduce the risk of accidental war. (Notably, Iraq was not party to the CMC prior to 2003, did not have these regular inspections, and so international observers were uncertain about Iraq's stockpiles and production capabilities. Saddam Hussein gambled that this uncertainty would make war less likely, but these non-existent chemical weapons were ultimately how Bush/Powell convinced the Coalition of the Willing to invade Iraq.)
Arms control treaties are rarely designed to change a state's behavior during a war. Instead they are designed to change the way states prepare for war. These changes in preparation do impact whether and how wars are actually fought.
Yes, when the interests of a nation with a military powerful enough to enforce it on other nations aligns with the text of a treaty, it gets enforced. This has nothing to do with the value of the treaty and everything to do with the value of a military powerful enough to enforce it and the interests that power has (or thinks it has).
This is a non sequitur. Good treaties define Schelling points, and Schelling points do not need enforcement.
As I mentioned before, no one has a military powerful enough to enforce the CWC on the US and yet the US is voluntarily complying because it makes the US a safer place (and increases trade/commerce) to allow these foreign inspections.
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