[Update below the jump. -Ed.]
Berlin brings out the best in U.S. Presidents.
President Barack Obama has now tried in Berlin to replicate successful JFK’s recipe for curtailing nuclear tests. Senior administration officials have talked privately with the Kremlin about taking parallel steps to reduce strategic forces by one-third and to make bold reductions in tactical nuclear arsenals. Obama made this pitch privately and directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland. He has now publicly called on Putin to join in taking these reductions in parallel. Left unsaid is whether the Obama administration will reduce these nuclear arms, which have been declared by the Pentagon to be in excess of U.S. requirements, if the Kremlin balks.
Nuclear weapons are expensive to maintain and even more expensive to replace. Despite concerns over budgetary outlays and calls for spending reductions, Republicans on Capitol Hill will resist making nuclear arms reductions. To do so by regular order would take the form of a treaty, but the Congress no longer follows regular order. Congressional consent would still be required, however, in the form of budget and appropriation measures.
Changing Putin’s views toward the value of nuclear weapons will also be a challenge. He is pursuing the deployment of a liquid-fueled missile that can carry multiple warheads and is expressing deep concerns about U.S. missile defense programs – even though Russia can foil U.S. defenses even if funding for them were increased ten-fold.
The Kremlin is speaking in ways that are stuck in the 1970s. President Obama is speaking about the future. To succeed in making parallel, verifiable strategic arms reductions, they have to find common ground in the present – preferably before the 2015 NPT Review Conference.
Update | June 20. The initial Russian reaction to President Obama’s offer has been lukewarm to negative. No surprise there.
Three “ifs”: If this is not a negotiating ploy, and if the Kremlin holds fast to its negativity, and if the Obama administration eventually decides to de-link its offensive reductions from Russian force levels, we all move one step closer to the end of Big Nuclear Treaties. This step may be coming, in any event, given how much the Washington, DC-based Republican Party has changed, but the Kremlin would be wise to consider whether it wishes to hasten this outcome.
The demise of Big Nuclear Treaties is a consequential, slow motion trend. They have been part of the geo-strategic landscape since 1963, and they have ordered the strategic arms competition since 1972. Big Nuclear Treaties provided order out of the chaos of the Soviet Union’s demise, even as these treaties lost their centrality when the Cold War competition ended.
Strategic offenses and defenses were delinked by the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002. If offensive reductions are de-linked, what’s left?