Obama in Russia. From a few days ago, Matthew Yglesias:
There’s a certain amount of sentiment in the United States that not only should the U.S. continue to disagree with Russia’s perspective on this, but that we ought to somehow elevate such disagreement to the very top of the U.S.-Russian bilateral relationship. The president should go over there, denounce the Russians, get denounced back, and then come back to Washington empty handed but full of self-righteousness. This is part and parcel of the phenomenon whereby people don’t grasp the difference between a pundit and a president. It makes a lot more sense to focus a visit on something like the nuclear issue, where U.S. and Russian interests are roughly in alignment and some high-level discussions stand a decent chance of bearing fruit.
There is no more important bilateral relationship between nations than that between Russia and the United States. Between them the two nations have at least 95% of the world’s nuclear weapons. We literally have the ability to destroy the world.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much basis for a good relationship between Russia and the United States. Russia’s population is dwindling, its economy languishing, it survives largely by selling its natural resources. Russia would be a difficult market for American goods and its natural customer for its oil and gas is Europe. We don’t really need Russia’s cooperation on pressing world issues like climate change.
Russia has had consistent and clear interests over the period of the last 200 years or more: annexing or at least neutralizing its neighbors.
So color me skeptical that Russian interests will ever lead it to be an effective partner in pressuring Iran on its nuclear weapons ambitions. And what’s more, anyone who thinks the U.S.-Russian nuclear reductions that Obama just won will help to halt the Iranian nuclear program needs to refrain from operating heavy machinery. Something tells me that Iran’s rulers will be none too persuaded to give up their nuclear aspirations simply because the United States and Russia have now agreed to retain a couple thousand fewer nukes apiece between them.
As for the other accomplishment of Obama’s trip — Russia’s offer to open its airspace for U.S. military re-supply of the war in Afghanistan — I’m of two minds: Given the uncertainty still surrounding Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan and the insecurity of supply routes through Pakistan, it’s nice to have another option; but we are now directly at the mercy of Russia for a service that they can use against us as a political weapon if they see fit. Just ask Ukrainians with gas-heated homes how that’s working out for them.
And now about the nuclear arms cuts:
…that’s a roughly 28 percent reduction in the total number of nuclear weapons in the world. It’s also a powerful signal to the French, British, and especially Chinese that the United States and Russia are serious about reducing arsenals and that the Obama administration really wants to pursue a nuclear-free world. The fact that the US and Russia contain such a large proportion of global nukes is, after all, a bit of an anachronism as in pretty much all other respects China has clearly replaced Russia as the number two geopolitical player and in some domains the European Union has set itself up as a more-or-less independent great power. It would be very plausible for the Chinese (and much less plausible, though still possible, for the Europeans) to decide they need to react to this situation by “leveling up” and building their own arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Steps that give the Chinese confidence that they don’t need to do that, that the US and Russia are prepared to level down, will do an enormous amount to help build a more peaceful, more secure world. Not only in terms of the US-China relationship, but also in terms of India’s thinking about its nuclear needs and therefore Pakistan’s thinking and therefore the general problem of proliferation around the world. These reductions, if they come to pass, will be a huge deal.
It’s not the weapons, it’s the regimes that matter. Personally, I don’t feel much safer knowing that Russia will have a few hundred fewer strategic warheads, especially when they still have thousands of highly portable tactical nuclear weapons that aren’t covered by this treaty at all. Russia will continue to be a destabilizing and dangerous influence as long as it has an unaccountable government with few, if any, internal checks and balances. That is the real source of American-Russian tension, and by further legitimating the existing Russian regime we are, if anything, slightly exacerbating that problem.
Obama and Medvedev signed a “preliminary agreement” on the reduction of nuclear stockpiles. Aside from the signing ceremony, it’s hard to see why we need a “preliminary agreement” instead of just an “agreement.” This is all the more true in light of the statement by Medvedev in an interview Sunday that a new agreement depends on the U.S. being willing to compromise on the proposed anti-missile system in Eastern Europe. One can only hope that this will not happen. A strategic arms-reduction agreement is already a gift to the Russians. It allows them to maintain parity with the U.S. in nuclear arms at little or no additional cost despite their aging arsenal and reinforces the misleading and potentially dangerous impression that Russia is still a superpower.
UPDATE: Andy McCarthy at The Corner
Will at The League on McCarthy
In Foreign Policy:
UPDATE #2: Dave Schuler
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