START treaty breeds Cold War nostalgia


by Robert Robb - Jan. 5, 2011 12: 00 AM
The Arizona Republic



After all the huffing and puffing over new START, what remains is the sense that it was, primarily, the last gasp of Cold War nostalgia.

Substantively, there was little about the new START treaty that was important, and what was important was troubling.

The treaty sets limits on strategic nuclear warheads and launchers toward which both sides were trending anyway.

After the end of the Cold War, the George W. Bush administration decided that the United States didn't need to correlate a reduction in its nuclear arsenal with Russia and announced a unilateral reduction. Russia wanted to do it in the context of a treaty, so the Bush administration complied. But it made no pretense that the agreement was important.

Nuclear arsenals are expensive to maintain. After the end of the Cold War, the extensive redundancy built into the configurations of both sides made no sense and, in the case of Russia, was no longer affordable. Self-interest would lead to reductions independent of agreements.

What is important about the new START treaty is the acknowledgement in the preamble of the link between offensive weapons and missile defense. The Obama administration said it was dross and to ignore it. The Russians take a decidedly different position.

The Russians have made it abundantly clear that they regard U.S. missile defense as a threat, to which they will respond with improvements in offensive capabilities. And they have also made it abundantly clear that they regard new START as limiting the ability of the United States to improve missile defense without their consent.

Given the disagreement and ambiguity over something so important, why the rush to negotiate and approve the treaty? After all, Russia is not currently much of a threat to the United States. Right now, our interests clash much more extensively and potentially dangerously with China than with Russia. Yet there is no clamor for an arms-control treaty with China concerning deployments in the Pacific. Why such importance attached to an arms-control deal with Russia?

This is easier to understand from the Russian perspective than the American perspective. For the U.S., the Cold War is over. For Russia, it is not.

Russia views with alarm the extension of Western alliances - NATO, the European Union - into what it regards as its rightful sphere of influence along its borders. Russia is no longer an expansionary power. But it fears that the United States may be.

So, it wants to continue the arms-control process, both for what it symbolizes about the continuing importance of Russia and for whatever constraints it can impose on the United States in areas that trouble it, such as missile defense.

The importance the Obama administration attached to the treaty is more difficult to fathom.

President Obama famously wanted to push the "reset" button on Russian relations. Russia can be helpful, for instance on Iran. The WikiLeaks documents strongly suggest that the Obama administration at least implicitly agreed to drop land-based missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, to which Russia vigorously objected, in exchange for greater Russian cooperation on Iran. This tendency by the Obama administration to view missile defense as a bargaining chip, rather than a pillar of security, is what is most worrisome about new START.

Russia wants a continuation of arms-control agreements with the United States. So, perhaps the Obama administration went along as part of the "reset" strategy.

But there appeared to be more than realpolitik involved. The Obama administration seemed genuinely to believe that the treaty was important, in a way the Bush administration clearly didn't.

But it never articulated a reason why that wasn't tinged with Cold War rhetoric and perspective - the need to keep an eye on what those pesky Ruskies were up to.

I don't think the Obama administration misses the Cold War. But it may miss the days when agreements between superpowers were more consequential than they are today