Last week the White House spent most of its week sitting on its foreign policy hands while waiting for the Russian Duma to ratify New START. New stories both in the US and Russia have been filled with articles reporting on what kinds of declarations, amendments, or conditions Moscow’s legislature might add to its ratification of the nuclear agreement between the two countries. Most of what we are hearing from the Russians is exactly the kinds of things the White House would rather not acknowledge—that Moscow sees this treaty very differently from the way the President pitched it to the US Senate.
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Now we also find out that the US got exactly nothing from the treaty. Nuclear expert Keith Payne wrote in the National Review that “senior Russian officials have confirmed the fears of U.S. skeptics. An Interfax-AVN article entitled “Russia’s Current Number of Nuclear Arms Well Within START Limits” reports that in a speech to the Duma about New START, Russian Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov said that Russia will not eliminate any nuclear launcher or warhead before the end of its service life: ‘We will not cut a single unit.” According to Payne, this point — that Russian forces already are below New START’s ceilings and the treaty effectively mandates unilateral U.S. reductions — was made openly and with obvious glee by some Russian commentators months prior to the U.S. Senate’s consideration of the treaty. But the Obama administration typically presented the treaty as requiring Russian reductions, and senior Russian officials remained mum until after the Senate had acted. Now, senior Russian officials appear to have acknowledged publicly that U.S. critics — whom the Obama administration had accused of ‘slanting’ information — were correct.”
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