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The Politics of the New START Endgame
Travis | Dec 08, 2009 |
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Hey everyone, come see how good I look!
With December 18 being floated as a potential signing date for the “New START” agreement between the United States and Russia, all the apes have left to do is agree upon a treadmill downshifting scheme that will maximize their appeal to all the lovely lady apes working the free weights.
This part is tricky…
The Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer thinks that mobile missiles and data exchanges are the sticking points. Russia may have gotten tough on verification down the stretch for several interrelated reasons: 1) to win last minute concessions from the United States; 2) that’s how the Russians negotiate; and/or 3) the Russians decided to invoke what the Bush administration said about verification (i.e. “we don’t care”) and force structure (i.e. “we don’t care”) during the endgame in order to gain advantages.
Yet Strobe "Brookings Finest" Talbott suggests that Moscow overplayed its hand:
Here’s what seems to have happened: the Russians assumed (correctly) that Obama would like to have a treaty to sign with President Medvedev before his trip to Oslo this Thursday to receive the [Nobel] prize. A concrete diplomatic accomplishment would have helped blunt the criticism that the award is premature and, in that sense, undeserved.
The Russians may have overplayed their hand, figuring (incorrectly) that Obama was so eager for a deal that he’d grant them last-minute concessions to get it before he goes to Oslo. That’s the most likely explanation for why their military toughened its stance on some unresolved issues involving verification and monitoring. The Pentagon—in part to demonstrate that it isn’t going to be pushed around—hardened its own stand. Obama himself was miffed at the Russian squeeze play.
There will still almost certainly be a treaty, although later than Obama would have liked—perhaps when he returns to Europe for the Copenhagen climate summit next week. If that happens, the Russians will have achieved nothing with their eleventh-hour tactical stonewalling. They will only have complicated negotiations on an agreement that is at least as much in their interests as the U.S.’s and slightly soured an otherwise solid relationship between their president and Obama.
Talbott seems to overestimate the degree to which Obama-haters’ criticism vis-à-vis the Nobel would have been blunted if New START had been signed by December 5. Quite frankly, certain Republicans are going to assail the President no matter what he does, even if it means adopting lines of attack that clearly contradict their previous positions. The Obama administration of course knows this, so it was never going to get shaken down by the Russians in order to appease congressional Republicans whose criticisms are disingenuous in the first place.
If the Russians really thought, as Talbott suggests, that the Obama administration would kowtow on New START simply to wrap things up before the Nobel trip, they badly overestimated the award’s political value within the American electorate. 66 percent of Americans think Obama doesn’t deserve the prize. The Russians’ 11th hour gamesmanship may have interfered with the optics, but the Nobel award tour offers little for Obama to gain with the American public anyway. There was never any compelling domestic political reason for Obama to go wobbly, so he didn’t - much to Russia’s apparent chagrin.
Nukes on a Blog, New START, START, Russia (all tags)
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